Calendars

I am a recovering productivity nerd with a keen sense of my own mortality that spends time with computer systems professionally. Because of this, I’ve accumulated opinions about dates and calendars.

• Dates should be written in ISO 8601 format e.g. 2024-12-31.
  • The year-month-day order eliminates any ambiguity between month/day/year and day/month/year.
  • year-month-day strings are sorted the same both alphabetically and chronologically; n.b. prefixing filenames with dates is a great way to help organize data.
• Weeks are the most useful unit of time.¹ Months are too long to go without a recap. Days are too short to identify any trends. The week number helps anchor it in context; I track two:
  • The current year e.g. 2024 WK 45
    • This can be displayed in calendaring software:
      • MacOS Calendar: Settings > Advanced > Show week numbers
      • Google Calendar: Gear Menu > Settings > General > Language and region > View options > Show week numbers
      • Outlook (Mac): Outlook Settings > Other: Calendar > Calendar Options: Show week numbers
      • Fantastical (iOS): Settings > Calendar Views > Calendar Weeks
  • The week of my life e.g. 2167 (of about 4000). I was born on a Friday so I increment my “death clock” week number at the end of the workweek.
• Weeks start on Monday.
  • This best reflects the rhythms of school, 9–5 office work, and similar job schedules.
  • It keeps the days of the weekend together on the right hand side of a 7-day calendar view making it easier to plan your weekend as a contiguous chunk of time. This reduces context switching when toggling between 5-day (work) and 7-day (personal) week views.
  • There is wide support for starting the week on Monday in modern computer and phone operating systems.
    • MacOS: System Settings > Language & Region > First day of the week
    • iOS: Settings > General > Language & Region > First day of the week
    • Google Calendar: Gear Menu > Settings > General > Language and region > View options > Start week on
    • Outlook (Mac): Outlook Settings > Other: Calendar > Work Schedule: First day of week
    • Fantastical (iOS): Settings > Calendar Views > Start Week On
  • You can configure the Periodic Notes plugin for Obsidian to support creating notes like this by setting the Format for Weekly Notes to YYYY/MM/YYYY [WK]ww.
• Months are not long enough for long-term planning. If you need to execute a strategy or manage a long-running project, use a one-page year-long compact calendar.
  • There is an Excel template that does the heavy lifting. I customize mine to include both types my week numbers and work-specific times e.g. quarters or program increments.
• Calendaring, like note-taking, benefits from being physically tangible. You don’t have to draw your calendars from scratch (although that can be satisfying); printing out a compact calendar and annotating it by hand works well.
  • Even though it doesn’t employ my preferred calendaring conventions, I have a soft spot for the Field Notes 15-Month Work Station Calendar.
  • If your days are extremely busy, then I’ve had good results using the Emergent Task Planner (sadly out of print; you can print your own).

I’ll leave thoughts on time and task management for another day.