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Comment by ElevenLathe | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting. I never anticipated so many people would think of it as a circle. I mentally picture a calendar we had in my kindergarten classroom. It was a regular (USian, with the start of the week on Sunday) wall calendar, but all the pages had been cut out and hung in a line with January at the ceiling and December just above the floor.

Relatedly, I've recently put a line in my .bashrc to display the ISO week number (date +%V) in addition to the traditional date. Knowing that we're in week 42 of the year somehow helps me get a better sense time passing than knowing it is the third Wednesday in October. In general I think the world lives in weeks rather than months and it's a little unfortunate that our date system obscures this.

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> In general I think the world lives in weeks rather than months and it's a little unfortunate that our date system obscures this.

In Denmark using week numbers is very normal. People will know what week's are vacation weeks, and ask you what your plans are for week 40 etc.

I wonder if this is common in other countries too?

It's about as common here (AU) as referring to dates as sprints since epoch. So not very.

Sprints since epoch, that's a nice one!

Found the Atlassian employee :)

I wish :) I feel like I use BitBucket more than they do; JIRA has dark mode while BB doesn't...

Week numbers are quite common in Norway as well.

It's a very white-collar thing.

Why? I don’t get this comment.

In Germany some people might ask "Hey, let's meet up on calendar week 42", but I then always have to quickly google "when is week 42". I think people who are in the office a lot and have management meetings will know these weeks better.

But only very recently a couple of friends of mine mis-communicated because they had a different week in mind ("so how about we meet this Wednesday?" - "I thought you wrote calendar week 33, not 32, I'm away on seminar all week.")

I much prefer "Hey, let's meet up on the week of November 6th" (the date being the Monday of the week).

I grew up in Germany, but never seriously worked there. I never really encountered the week number being used (much).

But as you say, that might be something common in specific places of work.

In the Netherlands I think it's common to think like that in larger organizations, and so people who work there sometimes talk like that in private too.

In Germany it seems normal. In Serbia I don't remember anyone ever used it in my presence, emails etc.

I kept waiting for the article to get to early school exposure to months of the year, and was disappointed until I read your comment.

Indeed, I've been aware for many years that my spatial visualization of the year was formed in kindergarten, from the board that had a ring of 12 laminated paper cupcakes, each with the names of the kids in class born in that month. December was at the 3:00 position, thus permanently wiring it there in my brain.

All that said, my mind somehow added a dimension over time, turning the loop into a sort of loose helix with the past below (and intermittently attached to corresponding real-world time-places like classrooms or offices) and the future somewhere above.

I've discussed this with numerous different friends and colleagues over the years, and then most see time as linear if not quantified but very different when you start asking of periods. So many see years as cyclical, and understandably hours as well. Weeks are often tabular as your year is.

One of the more interesting visualizations of the year was a colleague who saw it as a coil, so cyclic but also with a forward motion.

Seasons are also interesting: my seasons are wedges of the cyclic year, but som I've discussed this with have the seasons removed from their representation of the year and have seasons tabular instead.

I'm surprised so many people think of it as a circle too. I guess it makes sense, since it's a cycle, and we already use a circle for clocks. But it never occurred to me. In my head it's a straight line with notches, like a ruler, with another ruler at each end for the next and previous years.

You might find this interesting, as this is somewhere between the two: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

Fwiw I think of the year in much the same way as a clock face.. the 12 months and 12 hours thing essentially matches somewhat 1 to 1 for me. So circle representation is what follows. Im actually surprised in the variations too.

I started tracking the weeks like that a long time ago when I was working a job that paid weekly. It's kind of like a super power for making accurate time estimates, I've found.

So the participants were culturally exposed to something called "year wheels" and "If the year is a circle (...)" was part of the question.

Of course they ended up with circles!

Be careful because week numbers are different in the US and in Europe (and probably elsewhere).

We use the ISO definition of the week, the US uses something else.

I wasn't sure if you were making a joke, or pointing out a real difference. Turns out to be a real difference: https://support.claris.com/s/article/ISO-Week-Number-Calcula...

Yes, it is a real difference that bit me a few times when I forgot about the 1 week difference. The worst is that this week of difference is present or not depending on the years.

The second nightmare is the week iof difference in daylight saving time (in Europe we switch a week earlier or later vs the US, I do not remember anymore)

I have lived in America all my life and have never even once heard somebody talk about a week number. The only exception I know of is that electronics geeks sometimes know about the concept because often electronic components have a date code that is the year and week of their manufacture. This is where I got the idea anyway. So, if there is a US standard, most Americans are not aware of it -- even electronics geeks would only bring it up when actively decoding some markings on a suspicious chip.

This is quite a common measure in business, especially in project management. Including in the US, from my experience with a dozen or so large US companies I worked for or with.

It is granular enough (~52 weeks) to give good (rough) estimations and is is not difficult to manage (compared to 365 days for instance)

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