Brad DeLong is teaching American economic history. I'm scheduled to teach it next year, and I feel his pain when he says that his eyes are bigger than his stomach.
The canonical course on American economic history spends:
* one week on the Spanish conquest
* one week on Amerindians
* one week on colonial settlement
* one week on the American Revolution
* one week on Alexander Hamilton
* one week on agriculture in the Old Northwest
* one week on New England manufactures
* one week on slavery
* one week on the Civil War
* one week on the Gilded Age
* one week on Populism
* one week on Progressivism
* one week on immigration
* one week on the Roaring Twenties
* one week on the Great Crash and the Great Depression
* one week on the New Deal
And we have overshot the end of the semester by three weeks.
He goes on to say that he wants to make room for post WWII history by getting to 1865 by the fourth week. Wow. I think you could buy a little time by spending just one day rather than a full week on the pre-colonial period and on Hamilton. Due to my location, I would switch out agriculture in the Old Northwest for agriculture in the Midwest, put it later in the semester (together with the railroads). Make Populism and Progressivism a day each instead of a week each. Similarly for immigration and the 1920s--make them a day instead of a week.
But even at that, you've only crammed that syllabus into the proper length of the semester. You haven't made room for post WWII.
This is going to require some serious contemplation.
Sounds like you're both suffering from an adherence to a week as a necessary period of study (or per your suggestions, a single day)
Go to 4-day 'weeks' and Prof DeLong's 16-topic syllabus is down to 64 days or (roughly) 13 weeks, and you're back on schedule. Reduce half the topics to 3 days and you buy 2 more topics. Done.
Plus you get out of the rut of starting a new topic on Monday every week. Keep them on their toes.
He and I both teach courses that meet only two days per week. (He has his schedule in the sidebar of his blog.) It's not realistic to do more than one historical period or major topic in a single day. Thus, most topics or periods are covered in one day or two days (one week).
But whether the class meets 2, 3, or more times per week the true constraint is the number of contact hours required per credit hour.
Redefining the number of minutes in an hour doesn't keep the sun up any longer.