Depends a lot on your locale. Physical calendars around here always have them, and all decent calendar software has an option to display them.
And if you’d grown up with it, it would be a lot more natural. Much like you probably know what month you’re in without checking your watch, I have a pretty good idea what week we’re in, and if someone says they can deliver something in week 8, I instinctively know that’s late February without having to check.
> And if you’d grown up with it, it would be a lot more natural.
That’s like saying imperial units are more natural than ISO units because you grew up with them. Of course what you grew up with is more natural to you, it doesn’t say much. The problem is not everyone grew up with it, compared to “the week of Dec 21.”
Not saying week numbers aren’t useful, I’ve used them to label weekly results in datasets, for instance.
You could argue that the "natural" part with using weeks is that the weekends split up your working days, but there is no effect of januari becoming februari and that weeks thus are a more natural unit for planning at work.
I've pondered on dates and how to divide the year down to how long weeks should be — for way longer than I care to admit.
The thing is, we basically need there characters to map dates (it would be easier with a duodecimal/dozenal system for months, but 1-9,A,B works too).
Using weeks, we could say that e.g. "23-2" is the second day of week 23, from 01-1 to 52-2 (or 52-3 on leap years).
This seems like a good business approach to me.
I'd go one step further and map these to Q's, it's 13 weeks for each (13×4 = 52). Which neatly maps to 12 weeks of work + 1 week transition (debrief, brief) between each Q.
What's interesting is that we count hours, projects, deadlines usually in week units — e.g. most labor regulations speak of weekly work hours, whereas months are sketchy depending where weekends fall, 28-31 days, etc.
So it's easy to think e.g.: we got 3 weeks for this, team of 5, that's 3×5×40 = 600 man-hours.
Finally, considering a 5 workdays week (Mon-Fri), you can easily use .2 increments for days: 24.0 for Monday, 24.2 for Tuesday, 24.4 for Wednesday, 24.6 Thursday and 24.8 Friday of the 24th week. What's the use? Well, between e.g. 24.6 and 28.2 you can quickly do the math and get 4.4 = 4 workweeks + 3 days.
It may seem like nothing but math on dates has always been hard when it doesn't have to be. We shouldn't need Excel or Google to quickly calculate date differences, number of days since/until, etc.
And if you’d grown up with it, it would be a lot more natural. Much like you probably know what month you’re in without checking your watch, I have a pretty good idea what week we’re in, and if someone says they can deliver something in week 8, I instinctively know that’s late February without having to check.
So it’s a useful shorthand in many ways.