What should you may by no means have the identical break day as your family and friends? Would you stop your job? What if it was the murderous dictator Joseph Stalin providing you with the order?
The Soviet Union needed its factories to run every single day, all yr lengthy. And so in 1929, Stalin killed the weekend: employees have been prevented from all taking the identical break day on the similar time.
On this crossover episode of Cautionary Tales and The Happiness Lab, Tim Harford and Yale professor Dr Laurie Santos inform the story of Stalin’s curious, calendar-reshaping experiment. They discover what it could train us about day without work even right now and why the vacations matter so very a lot.
Additional Studying
Dan Lewis, The Soviet Plan to Finish the Weekend Now I Know
EG Richards, Mapping Time
Judith Shulevitz Why You By no means See Your Associates Any Extra The Atlantic
Jodi Kantor “As Shifts Fluctuate, Household’s Solely Fixed Is Chaos” – New York Instances 14 August 2014 and Jodi Kantor “Starbucks to Revise Insurance policies to Finish Irregular Schedules for its 130,000 Baristas” New York Instances 15 August 2014
Oliver Burkeman 4 Thousand Weeks
Terry Hartig et al. Trip, Collective Restoration and Psychological Well being in a Inhabitants
Thomas Schelling Micromotives and Macrobehavior
Heather Boushey Discovering Time