How Many Days a Week?

"We tend to think of the five-day workweek as a law of nature, as certain as the rising of the sun. But it's nothing of the sort. The five-day workweek is a human invention that was introduced just over a century ago to solve the specific problems of the industrial age. By now it's so ingrained in our lives that we've forgotten we created it in the first place-but we did create it and we can also un-create it."

"The French Republican calendar still divided the year into twelve months, but each month was made up of three, ten-day "weeks," or décades. Days were then divided into ten hours, each hour into one hundred minutes, and each minute into one hundred seconds. Nobody uses that system today, which tells you everything you need to know about how well it went."

A prediction suggests that artificial intelligence could shrink the workweek to three days by handling tedious tasks and freeing humans for more leisure. The five-day workweek originated just over a century ago to address industrial-age problems. That schedule is a human invention and therefore changeable. During the French Revolution, reformers introduced the French Republican calendar, replacing seven-day weeks with three ten-day décades and dividing days into ten hours and decimal minutes and seconds. Workers found nine straight workdays exhausting, and the loss of Sunday disrupted religious, market, and social gatherings, contributing to the reform's failure.

Read at Psychology Today