The magical time that is today and tomorrow

I recently learnt that some countries use the hours 24:00, 25:00, 26:00 and so on to mean 00:00, 01:00, 02:00 and so on when continuing a timespan from the day before.

Why does the day end and begin at midnight? Each must lead into the next at some point. Mathematically, or scientifically, or whatever, it makes sense to have an exact and explicit time for that transition to take place. Midnight. But us humans are not mathematical, nor scientific, creatures, or whatever. We move in ways unconstrained by numbers and logic. The day ends when we fall asleep, and begins when we wake. Maybe it begins when the sun comes up, and ends when the sun goes down, and night is a no-man’s land.

It seems a shame then that most software doesn’t understand this. If i set a task for one am, should it be listed as a task for today, or for tomorrow? If one was to walk home after a night out and in doing so take a thousand steps between five minutes to midnight and twenty past one in the morning is it beneficial to the user to add some of those steps to the count for tomorrow rather than the count for today? They are part of the same walk with no rest in between. Smart watches know when we sleep, so perhaps they should also consider that as the boundary on which to demarcate steps.

It’s the little things, the simple things, that really make the thing. I call them joyful features, but they shouldn’t make any user feel joy until they realise one day that the thing that has been happening is the thing that’s meant to be happening. And then they might feel happy if they’ve been unfortunate to use something less joyful beforehand, but really they should feel nothing, because it should be entirely expected for the thing to have done it’s thing in the way that it did.

Scrolling through anki’s settings, i found an option to choose when the day ends, which is set to four am by default. That’s a good time to start with. Most people won’t need to change it, and it will do what’s expected, but if someone needs to, the option is there.