Rethinking the calendar

Zach Waugh • February 22, 2012

Jason Fried, giving a preview of the all-new calendar in Basecamp Next:

There is one thing in particular I love about this calendar. Instead of the standard month-at-a-time view, it shows the next 6 weeks. You can see the current week and 5 weeks into the future. It’s one of those things that is so incredibly obvious once you see it. Why doesn’t every calendar do this?

Calendars are primarily future-oriented. We care about what is scheduled to occur, or what is happening now. You may on occasion need to find the date of something in the past, but that is relatively rare. Yet, at the end of the month, we have to deal with the noise of over three weeks of past events.

Unlike their paper predecessors, computer calendars aren’t static, pre-printed a year at at time. They should take advantage of the fact they can dynamically update the interface based on the current date, and adapt to our needs. There is no reason they need be stuck on rigid day/week/month boundaries.