New Year, Same Old Calendar? Time For A Change! [Calendar Reform Blog]

It's a new year! And millions are literally turning the page onto our new, 2017 calendars. But by doing so, we're carrying the same problems we have with our calendar over into a new year.

Our Gregorian Calendar itself is the problem. Actually, it has several problems.

Each month of our current calendar varies in length: 31, 28/29, 31, 30, 31, etc. We have to look at a printed calendar or recite a rhyme to remember month lengths. Because of this, business quarters are unequal, causing problems for accountants and business owners.

Connecting a weekday with a day of the month is now nearly impossible (Quick, what weekday did March 9, 2014 fall on? It was a Sunday. But you'd have to look at a calendar, or Google it, to know this.)

Determining how many days in each year have passed - and how many we have left - is also not an easy task with the Gregorian.

What's the solution? There are many. One of them that's been suggested in recent years is the Thirty-Eleven Calendar. (30x11.com)

In this modern calendar reform proposal, the first 11 months would have 30 days. December, the 12th, would have 35 days in a regular year, and 36 days in a leap year. (This doesn't change the length of the 365/366-day year.)

This is a "gentle" reform to an old calendar we've become accustomed to, not a radical re-design that will leave people confused and hostile to the change. Previous attempts to reform the calendar changed the number of months, the number of days in the week, or had other radical changes that made them unacceptable to most people.

What advantages does this calendar have over our current one?

It has an easy-to-remember 11 straight months of 30 days each, ending the confusion of variable month lengths. It offers three identical business quarters of 90 days each. It still only has one "leap day," and puts it in December, at the very end of the year.

It allows easy calculation of ordinal days (number of days in the year), since almost all months are equal in length and each month within a calendar year starts again after 30 days. March 1 is always the 61st day of the year. June 30 is always 180th. November 15th is always the 345th.

Months also progress in a more logical fashion, with each month within a year's calendar year starting two weekdays later than the previous month did (if January starts on a Monday, February starts on a Wednesday.)

Learn more at www.30x11.com.