Here in my office I’m involved in the designing of a printed calendar. We just got our first set of proofs from the printer and aside from little proofreading/nitpicking stuff one thing that stood out is that the laid-out weeks start on Monday and go through to Sunday, leaving the weekends bunched up on the right.
I find this to be an abomination against all that’s right & good in a world based on order, reason and a desire to feel like my ‘weekend’ days are indeed at either ‘end’ of the week.
My weeks on a printed calendar must start on Sunday & end on Saturday. Why? I dunno. It’s always been that way? I schedule work-stuff on the weekends? I’m willing to admit that my experiences may be limited and there’s a perfectly good reason to lay out a week starting with Monday, but I don’t see one.
So Teeming Millions, am I alone? Am I out of touch somehow? Let me know which way you prefer, and if you actually like the Mon-Sun layout, please explain to me why.
I prefer Sunday to Saturday, which is the traditional calendar layout. However, the Monday to Sunday layout may work better for offices that are on a traditional weekday only schedule, since the important information (work meetings and activities) is at the front, and the non-essential weekend days are at the back. If your calendar will be used by the general public, or by people documenting both work and non-work activity, then Sunday to Saturday makes the most sense. But if it’s a calendar to primarily be used to document a Monday - Friday work week, starting on Monday can be a useful alternative.
I meant to add that my datebook, while not in a traditional calendar format, since it is one page per day, actually provides only a single page for each weekend. This works fine for my purposes, since I am recording Monday-Friday workweek activity, and don’t typically need to use the weekend page anyway.
I prefer Sunday to Saturday, paradoxically, for the same key reason that SpoilerVirgin prefers the Monday to Sunday layout: The most important stuff in many offices happens Monday to Friday.
So why would I want it all bunched over to the left? Sunday to Saturday centers all the important stuff with the weekend acting as a margin.
Plus, that’s how calendars were when Jesus and the apostles used them.
I should have mentioned that it’s designed to be used by the general public. It’s a ‘pretty pictures’ type of calendar featuring nature & wildlife photography.
Oh…I’m going to. I’m just curious about the other side. Who actually wants a Mon-Sun calendar? I want to learn about these strange people to better understand them.
But for an office calendar - or more specifically an office wall planner where people stick their holiday dates up, Mon-Sun makes more sense, because then you know that such-and-such person is off in the week commencing July 12 or whatever.
Me! Aethist, but brought up in a church that clearly said God rested on the 7th day, Sunday. Therefore Monday is the first day of the week, and comes first on the calendar.
More practically, I like having the two days of the weekend together, so it’s easier to plan what I’m doing over the whole weekend, rather than splitting it across two lines/two weeks worth of calendar.
I was given to understand that God rested on a <i>Saturday</i>, hence Saturday being the Sabbath until about 2000 years ago, when Jesus was supposedly crucified on Friday, dead on Saturday, and rose on Sunday, hence the current practice of keeping Sundays special.
That said, I don’t really care about the history, I much prefer a non-traditional Mon-Sun calendar because I do lots of things on Sat/Sun so I want them next to each other, and occasionally want to know which Fridays I’ll be doing something big on Sat, so I want Mon-Sun, not Sun-Sat.
Day-Timers tried to go Mon-Sun back in the late 80s or early 90s.
I don’t know how many people besides me complained, but Day-Timers reprinted that entire year’s worth of calendars (I was on monthly refills, 2 pages-per-day, so it was mostly just the principle of the thing for me, but I bet people who were on 2-page-per-month refills were livid) and replaced the abominations for free.
After that, I think Mon-Sun became an option you could choose. I quit using Day-Timers sometime in the mid-90s, so I’m not certain where it stands today.
I too think this is a European thing based only on the travel planning I’ve been doing recently. Every hotel booking site in Italy and Austria that I’ve been to has been set up M-S instead of S-S.
I wouldn’t use a Monday-first wall calendar, because I frequently glance at my calendar from across the room and can’t even see the days marked across the top, so I just go by the position I know them to be in. You’re going to have to come up with something more important than pretty pictures to get me to undo half a century of mental calendar organization ;).
I like Monday thru Sunday.
It’s a pain when I look at a typical wall calendar because I have to reposition the days in my head.
Monday through Sunday works better for me because I use a weekly calendar.
For pet sitting, most people go away on the weekend. Having Saturday on one page and Sunday on another means I have to flip back and forth to see what is scheduled. Having Saturday and Sunday on the same page makes more sense.
For the call center, our pay week runs from 12:01 AM on Monday through Midnight on Sunday. Having that entire block of time on one page makes more sense to me.
