Trello dates and time: YYYY-MM-DD, 24 hr clock? How?
Asked by tsnacio:

I might be stuck in American!  

I am an immigrant, know and interact with people from several countries, and I'm not interested in any combination of clock, date and language, as defined by any one country. This is the internet, after all. I'm only interested in International Standards.

I want to select my language, the international clock (24hr clock), and the international date format (YYYY-MM-DD) on my profile display preferences or something. With the exception of language, this is defined in the ISO 8601.  

Adding a date to a card, for example, is a use case where I'm presented with USA formats which I'm wanting to opt out of in order to avoid the insanity of juggling multiple formats at the same time.  

Thanks for reading!


Answers:
author: Laura Holton _ACE Rotterdam_
body: Hi [@tsnacio](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4146812) ?

I've taken a look into this for you and the only way to change to an international date/time formatting on your Trello is explained below...

Date formatting is changed per-language. For instance, English (US) and Fran?ais (Canada) will see a MM/DD/YYYY format.

If you want to view Trello in English, but use international date formatting, you can change your language to English (UK) from English (US).

To change your language, click your name in the top right, then "Change Language..." (if you're using an Atlassian account, the language will have to be changed from your Atlassian account preferences instead on <https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/account-preferences>)

![](https://d33v4339jhl8k0.cloudfront.net/docs/assets/545804d8e4b09c5ca72525ce/images/56a7fcca9033603f7da34f4a/file-rSz8pECJ8z.png)

This will cause Trello to show Monday as the first day of the week, show dates as DD/MM/YYYY, and use 24-hour time.

I hope this helps but if you have any other questions just ask away ?

All the best,

Laura

comments: author: tsnacio
body: Hi Laura.  

Thanks for taking the time.  
It changes but doesn't solve the issue.  

The problem is still built in, by design, in the approach you describe:  
"Date formatting is changed per-language."  

That's a huge problem, because the internet is global, not language locked.  
When I'm in a youtube video / zoom call / twitch stream / discord with people, sharing some plans to an international audience of many, we need to be international in our date and in our time.  

As such, DD/MM/YYYY will sometimes confuse an American (until after the 12th of each month, at least), as MM/DD/YYYY will confuse most of Earth (also during the first 12 days of the month), for example.  

YYYY/MM/DD confuses no one on Earth, because no country on the planet uses YYYY/DD/MM to be confused by.  
Hence why ISO-8601 defines it as THE standard way to represent dates and times. It's superior to all other formats for being the only unambiguous format in existence.  

I DO NOT want to lock my audience to my language that a country's culture defined. I INSTEAD want to lock my presentation to everyone else's needs by it being fully international.  

I ask then, that Atlassian finally decouple the concept of language from the concepts of date formats and clock formats.  
They're clearly being incorrectly bundled together when the internet isn't a place for such bundles. We're borderless here, and so is our digital audience.  

We sometimes share screens now, so it's no longer acceptable for this to be just about the one user setting the language.  

Thanks again for the time and hopefully passing this problem along.  
I appreciate it! Everything else is great!


author: Gilles Dignard
body: I'm wondering if we could get a followup on this.

We, too, are very much ISO 8601 and that there isn't even any access to this date format is very surprising.

As [@tsnacio](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4146812) point out, decoupling this setting from the interface language is the obvious way to go.

Having the date format default to a value most closely associated with the language would be more than fine, but add a way to override that default to the format of choice.


Tags: date