Do downtime activities that take longer than a day have to be performed on consecutive days?

Question

For example, let's say a character wants to retrain a feat, it will take him 7 days (a week) of downtime.

Do these 7 days have to be consecutive, or can they be split? For example, could he retrain for 3 days, then go adventuring for 2 days, and then finish the last 4 days of retraining?

The same could be asked of other downtime activities like learn name, create forgery.

The craft activity does specify that:

If the downtime days you spend are interrupted, you can return to finish the item later, continuing where you left off.

But I'm guessing this only applies to that activity.

Further, there's this tidbit of rules from exploration and downtime activities:

If an activity that occurs outside of an encounter is interrupted or disrupted, as described in Disrupting Actions below, you usually lose the time you put in, but no additional time beyond that.

But I'm not sure if this refers only to disruptions, or to any interruption.

Answer 1

A GM should make this call case-by-case because it is highly context-relevant.

Retraining mostly makes sense to be able to split it up across days, but might not depending on what is being retrained. If you practice a new skill on Moonday through Wealday for three weeks should yield pretty similar results to being able to throw a full week at it in one go. But studying and performing the ritual to change your Druid order probably requires a month or more of dedicated time to accomplish.

By default, yes

The section you quote is pretty clear that you lose progress (and therefore cannot continue from where you left off) on any Downtime activity that doesn't have an exception (like Craft) when the activity is "interrupted or disrupted". Interruption is a pretty general term, with definitions like "stop the continuous progress of (an activity or process)".