The Week

Earth rotates once a day, the moon circles (roughly) once a month, and we circle the sun once a year. But the week is only weakly linked to quarter moons.

It seems to me this span of 7 or so days arose not from astronomical measures but instead reflects the human perception of time. Last week and this week are pretty easy to consider and compare to each other, but to recall 20 days ago calls for some tools like writing and calendars. Looking forward, the fog of “in the future” blurs quickly after next week. Weeks appear to divide time at human scale.1

Maybe this is why it felt natural to adopt weeknotes for work. I’ve settled into a routine, now, of journaling a few thoughts at the end of each week2, for myself as the audience but nonetheless filtered for fearless sharing. I even started adding them to the repository for this site, but hadn’t set up publishing.

So when considering how to structure time-based navigation of this site, weeks were an intuitive resolution to use. Because everything here is about me, anyway, I decided to avoid obscure ISO week dating (this is week 2019-W41) and just zero-index my life.

So, I’ve bootstrapped a basic week-based archive at /weeks and intend to expand upon it with more data. (This is week 2379.) Because I enjoy emergent standards, /now will redirect to the last completed week.

According to the US government, I should expect to log up to week 4262. I’m hopeful some lifestyle choices (especially leaving the US) will increase the actual result.