Posted by Sean MacKenzie on Tue, Mar 30, 2010
In a world of increasing connectivity it makes no sense for any entity to use or enforce a date display that could be misinterpreted by others.
Ambiguous Dates
An ambiguous date format is one which requires a reader to reference some external source, such as a policy or standard in order to understand what real date the display is actually referring to. For example, if you looked at a report with the date
2/3/08 on it, you would need to find out which country it was written in, which standard was used for dates in the report, or even worse, guess what the author meant when using this format.
Examples
Food and drink producers in many countries are guilty of this practice. Consumers are often confounded by dates on products in formats they cannot decipher. For example, depending on what country you're in or which product you're about to eat, a date of
11 MA 10 on a canned good could mean
March 11th, 2010,
March 10th, 2011,
May 11th, 2010, or
May 10th, 2011! Make the wrong choice and you could be in trouble.
Businesses run into problems when dates are ambiguous, as they create scheduling mixups, customer order mixups, and more. The inefficiency caused by this issue can be significant.
Many governments and international bodies enforce their own versions of ambiguous date formats, which causes confusion. Even some international standards promote ambiguous dates such as the ISO 8601 dotted standard that would show February 3rd, 2008 as
03.02.2008 (this could be interpreted as March 2nd, 2008 in areas of North America using m/d/yy). ISO 8601 also uses a more logical format that shows the same date as
2008-02-03, which has less of a chance of misinterpretation since it appears to be in descending orders of magnitude (yyyy-mm-dd).
Use Unambiguous Dates!
What can you do? Well, you can help by changing peoples' attitudes in the workplace by discouraging the use of ambiguous date formats, and by challenging any standards or policies that enforce the use of ambiguous formats, since they are obsolete in a connected world and create organizational inefficiency.
It doesn't mean that everyone has to always use a long format (ex. February 9th, 2011), as there are popular short date formats like
dd-mmm-yyyy. This would be my first choice and would show the date as
09-Feb-2011. The day and month elements are known on first glance, and cannot be misinterpreted. My second choice would be for people to use the ISO 8601 standard
2011-02-09, which is logical and has month and day elements that would be guessed correctly by most people.
Posted by Sean MacKenzie on Wed, Oct 07, 2009
Ok, you own a small business with several projects on the go at any
one time. Why bother with keeping project records? I mean, you've got it all
organized in your head, right? Besides, you looked at project management programs and
found that they were overkill and wasted a huge amount of your time. Well, there are
some very good reasons to use at least some basic project management tools in your
business.
Try answering these questions:
- If your customer calls you and asks how much time you've burned to date on her
project items, can you tell her right then and there? Or do you have to compile a
bunch of information (and phone people) before you can tell her?
- Is your business relatively free from costly bookkeeping mistakes?
- Do all of your bills go out on time, all the time?
- Can you measure your success over the past few years? Can you see how often you've
been on time for delivery of your projects?
If you answered no to any of these, you need some basic project management tools.
Forget complex project plans, you just need to set up your project with a good list of
deliverables on it. Make sure your people can access it and update it in real time, so
that you or your bookkeeper don't have to spend as much time on it. You'll know how much you've burned and what the item completion status is at any one
time, for all your projects, across your whole business.