Leap weeks and week cycle

What about leap weeks?

Leap weeks would keep the week cycle intact and seem like a great idea at first, but certainly come with a lot of other issues. Calendars with leap weeks drift quite a lot compared to the actual seasons, which means that even fundamental tasks like farming would probably have to be managed with a different (and more accurate) calendar to track when to plant and harvest crops. Also, what would your monthly bills look like? Is that week part of an extra-long month? Or a very short separate month? Do you get 12 monthly bills in common years and 13 on leap years?

Why break the week cycle?

A perennial calendar and a never-breaking seven-day week cycle are in direct conflict with each other. You can only have one. There are many benefits to having a perennial and simple calendar system, and I have never heard anything I would consider an argument against interrupting the week cycle. There are only two reasons why this hasn’t happened already: tradition and religion.

That does not mean I don’t take those concerns seriously. I don’t know much about the rules and scriptures of all the different religions on Earth. Maybe it would be possible in sync weeks to consider two actual days as an extra-long 48-hour day of worship, or two days of worship. Or maybe it’s possible to just keep the seven-day worship cycle and plan your earthly business accordingly. The week cycle is only broken once a year (twice in leap years), so even if the worship day is on Wednesday at the beginning of the year, it will be Wednesday the entire year and could be planned accordingly.

But as I said, I don’t know the specific rules of all those religions. What I know (because I did a lot of calendar research ^^) is that there already are many religions that use special calendars that are completely incompatible with the official calendar that’s used by their respective country. As said before, there is no perfect calendar. It is, and always will be, a compromise.