A Failed Soviet Experiment Offers A Warning To Today’s Burnout Generation

The design of our calendars — the way we arrange our days, weeks, and months — is a reflection of how we aspire to live our lives. What’s a week anyway? By the numbers, it’s seven days, 168 hours, or 10,080 minutes tidily packaged into a set amount of time that is agreed on by most everyone. However, for one brief but disorienting moment, a week meant something entirely different to people living in the former Soviet Union. In 1929, the Soviet government launched the nepreryvka, a new plan that completely upended the structure of the work week as we know it today. Colloquially called the “continuous working week,” the plan dictated that the week would become five days long. Then, less than two years later, the government changed it to six days (called the shestidnevka). Eventually, they returned the week to its original seven days, but only after thoroughly shattering people’s mental model of time.