Breaking the Year Down into 28 Day Periods

Pretty much everyone and everything is based on a 12 month year. This is fine for many things and it’s definitely a norm so ingrained into society, we don’t even question it a little…but for Home Economic purposes, is it really the best way to break down the year? My experience in restaurant management would suggest that a 12 month year is not really the best way to break the year down for economic purposes.

Empty calendars rarely stay empty.

When you use a year that’s broken down into 12 months, each month has different numbers of days with 3 different possibilities. There are 30 day months, 31 day months and a 28 day month. This makes it very hard to get accurate observations as to what is going on. In a 12 month year, comparing February to March isn’t an apples to apples comparison. February has 28 days, March has 31 days. This makes it roughly 10% longer than February, so in order to accurately compare the two months, you have to account for the extra days.

By breaking the year down into 28 day periods you get a lot more consistent breakdown of the year. You end up with 12 x 28 day periods and 1 x 29 day period. This makes for a much more consistent breakdown of the year allowing for much more accurate comparison between periods. Also, by doing 28 day periods, you set a schedule so each period has the same number of weekends and weekdays, which also helps with more accurate comparison between the periods.

Jan. 1, 2020 will be my first day implementing the 28 day period into the operations of my Home’s Economy. First thing I do for this is mark my Google Calendar for the end of each Operating Period (OP) so I know when each period is over. Then I’ll start marking down all of my bill due dates throughout the year and set other known important dates in my calendar. Setting up the calendar both helps me keep track of what I’m doing each day, but also lets me keep notes about my day so I can go back later to review.

Left handed people always have stuff in their way when trying to write things down.

One thing to note about switching to a 28 day period vs monthly breakdown of your year will result in some periods not having certain bills. Since most bills come in monthly, you’ll have one period where you don’t have an electric bill, one period where you don’t have a car bill etc. This is a slight inconvenience when breaking down the year, but since we will break the bills down into daily use anyway, it won’t make be too much of a big deal.

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