For some reason I've always felt awkward with all the calendars that I've tried to use for organizing things. So far I've often made my own calendars, by hand or with the help of a spreadsheets and drawing applications.

For example, for some reason all the monthly calendars typically run from top to the bottom: how do you have a monthly wall calendar that displays two years at a time? You most likely don't. What if you had the monthly calendar running horizontally, from left to right? There usually is more space on the wall horizontally than vertically plus it is more natural for people to perceive (I definitely watch movies rather from a wide-screen than some 'high-screen').

This was just one example.

I was thinking some ideas of now calendar layouts, for example 3D calendars which would nowadays be easy to implement for computers.

Then I ran into this quote on the manual page of UNIX date-command... :

"Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months,
are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make
coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had
some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to
make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden
routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done
better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of
trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal
surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands
ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy
circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language
and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least
level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and
persistently encourages our terror of time.

... It is as though architects had to measure length in feet,
width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction
manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is
no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or
future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of
helpless confusion. ...

-- Robert Grudin, `Time and the Art of Living'."

Now I'm convinced that we should just scrap the whole Gregorian calendar thing and come up with a totally new one for measuring time. Maybe not the easiest thing to pull off, but hey, it has been done before...

The business? We would be creating a whole new industry here. :)

Antti