2025.W50 - Use Week Numbers! 📆

'Next Month' can mean many things. How do you plan? Using week numbers is a giant unlock for clarity.

Have you ever received an update from someone on a project like this:

“We’re going to go-live next month”

It’s December 1, and you’re thinking to yourself, “do they mean January or December?” There are quite a number of ways that this can be interpreted.

Now, in a personal sense I can see it being awkward to communicate to my wife in week numbers (although it might avoid some confusion at times!) but for now I’d be really happy if in a professional sense we up leveled to communicate in week numbers.

The above would be “We’re going to go live in Week 51”.

Taking this further, we notate this by using the standard as in this example: 2025.W03 for Week 3 of 2025, and so on. This format allows sorting and also it’s amazing for searching. (We also use YYYY.MM for monthly prepending file names - 2025.12 vs “December 2025 update”).

Week numbers are an ISO standard, use the ISO 8601 standard (there are a few options that Outlook gives).

In Google Calendar (and Outlook), you can enable Week Numbers in your calendar too.

Outlook gives you a few fancier options, use the ISO 8601 standard (which is the week with the first Thursday).

When not to use Week numbers:

• Introductory calls

• Social occasions

And when using Week numbers, assume that someone in the group doesn’t know what Week number it is. So you can say “It’s week 23 right now, so let’s target get this live by Week 27-28”. Giving the context is respectful and avoids them losing focus on you and going to their calendar to check what week number it is.

Using Week numbers helps you be a master of cadence and repeatability, allows you to plan proactively and is a giant unlock for clarity.