Calendar Reform

Podcast Transcript

Our calendar and system of keeping time are rather unique.

It isn’t nice and tidy like the metric system. It is a collection of odd time units, leap years, and rotating calendars.

As such, many people throughout history have thought that they could do better.

So they have made proposals for changing our calendar, some of which would be very different from the one we are used to.

Learn more about proposed calendar reforms on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast long enough, you know that I frequently say that something will be the subject of a future episode.

This is such an episode.

I’ve done many episodes covering the origins of the calendar and timekeeping. It is a rather convoluted mess that has been passed down to us over time from a variety of ancient cultures.

It is why we have 24 hours in a day, but 60 minutes in an hour, seven days in a week, and 365 days in a year.

It’s a rather awkward system, but it works, and everyone knows how it works. Our calendar and our system of keeping time are a sort of protocol for society and civilization.

That being said, many people have come up with ideas for improving the calendar.

Let’s start with some of the problems with the current calendar.

The Gregorian calendar, while widely accepted, has long been criticized for its irregularities and inefficiencies. One major issue is the uneven distribution of days across months. Some months have 30 days, others 31, and February has 28 or 29 days, depending on leap years, making the calendar inconsistent and difficult to memorize or predict without constant reference. This irregularity complicates accounting, scheduling, and planning, especially in business and administrative contexts where even predictable periods are desirable.

Another significant problem is that the Gregorian calendar does not align cleanly with the seven-day week. Each year, dates fall on different weekdays, which creates inefficiencies for industries that rely on fixed schedules or comparisons across years. There is no standardization of which dates fall on which days of the week.

For example, last year Christmas was on a wednesday and this year it will be on a thursday.

The leap year system, while an effective approximation for aligning the calendar with the solar year, is also a source of confusion. Its rules are not intuitive, requiring exceptions for century years not divisible by 400. This adds a layer of complexity to what is otherwise a straightforward progression of days.

Religious observances further complicate matters. Many holidays, such as Easter, are movable feasts tied to lunar cycles rather than the solar calendar, resulting in shifting dates that vary from year to year. This inconsistency has made it difficult to standardize international holiday calendars or school years, especially in multicultural societies.

Moreover, the Gregorian calendar divides the year into quarters of unequal lengths, which is inconvenient for economic reporting and quarterly assessments in business. This lack of symmetry has led to calls for calendars with uniform quarters and months, which could simplify accounting and reduce errors in date-based calculations.

With that, let’s go through some of the proposed calendars that would replace the Gregorian calendar.

The first is the International Fixed Calendar, which was proposed by British accountant Moses B. Cotsworth in 1902.

It divides the year into 13 months, each containing exactly 28 days, which results in months that are precisely four weeks long. This uniformity ensures that every month begins on the same day of the week and that the same dates always fall on the same weekdays, year after year. The 13th month, often called “Sol,” is inserted between June and July in the Gregorian calendar.

Since thirteen months of 28 days add up to 364 days, and the solar year is approximately 365.24 days, the calendar includes an extra day at the end of the year, called Year Day.

This day falls outside the weekly cycle and is not assigned a weekday. In leap years, a second extra day, called Leap Day, is added after June 28, and it too stands outside the seven-day week structure. These additions allow the calendar to stay aligned with the solar year while maintaining the regularity of its 28-day months.

Because the weekly cycle is uninterrupted within each month but paused for the extra day or days at year’s end, the calendar offers a level of consistency and symmetry not found in the Gregorian system.

The next proposed calendar is the World Calendar.

The idea of the World Calendar was first proposed by Elisabeth Achelis in the early 1930s through the World Calendar Association. She promoted the system as a way to simplify and harmonize global timekeeping, especially for business and government. It even gained some support from the League of Nations.

The World Calendar divides the year into equal quarters, ensuring that dates always fall on the same weekdays every year. It retains the traditional twelve-month structure but adjusts the number of days in each month to create four identical quarters.

Each quarter consists of three months: the first month has 31 days, followed by two months of 30 days, making each quarter exactly 91 days, or 13 weeks. This allows for a consistent calendar where January 1 always falls on a Sunday, and every date has a fixed weekday.

To reconcile this orderly structure with the 365-day solar year, the World Calendar introduces a single extra day at the end of the year, called “World Day.”

This day is not assigned a weekday and falls between December 30 and January 1. In leap years, a second extra day, “Leap Day,” is added after June 30, also outside the normal week cycle. By placing these days outside the seven-day structure, the calendar maintains an unchanging relationship between dates and weekdays throughout the rest of the year.

Another proposal is the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar.

The calendar was developed in the 2010s by Richard Conn Henry, a professor of physics and astronomy, and Steve H. Hanke, an economist, both at Johns Hopkins University.

The calendar divides the year into 12 months and retains the traditional names of those months, but adjusts the number of days in the months to ensure consistency. Specifically, March, June, September, and December each have 31 days, while all other months have 30 days. This results in a year of exactly 364 days, which is evenly divisible by 7, allowing each date to permanently align with the same day of the week.

To account for the fact that a solar year is about 365.24 days long, the Hanke-Henry Calendar introduces a leap week, rather than a leap day, that is added every five or six years to bring the calendar back in sync with the Earth’s orbit.

This leap week, called “Xtra,” is inserted at the end of December during designated years. Because the system eliminates the irregularities of month lengths and varying weekday-date alignments, it too claims to simplify scheduling, accounting, and timekeeping on a global scale.

Yet another proposed calendar is the Symmetry454 Calendar.

The Symmetry454 Calendar was proposed in the early 2000s by Irv Bromberg, a calendar reform advocate and mathematician affiliated with the University of Toronto. Bromberg’s goal was to create a calendar that offered the advantages of perpetual scheduling and consistent date-weekday alignment without violating the weekly rhythm of other proposed calendars.

Its name comes from the distinctive pattern it imposes on each quarter: every quarter consists of three months arranged in a 4–5–4 week pattern, meaning the first and third months of each quarter have four weeks, and the middle month has five. Each quarter thus contains exactly 91 days, which totals 364 days in a standard year. This symmetry ensures that every month starts on a Monday and ends on a Sunday, and every date always falls on the same weekday year after year.

To align with the solar year, this calendar also adds a leap week at the end of December, approximately every five or six years. This extra week, known as “Leap Week,” keeps the calendar in sync with the Earth’s orbit without breaking the seven-day weekly cycle.

I should also give a mention to the French Revolutionary Calendar, which I covered on a previous episode.

It restructured the year into twelve months of 30 days each, with names inspired by nature and agriculture, such as Brumaire and Thermidor. Each month was divided into three ten-day weeks called décades, and the remaining five or six days of the year were designated festival days not part of any week.

So, what are the problems with all of these proposals?

Each of these systems puts an emphasis on trying to put the same day each year on the same day of the week. For example, January 1 would always be on a Sunday or a Monday, depending on the calendar.

The only way they can achieve this is by inserting days into the calendar that are either not part of any week or weeks that are not part of any month.

In our current calendar, every day is accounted for. Every date on the calendar has a day of the week and is part of a month.

One of the biggest objections to the extra day proposals comes from religious groups. By religious groups, I mean Christians, Muslims, and Jews….and probably a whole bunch of other ones.

Friday is the Jumu’ah in Islam, which is a community prayer day. Saturday is the Sabbath in Judaism, and Sunday is the Lord’s Day in Christianity.

If you toss in a day that isn’t a part of any week, are the days of the week that follow really those days? Would Sunday be Sunday if there were an extra day thrown in since the last one?

The proposals to insert the occasional leap week attempt to solve this problem, but they just create another one. Instead of a floating random day, you have a floating random week.

Personally, I think all of these ideas are bad.

While I can see the appeal in having months or quarters that are the same size, or having the same dates each year fall on the same day of the week, I don’t think these are really that big of a deal.

The current system works even if it doesn’t appeal to our more obsessive-compulsive natures to try to make everything even and tidy.

However, there is a much more important reason why I think all of these proposals are a bad idea.

It would make the concerns over Y2K look like a walk in the park. Unlike Y2K, which was a concern over how computers would handle a number, this would be a total replacement of the entire calendar system, which is hard-coded into every computer in the world.

Everything would have to be rewritten, and everyone on Earth would have to adapt to a new system.

The cost of changing such an ingrained system is simply not worth the potential benefits of a new calendar.

So, is there a calendar reform that I would support?

Actually, yes.

It is an incredibly simple change that would require changing almost nothing, and hardly anyone would even notice. Yet, it would solve one very annoying problem.

It’s called the Holocene Calendar.

All it does is add 10,000 to the current year. So, instead of the year 2025, it would be the year 12,025.

Everything else is the same. In fact, for all practical purposes, we could keep calling it 2025.

So what is the point of this?

It completely eliminates the annoying BC timing, where 2025 years ago you start counting backwards. It is a system that would mostly be used by historians, archaeologists, and scientists.

Ten thousand years is a nice round number that puts the start of the calendar at a point well before anything in recorded human history.

Under this calendar, the year 1 would be the year 10,001.

The pyramids were built around 7441.

The city of Jericho, believed to be the oldest city in the world, was founded around 9600 BC, which is the year 401.

Our calendar is something that can’t be changed on a whim. When the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1582, it faced an enormous amount of resistance….and that was 450 years ago.

The interconnectedness of the modern world has made it exponentially harder to change the calendar.

Reforming the calendar doesn’t solve any problems so much as they shift the problem to something else.

We live in a world where days, months, and years do not evenly divide into each other. As such, no matter what calendar we use, something has to be fudged to make it work, so we might as well stick with the one we got.