If I say to you “let’s meet in a month” you probably won’t know exactly when we are meeting again. It’s an approximation at best. Do I mean 30 days? do I mean the exact same day number but on the next month? What if that month doesn’t have that day, like February 30th? What if we are in a business setting and 30-days-later or same-number-of-the-month falls on a Saturday? As you see, months, as a measure of time, can be pretty useless. Specially when talking about small numbers, like 1 or 2.
There’s a better unit. The week. How long is the week? 7 days. All weeks are 7 days, no exceptions. If I say “‘let’s meet in a week” you know what I mean. Add seven days to today and that’s when we are meeting. If it’s a Monday, in a week, it’s also a Monday. Also, weeks are smaller, more granular, which is useful for little projects. If I ask “When is X is going to be done?” I’d rather hear it expressed in weeks rather than months.
We normally use months because they allow us to set up a time in the year. We can say “July” and know when it’s that. Weeks can do that too actually.
Did you know that the weeks of the year are numbered? It is call “ISO week date” where ISO stands for International Organization for Standardization. Since a year doesn’t start on the same day of the week every year and also has variable numbers of days, years may have 52 or 53 weeks. This allows to say week 5 or week 30 and refer to a specific week of the year. There’s even a format: 2015-W5-1. That referees to Monday of week 5 of 2015.
If you are using Google calendar, you can add the week numbers to it following this procedure:
- Click on “Other calendars”
- Click on “Browse Interesting Calendars”
- Click on “More”
- Next to “Week Numbers” click on “Subscribe”
From now on, in your week view, you’ll see a small rectangle with the week number, in this case, week 6:
It also appears on your list of other calendars, so you can change the color and enable or disable it:
The most organized businesses I came in contact with, made extensive use of calendar numbers and I intend on doing the same and recommend it to other people. I think the first obstacle to overcome is making the number ubiquitous so that when you use it, saying “week 6” for example, people know intuitively what you are talking about.
Let’s do it.
