Fun fact: Nordic countries use week numbers for all sorts of planning, e.g. vacation period, school events, company planning, statistics reporting, ...
I use GNOME with week numbers shown in[0]! Find it super useful.
I am also a big fan of setting yearly goals. Been doing this for a couple of years now. This has sort of converged into a tradition of having ~12 goals per year.
Each item is something quantifiable and achievable. For example, a goal of mine is 'losing x amount of weight', as opposed to 'becoming fit' - this I won't expand into other domains however, if the context is making a game, it would be 'publishing a game', and not 'publishing a game that sells a million copies', as the latter depends on factors outside of your control, luck, etc.
The way I set up my own goals, they are achievable if I were to focus on these for a quarter alone. They are not big, huge deals. But I don't focus on these for a quarter of course, I have to go to work, and I have a family and loved ones that I enjoy spending time with. Yet it is also an anchor I look at occasionally, and if the list is having too little progress, I get the message that I should work on these for a while. I find it to be a nice balance.
0: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.calendar show-weekdate true
I'm Norwegian, but never got used to this, and to this day (I turn 50 this year) my mum will try to communicate time with me using week numbers, and I have to tell her to use dates.
Week numbers are very useful for static holiday periods like the kid's school fall vacation and winter vacation. In my area, they are always in week 8 and week 40, and as such it's easier to plan accordingly. And my summer vacation is usually weeks 28-30.
Just make sure to turn on week number in your calendar applications, then it might be more useful to you.
Another fun fact: there are three commonly used ways to define week numbers (see `man strftime`, %U, %V, %W; %V is the one used in at least the Nordics). In some years they coincide so you might not notice that you picked the wrong one until next January.
Yet another fun fact: with %V week numbers, the date 2024-12-30 (December 30, 2024) was 2025-W01-1 (the Monday of week 1, 2025). Thus strftime needs two different ways to specify the year: %G denotes the year that goes with %V week numbers, %Y denotes the year that people usually think of when they ask "what year is it". Unfortunately %G comes before %Y on the strftime man page, so people who scan the page quickly can easily pick %G when they really want %Y. I've seen a few bugs caused by this.
I have also seen the corresponding bug in SQL, using IYYY instead of YYYY. This boggles the mind, but apparently when some people read "ISO 8601 week-numbering year", they only see "ISO 8601 ... year", think "yes, that's the date standard we use" and don't care about the "week-numbering" word in the middle.
I've done a bunch of thinking around how to organize things in dates, etc, and often wondered if I should be using week numbers. Never thought to look up if it's a common practice in any countries.
Not so fun fact: Corporate Germany also uses week numbers and some paper pushers and some project managers have adapted, most nerds (incl. me) will never come to terms with it and have to look it up once a month. Also what do you mean by "all calendars" - the last paper one I owned I bought at an art fair in 2018ish ;)
If you work at a 'real' paper pusher office they have a three month calendars with week numbers hanging at every office wall, gifted from the wholesale and office center!
(You can activate week numbers in Office Outlook as well. Or go to ukenummer.no for simple display)
I know you can get to them - but people just don't have them at hand most of the time, in most places :) (My Android phone doesn't display them by default but I've not looked around)
> The first ~1000 are spent in the the very limited tutorial area.
I think it's kinda strange that you're saying up to age 19 is "the very limited tutorial area", as if it doesn't count. Up to age 3 or 4, before you have stable memory, perhaps I could understand, but I'm well, well into middle age and I think of some of the time between say 10-19 as the most vivid in terms of my memories, friends, direction of my life, etc.
I scarcely recognize the person I was at 19 as the same person as me.
I have almost no recollection of school except for maybe a couple of dozen moments and a handful - no more than 4 or so - acquaintances. They were friends at the time, but we went to different colleges in different towns, we're not close now.
I remember books I read, but they're detached from a timeline. I remember programming - that was the most formative thing I learned, and it was outside school - but I have very little recollection of actual time spent, just that I did a huge amount of learning.
Have you heard of Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory disorder? For me it's memory as it relates to myself that barely functions, I can remember facts just fine.
That's weird to me. I'm in my mid thirties and I feel the bulk of my memories are in the 13-23 range and everything's been a quick blur since then.
In fact when I started a dream diary for a personal experiment, I'm in highschool in most of them - literally, as the dreams take place in the building.
I find this really interesting. I left school 20 years ago, I've lived a wildly varied life and been all around the world on adventures outside of general tourism, with highs and lows tied to locations I am beyond familiar with, yet far too many of my dreams are in that damn school.
I am slightly older and I don't really remember very much from around when I started work after graduating. It's kind of sad that works consume a lot of my time but I have no memory to show for it.
I went through the lucid dreaming rabbit hole when I was 17, I recently found the diary from back then and was curious to see how different the dreams are now.
I agree with the other poster. You are definitely on the extreme side here. Good for you, really, I would love to have your superpower, but you are not the norm.
Sure, I may be toward the other end of the extreme. It's certainly not eidetic memory, I just have tons of memories from all years of my life >=4. But I do think "basically no memories before 20" is close to the other extreme.
No, what you said sounds extremely extreme. Remembering a lot of stuff since ~4? For me, that feels inconceivable!
Myself, I remember maybe one or two things per year from 4+ onwards if I focus; flashes of images. This gradually ramps up after ~12yo, and I can actually say I remember some events from around 16+ well enough to describe them and place in rich context. Properly detailed memory? That starts for me somewhere after 20. I'm 36.
> I think of some of the time between say 10-19 as the most vivid in terms of my memories, friends, direction of my life, etc.
Me too. I think 12-14 is the most vivid for me... I used to enjoy stuff a lot more fully and completely than I seem to be able to nowadays. I miss that.
That makes sense. Just young enough to be able to fully emerse yourself in activities, while not quite old enough to have real worries. Of course I'm saying that from a position of privilege, but that was a sweet spot for me as well.
Oliver Burkeman wrote a book about this, named "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals". The main point (at least as I remember it) is that there are way more books to read, links to click, and things to do than you can fit in your lifetime, so it's a delusion that you could ever get to the end of your to-do list.
