Tuesdays no more.

I want to change one of the most influential social structures in our society, so fundamental hardly anyone even thinks about it anymore.

The Calender.

More specifically, the number of days in a week.

Curently, the number of days in a week is seven, a prime number difficult to divide. The concept of a 7 day week is a hold over from the lunar calender days, with about 7 days between new and quarter and full moons. Heck, our current weekday names are an amalgam of Norse (Thor's Day, Woden's Day) and other european cultures! Very archaic.

I propose changing the number of days in the week to 6, by dropping Tuesday. I have nothing against that day in particular, but it is statistically the least likely to be somebody's favorite day of the week (and why would it?).

And ta-da! We have a week easily evenly divided in halves and thirds. I did toy with the idea of making a twelve day week, but I think thats messing with peoples concepts of time a little too much.

With a 6 day week, we have 5 weeks a month (6*5=30). And twelve times 30 is 360! A very neat and useful figure. However, we still have those pesky 5 and a quarter days in the year. Lets steal a page from Tolkien and have those days be extra floating holidays, outside the week formula and no body works on them. Now I'm torn whether to have that be the current nonproductive week between Christmas and New Years, or sprinkle them across the calender year.

Now the whole point of this is efficiency. and relaxation. Currently there are 52 weeks and 104 weekend days in the year. My idea would make 60 weeks and 120 weekends in the year! Or, even morefun, we can have jobs where people work 3 days on and 3 off, enabling the widened economic possibilites of regular threeday weekends and enabling someone else to work your exact position while you are gone, simultaneously increasing job output and quality of live. Even better, peoples weekends in whatever form can be staggered, enabling people on their time off to have access to the goods and services of those still working. The economic potentials are enormous!

A couple of problems might be legal documents like the constitution which refer to tuesdays. I'm fine with removing a day with less impact, the concept still holds. Another problem is inertia and practical problems with changing the week, like calenders and watches and computer programs and the like. No prob, we make a date set in stone like 2020, and give people plenty of notice.


So much to do and so little time...


Lurker