What if we just stop fragmenting ourselves

…and adopt a global timedate system. This system would use every format already used, based on context.
There is no format objectively better than the other. “Smallest unit to largest” provides no functional benefit; the most relevant piece of information is not always the day.

For starters, the date 04/11/20 is different in every region.
It can be April 11th, 2020.
It can be November 4th, 2020.
It can also be November 20th, 2004.
ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) aims to solve this by placing the year (not condensed) in front, the month secondarily, and day as the last value. This solves two glaring problems with the other standards; the year truncation issue as mentioned in the last example, and the context-based issue that has been yet to be explained.

Consider a situation where you are due for bloodwork in one week.


This usage makes some sense. The first piece of information fed to you is the day. This isn’t an issue here, as this context immediately implies that the day will be in the current (or next) month. The rest of the listing is merely for posterity.

However, with this same context, you can truncate the month and year entirely.
You are told the appointment date on April 6th.
“Your next appointment is on the 13th.” perfectly conveys that your next appointment is on April 13th, regardless of if the office staff even says April.

In DMY, your brain will categorise the day as a certain place in an undetermined month, since it’s the first piece of information fed. This doesn’t immediately give much info aside from “beginning, middle, or end of random month”. Of course, this issue is not apparent when the month is immediately implied, such as the above example.

In contrast, consider a situation where the month isn’t ambiguous.

As the listener is presented with an arbitrary date in the future, the distance between the current date and the future date is the first statistic evaluated.
Presenting the month first will provide the greatest evidence of the overall distance between the current date and the future date.

No matter what part of the year you are in, you will immediately know that the gallery will take place in the beginning of the year.
If you were told that sentence in December, then you will immediately know that the event is happening in just a few months.
If you were told that sentence in April, you will immediately know that the event will not occur for at least another year.

Both of these are solved with ISO 8601, but that introduces the pitfall of presenting the most redundant information first. As you can usually cut the month out in most cases with DMY, you can almost always cut the year out, in day-to-day discussion.

This is precisely why context based formatting should begin to exist.
Historical events will be better as ISO 8601 – YYYY-MM-DD. The latency between the current year and the historic event is much more of a concern than the specific day, in the majority of cases.
Likewise, formal and professional documentation, and any writing intended to be viewed in the far future without context is more appropriate with this format.

DMY is best used as an informal and short term marker for the date, used in contexts where the month and year are easily inferred and not as important as the day. However, in most cases, the latter two pieces of data can be omitted entirely, which also lends DMY to be used as a short term format.

Finally, with MDY, we should find ourselves using this in the majority of uses, for dates that aren’t happening within the upcoming month but still within a close range of years – upcoming business events, entertainment dates, appointments, elections, etc.

The most relevant piece of information in a date is not a constant. It is pointless to govern a single format to be used in place of all three circumstances.

Sidenote: Japan has a unique method of listing dates that bypasses any ambiguity entirely.
2020年09月15日 –
年 marks the year.
月 marks the month.
日 marks the day. No ambiguity is possible here, and the date is listed neatly in an order from largest value to smallest (doesn’t exactly matter, though).

No matter your stance, however, there is one more thing left to be mentioned…
…there is no excuse for 12-hour time to exist. 🙂

(side note: military time is not the same thing as 24-hour time… Wikipedia says that military is “popularly referred” to as 24-hour chiefly in the US. This is factual, but it does not imply that the usage is correct just because many use it.

Military time is read without a colon when represented numerically, and with an “hundred hours” or “hours” suffix.
1910 is nineteen ten hours. Notice how there is no colon.
You can add “hundred hours” if it is a new hour; 1500 is fifteen hundred hours.
You can also pronounce every digit; 0256 is “zero two five six” or “two fifty-six hours”.
—
24-hour time (civilian time) is read as two pairs of two-digit numbers. This is what the entirety of the world uses.
Civilian time can be expressed in both 12-hour notations or 24-hour notations.

19:10 is nineteen-ten.

12:40 is twelve-forty.

20:00 can be “twenty”, “twenty zero”, “eight pm” (yes, people in 24-hour time using countries still use 12-hour equivalents in these cases)

Zero people talk in a fashion such as “I go into work at fifteen hundred hours” in day to day life.)