This is one of the best examples of over engineering something that nobody asked for, to solve a problem that nobody has, in the most complicated useless way possible. It's funny but irritating that it's presented with a straight face.
It's only simple if you have a bunch of calendar rules memorized. Personally instead of for example memorizing the Thanksgiving rule I would find it much easier to just look for the square titled Thanksgiving in Nov.
I think it would work well as an app/website calendar but it wouldn't work as a paper calendar without extra sheets which would defeat the purpose of it.
Most of us need to refer to a calendar quite frequently to know what calendar date (day, month, year) corresponds to which day of the week
I do not do this frequently. It is maybe 2.5% of the reason I use a calendar. Am I an outlier?
My use cases of a calendar:
Daily: confirming activities for the day
~Bi-daily: setting an appointment with someone else.
Weekly: confirming activities for the week, and slotting in other activities.
Monthly: long range scheduling (includes the target use case, but needs other information to be worthwhile)
Annually: Transfer persistent events to following year calendar and archival. (Target use case, but only for events that are not linked to a specific date. Also requires additional information).
I'd say I primarily use a calendar for seeing which day of the week is which calendar date. I typically don't have too much scheduled in the next ~two weeks at any time to keep in my head, in the form of day of the week now that I think about it. I usually use a calendar to check if there's anything further out than that and convert it to e.g. 'next thursday' to remember.
It sounds like you use a calendar much more than I do, I check mine once every couple weeks at most tbh. I might be the outlier here though, who knows.
The article is a textbook example on how to overcomplicate things. It's almost like it was in school when you were done with your answer after a few sentences but the teacher demanded at least one written page.
I was sort of getting it until I noticed the months are all jumbled up too, they're not in any coherent order or anything. What a mess. It's so over engineered it actually makes me just a tad bit angry.
I kinda hate it but they're talking specifically about a different purpose of a calendar.
Most of us need to refer to a calendar quite frequently to know what calendar date (day, month, year) corresponds to which day of the week. But rather than having to change your calendar every month, this one-page calendar works for the entire year to give you all the information you need, practically immediately.
This is surprisingly useful to me. I frequently need to know the dates of upcoming Sundays when making agendas and having this printed next to my desk would save me from going back and forth with a traditional calendar.
Appointments were already mentioned, but what about holidays - the days most of us get off work? A simple solution wold be to write them next to the calendar, but it's a bit less than an elegant solution.
That was ridiculously complicated. What I did is memorize the month columns in Dr. Siegel's universal calendar. Now I can figure out any calendar day in my head. I plan to amaze my friends with this new skill.
Article aside, I love the calendar and started using it immediately. I do quite often need to know what day of the week a sepecific date is, and usually navigated the frustrating Win11 calendar from the taskbar. This is now on my bookmarks toolbar, so I have future answers a click away.
This is the equivalent of all those stupid new door handles that EVs have these days. Different and overly complicated just for the sake of being different.
This is the kind of thing some company prints on a piece of plastic the size of a credit card, someone sticks it in their wallet then they forget about it for a decade. 😂