When I first moved back to New York after a couple years in San Francisco, I attempted a Life Experiment of another sort. Rather than pursue a staff position in another design studio, I elected to freelance for a while and secured several assignments with generous timelines. For a period of about two to three weeks, I decided to ignore the clock, eating and sleeping only as my body dictated.

What I discovered was that the old adage of There Aren’t Enough Hours in the Day had resonance for me—in fact, my ideal day was 30 hours long. Every “night” I would climb into bed approximately six hours later than the one before it, relatively satisfied with what I was able to accomplish during the day, whether that meant catching up with friends, making progress on work, or oftentimes, both. I recently learned that Mao Zedong was similar, but unlike him, I wasn’t calling for meetings at two in the morning or asking anyone to abide by my routine.

A circadian rhythm is defined by Dictionary.com as “a daily rhythmic activity cycle, based on 24-hour intervals, that is exhibited by many organisms.” The rotation of the Earth—and thus daylight—clearly plays a defining role in the timing of our internal clocks and our overall health and well-being. But in a city as removed from nature as New York—where the sky is barely glimpsed through the canyon wall of skyscrapers and where an after-work drink can quickly snowball into a late-night bender—it’s no wonder we’ve become overly dependent on alarms, sometimes three. And for the truly desperate, there’s Clocky (thanks, Mike).

I recently learned of the 28-Hour Day, a time-management proposal that advocates for a six-day week:

“Until very recently in our evolution, it was a tremendous survival advantage to […] spend your time and energy in the lit environment of the daytime, when you had […] to do things like hunt, gather, build, travel, and fashion tools. Now that our society has been transformed by mass production, division of labor, and artificial lighting, there is no longer any great advantage to being diurnal. There are, in fact, considerable advantages to breaking free of the 24 hour cycle.”

Among the benefits cited are: a four-day work week, increased free time after work, longer weekends, variety (“One day you might have lunch under the stars. Another day, you might have breakfast at sunset.”), but perhaps the most hilarious advantage noted is the Reduced Frequency of Daily Chores, which the author postulates will allay our collective consumption.

Obviously, such a proposal would require one of two equally unlikely scenarios to ever work: 1) mass adoption on a global scale or 2) the Earth to slow down. Until then, you’ll find me hitting the snooze button on my iPhone at 6:00, 6:09, and 6:18, Monday through Friday.