It looks like there are loads of weird and strange calendars that try to improve on the Gregorian calendar. Some stick with the twelve months while others divide the year into 13! A little searching shows some interesting ones that people came up with:
- the International Fixed Calendar, a 13-month calendar made in 1902, interestingly was adopted by Kodak for quite a while! Each month has 28 days, and there is an extra “year day” appended to bring the total to 365 days. Another day is added during leap years.
- the Pax Calendar, another 13-month calendar that was made in 1930, but instead of having leap days to keep it consistent with the Gregorian calendar, it has leap weeks. That’s neat I guess.
- and the Symmetry454 calendar, which is a 12-month calendar made in 2002 (so much more recent than the above two) which alternates between months with four and five weeks. Additionally, it also has leap weeks, making December a five-week month every so often.
All of the above are “perennial”, meaning the weekdays don’t change every year. This could be both a good thing (makes things more predictable, you could reuse calendars from any previous year) but also as a negative (some birthdays would be on weekdays while others are on weekends). The 13-month options sound nice, but it would be very tough to get people interested in remembering a 13th month. I like the Symmetry454 calendar the most out of the three, since it’s elegant while retaining the usual twelve months.
You also have the calendar made during the French Revolution in tandem with stuff like metric time and other base-10 standardisation, which had 10 months per year. It was removed after Napoleon took over, however, and wasn’t adopted by any other nation.
I also find changing when the year begins from the birth of Jesus (which, apparently, isn’t even that spot on, the guy was born four years before 1 AD I think) to some when else to be interesting too. The Holocene calendar adds another 10,000 years to represent the beginning of humans doing agriculture and such!
As for the question bit, I would like to ask what you all think of these alternate calendars. Would you switch to them if given the opportunity? If major world powers were to switch to the calendar, how would the public react? Is it possible to configure the clock to use an alternate calendar system on Linux?
Another thing I would like to ask if we were to change the calendar and possibly add a 13th month, what would you rename the months? It would help differentiate the old Gregorian dates in old texts, videos, etc. with new reformed ones, and it would also be a bit of fun! I also really don’t like that the Caesars decided to shift the year by two, making September the 9th month, October the 10th, etc. Personally, I would name them after the major moons in the Solar System (the Moon, Ganymede, Europa, Titan, Miranda, etc.) given that the months were originally based on the lunar phases.
I like the international fixed calendar. 13 months with an extra day that doesn’t belong to any month, great excuse to make that day an special holiday, twice as good on leap years.
I’m big into adding 10,000 years to the date to better show how long human civilization has existed and I would appreciate some standardization in month length. 12 months is useful for dividing the year up in many neat ways, but I’m not married to it. In any case, we gotta make Sept mean 7 again and so forth, or just change them to like Month-1, Month-2, Month-3, etc., sorta like how Mandarin handles it.
Hmm, could we do away with months and just number the weeks from top to bottom? Or better yet, number the days.
Happy 2026-77 everyone!
At the same time, weeks do let us organize our working and non working schedules neatly.
6-7😃
I have to use week numbers for scheduling things at work and they are very useful once you get your head around them, but it’s also useful to have larger monthly descriptors too.
I love the idea of 13 months in a year with leap days here and there to make it so days don’t fall on the same days of the week. As much as that could be nice for planning stuff, I agree that people should have the chance for their birthdays and other celebrations to fall on weekends.
My radical thinking is that we keep the first 12 months as close to what they already are and the 13th month is just a big holiday. Kinda how England seems to treat August. And while we’re at it, let’s change working expectations to be no more than 32 hours a week
I like the ideas of the Holocene calendar and the fixed one (13 Months). However I think too many software has been written and the costs to globally change the calendar would exceed billions with no real benefit (apart from being satisfying af).
A lot better would be to adopt the Gregorian calendar everywhere in the world, so it’s easier to share and coordinate. The business world uses mostly Gregorian dates anyway. And if we’re talking about that, I hope the ISO format (2026-03-19) will replace the illogical formats like 19.03.26 or even worse 19/03/26 and 03/19/26.
Virtually no software program internally cares about calendar specifics. Most computers are happy just counting seconds since the start of 1970 (Unix epoch) with some weirdos counting days since 1900 (excel) or some other arbitrary date (SQL server goes down to 1753, when the current Gregorian calendar was adopted.)
the big issue isn’t so much the software cost as the fight over finance. Does your $1000 a month rent go “down” to only $923 a month (same $12,000 per year) or does it “stay” at $1000 and your landlord enjoys the increased revenue?
(Agreed on dates. Either ISO dates or use some damn names for your months! Mar 19 2026 and 19 Mar 2026 are both obvious at a glance if for some reason 2026 3 19 doesn’t work.)
no real benefit
I suppose the benefits don’t seem that great. Though I wonder…
Implementing dates in software is not trivial. A more sane calendar system would reduce production costs in the long run.
Heck, even increasing predictability by having the same weekdays for the same dates would reduce human mistakes of all kinds! I say that because in Lean and Agile, one of the consistent findings is that reducing variability in production processes of all kinds reduces mistakes and increases efficiency.
Imagine not having to take out your calendar every time you’re planning dates. Amazing.
Finally, imagine the greatest benefit of them all: calling September the seventh month, October the eighth, November the ninth, and December the tenth. I always say that if my job was designing a calendar and I showed my boss a calendar where “September is the ninth month”, I wouldn’t last long in that job.
Six days week calendar with 12 months of 5 weeks = 360 days. Pad 5 or 6 months with an additional day at the end of the month that is not part of a week to complete the year.
It is much more regular, weeks won’t move and on leap year it is perfectly symmetrical
6 days a week is also better because it is not a prime number, it is divisible.
Doing a task every 2 or 3 days is much easier to schedule.
Please, please, please, whatever the system, make it start again in March. Stop this December-January nonsense and revert back to the start of the year on the glorious month of the God of War
I’d rather have holidays and birthdays fall on different days through the years.
I kinda like the French revolutionary calendar. It’s nature-themed and cute.
