Money can’t buy more hours in the day. Or can it? Get four extra hours in every day with this new “28-hour day” system.

Background:

Most people would probably enjoy some extra time in the day: the ability to sleep sleep for a couple of extra hours and still be on time for your obligations the next day would allow allow even the most exhausting day to conclude with a leisurely “reset.”

Unfortunately, one thing that money can’t buy is more time in the day—until now, that is!

Proposal:

Days are 24 hours long, and there are (by popular agreement) seven of these days in a week.

It just so happens that 7×24 hours (168) is also equal to 6×28 hours.

So the solution is simple: while most people will still go about their business on a 24-hour day (synced to the Sun), some exceptionally decadent people could simply tack on an extra four hours to each day and live a six day week (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: The six-day week (bottom) gradually de-synchronizes with the conventional seven-day week (top). Midnight on “Two’s Day” (bottom) is equivalent to high noon on a conventional Wednesday. Note that the clocks always line up at 12:00 AM on Sunday, which is the same in both calendars. (The clocks actually stay synchronized from the leftmost point on the graph above to the dotted yellow/black line marked “23:59,” after which they diverge.)

Since none of the longer days exactly line up with their traditional counterparts, I have proposed just numbering the days from zero to six (e.g. the new “Sunday” analogue is “Zero’s Day”). This should help avoid confusion. (It would be possible to also re-use the name “Sunday,” since it’s the only day that’s unambiguous: 11:59 PM on Sunday is the same in both systems, it’s just that the “new Sunday” also has a 12:59 PM, 13:59 PM, 14:59 PM, and 15:59 PM.)

Conclusion:

This calendar would work especially well for people who never see the Sun anyway due to their jobs (such as deep-sea explorer, certain miners, and computer programmers).

PROS: With the extra time in each day, people should be more well-rested and less likely to get into car accidents or cause industrial mishaps while operating heavy machinery.

CONS: It might be annoying to run two separate schedules at the same time; for example, if you’re on the “new” schedule and you want to go out for a late lunch on “Two’s Day,” you’ll find that it’s 1 AM on traditional Wednesday. Also, unfortunately “Two’s Day” and “Tuesday” are homophones, so we may need to fix that somehow.