Counting Days and Weeks

What if we had 4-day work weeks--permanently?

Is it just me, or is there really something inherently complicated about the Gregorian calendar? I mean, what's with the erratic number of days in different months? Not to mention the seven days per week, which makes it impossible to divide the months equally into weeks. And then, you've also got the fact that in these demanding times, five straight days of work just seems too stressful to bounce back from over a two-day weekend.

Okay, I get it--God seems to have thrown us a curve ball when He decided that it will take exactly 365-and-a-quarter days for the Earth to make a full revolution around the sun. But be that as it may, I think Pope Gregory XIII could have done a better job in dividing those 365.25 days into weeks and months.

Imagine having six days per week instead of seven, and five weeks per month, instead of four--this gives you the same 30 days per month as we have at present. The only difference is that in the 5-week-month scenario, the months are evenly divisible into weeks. No two or three days left dangling, as we have in the current 7-day-week calendar. As far as work days go, having 4 in a week (plus the same 2-day weekend) still gets you a good 20 working days every month, while making a world of difference in reducing stress (yes, 4 straight days of work, versus five, makes a big difference). Granted, this is 2 working days short of the current 22 working days per month. But what if we spread these 2 days out over my proposed 4-day week? Say, 9-hour work days instead of 8. This means 180 working hours in a month--four hours more than what we currently have. What business wouldn't like that?

You may be thinking: twelve 30-day months amount to only 360 days--5.25 days short of a full year. Well, so was I. Here's where I'd take from Pope Gregory's wisdom. We alternate 30-day months with 31-day months, just like we do now, but only for the first 5 even-numbered months. Confused? In simple terms, the last week of February, April, June, August and October are 7 days long instead of 6. Whether the extra day counts as an additional workday or an extended weekend, I could go either way. The point is we still have five weeks flat in every month.

So that accounts for 365 days. And what of the extra quarter-of-a-day? Pope Gregory's solution still works--we add an extra day to every fourth year. Only in my proposed calendar, that extra day goes not in February but in December--the last remaining even-numbered month that has yet to have a 7-day week.

Six days to a week instead of 7; five weeks to a month instead of 4 (with one extended week every other month)--call me nuts, but I just want to make life simpler. Don't you?