I think changing the calendar is much, much more complicated than making the work week 4 days long. There's countless systems that depend on the current calendar. It would be a herculean undertaking

This. And you won't have a consistent tracking mechanism anymore. You would have a month shift every decade. As a child the season in January might be winter, but as an older person it might be summer. The laws, customs, etc would need a drastic overhaul.

I'm not sure why lengthening the months got folded in with lengthening the week.

Months and weeks are completely independent, we could have an eight-day week and keep months precisely as they are now.

I think it's way too weird to actually do it, but it's less weird than having a cycle of months that's longer than a year.

Islam manages, somehow, to have a cycle of months that's substantially shorter than a year, and doesn't throw in an extra month from time to time like Jews do. I've always found that exceedingly strange, but I guess you get used to it.

Some religions use a lunar based calendar. The customs and holidays shift relative to the Gregorian calendar over a number of years.

All those things you are flagging just don’t really seem that important versus having a 3 Day Weekend Society

- Seasons shift, who cares...

- Law overhaul (this is the ask, make it the law...)

- Consistent tracking mechanism (we aren’t throwing anything out)

That's not what I meant by laws need to change. I mean that we use calendar dates for laws that are tied to seasonal attributes. As a simple example, dates are set in law as a beginning and end date for when you are allowed to use studded snow tires (eg 10/15 - 4/15). Now you would have to go back through all that legislation for every date in law to see if it would need to be subjected to a shifting scheme. Stuff like tax day might not need to change, but school years would need to adjust every year, because the main purpose of it set the way they are is for agriculture labor on family farms (although that is a shrinking concern).

But again you can still have a 3 day weekend by simply shortening the work week. It also has the added bonus that your ratio of days off to days on is 3:4 instead of 3:5.

Meaning you get more days off by shortening the work week than you do by making all of society adapt to adding an extra day to the week.

People care about seasons and regularity a great deal. I know that it’s warm in the summer, so I’ll book a beach holiday then. Moving my vacation plans by a few weeks every few years to ensure they’re still in good weather would be a nightmare. Not least because people would probably want school holidays to match that time period.

The calendar feels very illogical and made up compared to most measurement systems but there’s a reason why they are what they are! A much more realistic proposal would be to just give people every other Friday off. Or work one Friday a month, something like that.

Eh. I disagree there could just be two running in parallel for a bit or even forever: original and modern.

3 day weekend society

Kinda like using a Gregorian and Julian calendar simultaneously?

It can cause issues

The French First Republic[1] and the early Soviet Union[2] both briefly reformed their calendars, but in both cases the changes were reverted after a couple of years. There's also a whole bunch of proposed calendar reforms[3], each with its pros and cons. But again, it looks like historically there's been too much resistance against calendar reforms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform

That would uncouple the months from the location of Earth in its orbit. If you're going to do that, you might as well go full-bore and just adopt a calendar that counts days, 8-day weeks, and years and forgo months entirely.

If you're going to keep months, but have an 8-day week, I'd rather see something like: 9 months of 5 weeks each (40 days) with an extra 4 days at the end or beginning of the year. Leap days could be appended to the extra week. This has the added benefit that the 8th is always Blernsday in any month.

In any case, I think there are advantages to only working 4-days in a row; and 4/3 is a better ratio for workers than 5/3; and I think you're just moving the goal posts, really. People 50 years from now would be arguing about going to a 4/4 week...

Eh, i think i'd prefer 4-3 more than 5-3. For the same reason that i'd rather not work 60 days straight and take an extended period off.

As it is, lately i've been working longer chunks of days in a row, 14+ days without breaks and it drains me. It feels like each day after the next really compounds.

It's also why i dislike longer vacations. I get super antsy after day 3 or 4.

I think people value working to the same work day schedule as everyone else so your time off is aligned. That is how Friday night drinks and Sunday brunch works with friends.

I have always joked that if I ran for Office that making weekends 3 days long would be core to my platform.

While there might be some obstacles the idea itself is great and we should pursue it further :)