5 Ways To "Re-Boot Our Foolish Calendar

Few would argue that our calendar is perfect. The number of days in each month are uneven, its quarters are unequal, and it's impossible to determine when on which day of the week any random date will fall.

That said, very few people know that there are many, many great ideas to reform our calendar and make how we mark time more predictable, and easier.

Here are just FIVE great concepts to reform our current calendar:

1. The 13-Moon Calendar. Inspired by the ancient Mayan Long-Count calendar, this proposal to reform the current Gregorian calendar re-names all the months, and introduces other innovations, including an extra month, which existed in many ancient calendars.

2. The Symmetry454 Calendar is a proposal by a Toronto university professor. It features four exactly equal quarters of 28-, 35- and 28-day months, making it easier to compare fiscal quarters. It's beautiful symmetry contrasts with the chaotic Gregorian. 

3. The 13-month "Sol" Calendar updates an Old Idea - the 13- month year tied to the lunar cycle. This calendar's 13 months are all exactly 28 days long, making it easy to remember the length of months. A leap year is added to the last month, December, and a new month, Sol, is added between June and July.

4. The New Earth Calendar is a bit of a hybrid - mixing the best elements of proposals like the Symmetry454 calendar and the 13 months of the Sol calendar.

5. Finally, the 30x11 Calendar is what its creator calls a "Gentle Update" of our current calendar. All of its months are 30 days long, except December, which rounds out the 365 or 366-day year with 35 or 36 days. It makes it incredibly easy to determine what day number each day on the calendar holds (March is always the 61st day of the year) and makes it easy to remember days.

All of these calendars - and MANY MORE - can be found EXCLUSIVELY on the new Abbott ePublishing eBook "A New Calendar for The World" available from the Abbott ePublishing website.

Can Our #Calendar Make Sense? Meet The #30x11Calendar [#CalendarReform blog]

Our calendar has a problem. Each month of our current calendar varies in length: 31, 28/29, 31, 30, 31, etc. Many people have to look at a printed calendar or recite a silly 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 had to look at a calendar, or Google it, didn't you?) 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 is the Thirty-Eleven (30x11) Calendar.

In this modern calendar reform proposal, each month (the first 11) would have 30 days. December, the 12th month, 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 almost all months are equal in length and each month 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.