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Fun fact: Nordic countries use week numbers for all sorts of planning, e.g. vacation period, school events, company planning, statistics reporting, ...

All calendars show week numbers.



I use GNOME with week numbers shown in[0]! Find it super useful.

I am also a big fan of setting yearly goals. Been doing this for a couple of years now. This has sort of converged into a tradition of having ~12 goals per year.

Each item is something quantifiable and achievable. For example, a goal of mine is 'losing x amount of weight', as opposed to 'becoming fit' - this I won't expand into other domains however, if the context is making a game, it would be 'publishing a game', and not 'publishing a game that sells a million copies', as the latter depends on factors outside of your control, luck, etc.

The way I set up my own goals, they are achievable if I were to focus on these for a quarter alone. They are not big, huge deals. But I don't focus on these for a quarter of course, I have to go to work, and I have a family and loved ones that I enjoy spending time with. Yet it is also an anchor I look at occasionally, and if the list is having too little progress, I get the message that I should work on these for a while. I find it to be a nice balance.

0: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.calendar show-weekdate true


I'm Norwegian, but never got used to this, and to this day (I turn 50 this year) my mum will try to communicate time with me using week numbers, and I have to tell her to use dates.


Week numbers are very useful for static holiday periods like the kid's school fall vacation and winter vacation. In my area, they are always in week 8 and week 40, and as such it's easier to plan accordingly. And my summer vacation is usually weeks 28-30.

Just make sure to turn on week number in your calendar applications, then it might be more useful to you.


Then I still need to consult my calendars, while dates I can relate to the current date without that extra step.


Another fun fact: there are three commonly used ways to define week numbers (see `man strftime`, %U, %V, %W; %V is the one used in at least the Nordics). In some years they coincide so you might not notice that you picked the wrong one until next January.

Yet another fun fact: with %V week numbers, the date 2024-12-30 (December 30, 2024) was 2025-W01-1 (the Monday of week 1, 2025). Thus strftime needs two different ways to specify the year: %G denotes the year that goes with %V week numbers, %Y denotes the year that people usually think of when they ask "what year is it". Unfortunately %G comes before %Y on the strftime man page, so people who scan the page quickly can easily pick %G when they really want %Y. I've seen a few bugs caused by this.

I have also seen the corresponding bug in SQL, using IYYY instead of YYYY. This boggles the mind, but apparently when some people read "ISO 8601 week-numbering year", they only see "ISO 8601 ... year", think "yes, that's the date standard we use" and don't care about the "week-numbering" word in the middle.


Fascinating! Thanks for sharing.

I've done a bunch of thinking around how to organize things in dates, etc, and often wondered if I should be using week numbers. Never thought to look up if it's a common practice in any countries.


Not so fun fact: Corporate Germany also uses week numbers and some paper pushers and some project managers have adapted, most nerds (incl. me) will never come to terms with it and have to look it up once a month. Also what do you mean by "all calendars" - the last paper one I owned I bought at an art fair in 2018ish ;)


If you work at a 'real' paper pusher office they have a three month calendars with week numbers hanging at every office wall, gifted from the wholesale and office center!

(You can activate week numbers in Office Outlook as well. Or go to ukenummer.no for simple display)


I know you can get to them - but people just don't have them at hand most of the time, in most places :) (My Android phone doesn't display them by default but I've not looked around)


Quite common in German companies too, it's usually refered to as KW, tomorrow (2025/02/17) KW 8 starts.


KW is Kalenderwoche (Calendar week) BTW


So that’s why Minecraft uses weeks for prerelease versioning.


WHAT?! I thought everyone did this!




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