When I tell others about my life and things happening in it, most of the time I do not say: “In 1990 I have done this and in 2000 I have done that.” I mostly say “when I was 14” or “when I was 22”. I talk about “last year” or “when we married”. I talk about my son “when he was 9 month old” and so on ...

When I tell somebody about my job an the business it’s mostly the same. When discussing projects I know the exact date of the deadline and sometimes we communicate about it, but in our minds we calculate how much time we have till then.

But in most systems dates are entered, edited and shown as absolute dates. That’s mostly because this is the base for calculation and persistence. So mainly technical reasons.

There are exceptions: Have a look at the twitter messages passing by. It’s “less than a minute ago” or “about 1 hour ago”. I think, that’s really fine, because the exact time does not matter. I even think, instead of “about 22 hours ago” the term “yesterday” would be enough.

Do you know the software project management tool “Trac”? Looking at a roadmap with milestones you first see “Due in 12 days”, “Due in 6 weeks” or “2 days late” and after it there is the absolute date in brackets.

I thought about this, because we implemented a “rapid messaging tool” like twitter into our Portal-CRM.com. I think the presentation of date and time informations there should work like in twitter or probably better.

But I think managing activities, sales opportunities and so and may work with the same principle at some point. Maybe one should be able to enter dates like “in two weeks”, not concerning about the absolute one. Will this work? Showing my activities to me with “Due in 2 days”, “Due tomorrow” or “One day late” would be really nice and not bending my brain about the calender every time I read it. This is much faster!

In some cases it may be better to present the difference between to dates. So you set one fixed date and every other date information is displayed relative to it. For example the activities in a project may be shown relative to the project start and/or to the deadline. This activity starts two weeks after project start and should be finished a month before the deadline. Would this be helpful?

These are just some moving thoughts and no conclusions.