Double Week Calendar

A standard year will have 52 weeks of 7 days. This totals 364 days. Rather than a leap-week added at the end of every 5 or 6 years, every 292nd week is repeated. This repeated week is the defining characteristic of the Double Week Calendar .

Numerical Days of the month would no longer be necessary because dates can easily be referenced by the day of the week and the ordinal count of that day in the month (ex. "the fourth Thursday of November"). Because every year has the same 52 weeks, such a reference would always refer to the same day.

The leap week would simply function as a duplication of whichever week was the 292nd week, resulting in a doubling of anniversaries celebrated and anniversaries generated for that one week. There would thus be no leap-year problem where the anniversaries of events originating on "leap-days" are rescheduled during "common" years. Days Of The Year would still be counted for financial and legal purposes; many businesses already alternate between 364 and 371 day years.

After a period of 73 years, 13 of the 52 weeks of the year will have experienced a double week and those same 13 weeks would be in line for a double week 73 years after their first. After 73 years the calendar will be 76 seconds fast compared to a tropical year of 365.2421896698. This is more accurate than the Julian but less than the Gregorian. A perpetual 292-week cycle would require a stretched 293-week period after approximately 228 years in order to keep the year in concert with the tropical year (making it more accurate than even the Gregorian).

However, rather than implementing such a stretch at an odd (and potentially inconsistent) interval, the 292-week period will be altered after each 73-year period either by a one-time stretch to 293 weeks or relax to 289 weeks, and then resuming the normal 292-week period. This pattern of this alteration, easily set centuries in advance, will allow subsequent sets of 13 weeks to be doubled over each 73-year period until all 52 weeks of the year are doubled at the end of a 292-year period. Because the stretching/relaxing of the double week's period is a 1% change or less, it will cause no consternation among the general populace.

The Gregorian Calendar has 366 potential days. To reduce this to 364 and to also create four annual quarters of 91 days each, a day from the months of July/August/September, and a day from October/November/December will be dropped.

The suggested months to lose a day are July and November, this generates mirrored symmetry with the lengths of months in the first half of the year. These drops are not necessarily of July 31st and November 30th, as ordinal days are not used any longer, but these two months would have 1 less day than the Gregorian Calendar. It is also suggested that the year (and subsequently each quarter) begin on the first day of the week. Both of these suggestions are not at the core of this calendar proposal but they would need to be determined before implementation.