Day One

posted November 25, 2009 by daniel

Since I work at home and my schedule is reasonably flexible, I decided to actually try my Five Day Schedule to see how it really works. In order to avoid confusion between the names of the days of the seven day week and my new five day week, I had to come up with new names. I long had suspected the weekdays to be named after Roman gods, and some quick research on wikipedia showed that to be close to the truth. The weekday are named based on the Norse rather than Roman gods and these same names are also the names given to the five planets visible in the night sky by the naked eye along with the sun and moon. I decided to follow the naming convention using Hindu gods rather than Norse gods. My favourite Hindu deities are Hanuman and Ganesha, simply because I like monkeys and elephants. I chose "Hanumanday" as my new Monday, "Ramaday" as my new mid-week day, "Ganeshaday" as my new Friday, "Brahmaday" as my new Saturday and "Natarajaday" as the last day of the five-day week. There isn't any particular reason behind these names, other than that I like the way they sound, and also that Nataraja dances to destroy a weary universe and that seemed appropriate for the last day of the week.

I made up a calendar in a spreadsheet with the five days across the top and the numbers for the days of the month, avoiding labelling the seven-day weekdays to avoid confusion and reinforce the new days. Unfortunately, I decided to start the whole project on a Friday and figured it was appropriate to start from the Monday, or "Hanumanday" of the five day week. This meant I would have to work two more days after five days of work. This was more tiring than I expected and the fact that my girlfriend was enjoying her weekend made it a bit more difficult. Today was supposed to be a holiday, but I ended up doing a bit of work anyway and tomorrow I have to go to the office to work, though it should be my weekend.

So far, the major issue with the five day week has been that I should have started my five day week at the start of a seven day week and that my weekend doesn't usually match the seven day weekend. It's off to a bit of a rough start, but I hope it will become easier over time.