03rd Apr 2005
Circadian Rhythms
I’ve always regarded Daylight Savings Time as an anachronism. Turns out that Benjamin Franklin is credited with coming up with it. I say that the man is entitled to have one stinker of an idea, but I wish we’d stop following it.
“Leave Time Alone!” says I. I don’t like all this mucking about with clocks.
It’s calendars I want to mess with, and the work week in particular. Yes, I want longer weekends, and you do too. We’re going to figure out how to rearrange the calendar … This is part April Foolishness, part thought experiment.
We get 52 weeks a year (364 days), where many of us work 5 days a week (260 work days). The seven day week is basically 5 on / 2 off. Let’s change it! Since many take off two weeks vacation, let’s call it 50 work weeks, times 5 days = 250 work days.
The one constant you can’t play around with is the length of the year. Our little thought experiment doesn’t involve changing the orbit aroud the sun. The 365/366 thing is the Law.
What if we had a 10 day week? 36 weeks per year (360 days), plus 5 or 6 days at the end that are a sort of “holiday week”. In the 10 day week, we’d work 6 days on, and have 4 off. This is great for getting a lot done on the 4 day “weekend”, but it only adds up to 216 work days. Ah, but bump it to 7 days on / 3 off, for 36 weeks, and you get 252 work days, and every “weekend” is 3 days. Hmmm.
The calendar people will love this. They’ve been trying to think of a way to increase sales for the last 500 years … this ought to do it … They get to come up with the names of two or three new weekdays, and this one detail gets tied up in “standards committees” for a good 15 years.
A variant is to think of a 9 day week. 40 weeks a year of 9 days gets you 360 (and then there’s the wild 5 or 6 day party at the end of each year, especially at the calendar companies, which suddenly seem to have unlimited budgets). What if we had 6 on / 3 off? Well, 6 * 40 gets us 240 work days. That’s pretty good, except some Scrooges out there will drag their staff back in during the 5 or 6 day “end of year” party, in order to get closer to the old-fashioned 250 day “ideal”.
The other thought in this is that there would be a lot of overlapping schedules (i.e. “my weekend is not always your weekend”). A plus in this is that traffic gets spread out a bit, and work facilities are used every day. A big minus is that everyone runs around consulting time scheduling programs, trying to figure out the ever-increasing “when is everybody free to get together?” problem. Those that put on weekend-oriented events are pissed off, because 60% of their usual attendees might be working on any given day.
On paper, the math all works out. In real life, I don’t see how society would cope - “7 days” is what we all know, right? It would work pretty well for a subset of jobs (and some do this now: more than 5 days on, more than 2 off). In any case, it all makes more sense to me than the Daylight Savings Time jazz!
I’ve always regarded Daylight Savings Time as an anachronism. Turns out that Benjamin Franklin is credited with coming up with it. I say that the man is entitled to have one stinker of an idea, but I wish we’d stop following it.
“Leave Time Alone!” says I. I don’t like all this mucking about with clocks.
It’s calendars I want to mess with, and the work week in particular. Yes, I want longer weekends, and you do too. We’re going to figure out how to rearrange the calendar … This is part April Foolishness, part thought experiment.
We get 52 weeks a year (364 days), where many of us work 5 days a week (260 work days). The seven day week is basically 5 on / 2 off. Let’s change it! Since many take off two weeks vacation, let’s call it 50 work weeks, times 5 days = 250 work days.
The one constant you can’t play around with is the length of the year. Our little thought experiment doesn’t involve changing the orbit aroud the sun. The 365/366 thing is the Law.
What if we had a 10 day week? 36 weeks per year (360 days), plus 5 or 6 days at the end that are a sort of “holiday week”. In the 10 day week, we’d work 6 days on, and have 4 off. This is great for getting a lot done on the 4 day “weekend”, but it only adds up to 216 work days. Ah, but bump it to 7 days on / 3 off, for 36 weeks, and you get 252 work days, and every “weekend” is 3 days. Hmmm.
The calendar people will love this. They’ve been trying to think of a way to increase sales for the last 500 years … this ought to do it … They get to come up with the names of two or three new weekdays, and this one detail gets tied up in “standards committees” for a good 15 years.
A variant is to think of a 9 day week. 40 weeks a year of 9 days gets you 360 (and then there’s the wild 5 or 6 day party at the end of each year, especially at the calendar companies, which suddenly seem to have unlimited budgets). What if we had 6 on / 3 off? Well, 6 * 40 gets us 240 work days. That’s pretty good, except some Scrooges out there will drag their staff back in during the 5 or 6 day “end of year” party, in order to get closer to the old-fashioned 250 day “ideal”.
The other thought in this is that there would be a lot of overlapping schedules (i.e. “my weekend is not always your weekend”). A plus in this is that traffic gets spread out a bit, and work facilities are used every day. A big minus is that everyone runs around consulting time scheduling programs, trying to figure out the ever-increasing “when is everybody free to get together?” problem. Those that put on weekend-oriented events are pissed off, because 60% of their usual attendees might be working on any given day.
On paper, the math all works out. In real life, I don’t see how society would cope - “7 days” is what we all know, right? It would work pretty well for a subset of jobs (and some do this now: more than 5 days on, more than 2 off). In any case, it all makes more sense to me than the Daylight Savings Time jazz!
