Tweaking Your Dates and Calendar

I was listening to the most recent episode of Cortex (one of my favorite podcasts), and the hosts were talking about their calendars. Unexpectedly they had a little standoff about what day of the week their calendars started on. If you grew up in America, this is an absurd statement that does not make sense. Upon some reflection and listening to the discussion of the hosts, I don’t have a good argument against their position that your calendar should start on Monday. Listen to the episode here:

I started experimenting with this by changing the preferences in Google Calendar and Fantastical. I soon realized that there is a preference in macOS to change the start of the week across your entire system so I changed that too. Its too early to tell if this has legs but I don’t hate it.

However, that preference pane led to an even bigger discovery for me.

For the past year I have been a big fan of the ISO 8601 standard for dates (that was probably the nerdiest statement I have ever written). I have been using YYYY-MM-DD formatting for my dates and as a way to prepend my scans and receipts. It makes it so much easier to find thing and it just makes sense. I never knew that there is a preference panel in macOS to change this as well. So, for the past 36 hours I have been trying some new things with my calendar and I am interested to see how this plays out over time.