A note about dates

[Rachael]

Don't know but they died hundreds of years ago by now.

[Graf Zahl]

The question shouldn't be "Who had such dumb ideas?' but 'Who keeps such dumb ideas in operation?'

[wildweasel]

I do still maintain that any given date standard would be comprehensible, regardless of order, if we just ensured that:
- the year is always fully written
- the month is named, even if in short form

Of course it's far, far worse where I work. Management enforces writing the date out as, to give today's date as an example, "WW46.2" - work week 46, day two. The idea of counting which week of the year it is, was a totally alien idea to me prior to 2018, and still is now, even though I can understand it enough to write that out off the cuff.

[yum13241]

the only numbered date format I will understand normally is either YYYY-MM-DD or DD/MM/YY(YY). MM/DD/YY(YY) gets me confused.

I'd be fine with smth like YYYY-Nov(ember)-8 or YYYY-8-Nov(ember) however. The problem is the ambiguity with the day and the month when they are numbers.

YY is of course more ambiguous than YYYY, especially when people do smth like this: '02. (see spoiler)

Y2K anyone?

---

Is that 1902, 2002, or what?

Of course people could say: CONTEXT! but let's say the year is 3684.


What does '84 mean?


1984, 2084, or 3084?

You can still say CONTEXT! but that won't work in a history book.

Of course YY won't work as well when new digits are added to the year (i.e 53524)

Of course it's far, far worse where I work. Management enforces writing the date out as, to give today's date as an example, "WW46.2" - work week 46, day two. The idea of counting which week of the year it is, was a totally alien idea to me prior to 2018, and still is now, even though I can understand it enough to write that out off the cuff.

I sure do hope they don't inspect your notes for not using it! Counting the week imo is pointless, it only makes sense towards the end of the year. The one advantage this system has is no ambiguity with the month and day, but then Y2K anyone? It also makes it harder to tell what month it is, i.e WW63.5 is when?

[Rachael]

This is done at many employers for accounting purposes. "Work week" is simply the number of weeks since the start of the fiscal year and the day always matches the start of the fiscal week. This is different from the traditional calendar day/week and is 100% dependent on how the employer sets it up. Often fiscal years start around February or so instead of January but that is not the case for all employers.

No, it is not standard, and hardly anyone else will understand such a format unless they were trained in it.