Dates vs days: How businesses can drive urgency to act

When it comes to communicating a time frame to a customer or colleague, you have decisions to make about how to describe it to get the response you want. For example, should you use days of the week or just a date? Should you use dates at all or are you better to say how many days something will take? 

Let’s look at how to get your time framing right.

Framing time

Adding the day of the week something is due can impact how people react. Let’s imagine you are telling a customer how long their delivery will take. 

You can either say it will be delivered on February 10 or it will be delivered on Tuesday, February 10. 

Now, more information is better, right? It’s helpful for them to know which day the 10th of February is.

Not so fast.

When we add a day of the week, it cues people to think in terms of a shorter duration. 

That might seem like a good thing. When it comes to deliveries, shorter is better, right?

The problem is how people use the days to evaluate the length of time between when they’ve ordered and when their product will be delivered.

If they order on Monday, Tuesday doesn’t seem too bad. But if they order on a Wednesday, Tuesday seems a long way away.

That means including a day of the week can make the gap seem longer than had only dates been used (Sokolva, 2023).

Therefore, whenever we want to diminish the perception of how long something will take, we are better to avoid including the day of the week.

This would also hold for times you want to drive urgency, like an approaching deadline for an event or ticket sales. As soon as we add days of the week, people will think they have longer to do a task, and therefore be more likely to put it off. (It’s not due till Tuesday. I have heaps of time!)

When to use days of the week

There are times when you will want to use days of the week, though. Particularly when you want your customer to perceive something as lengthy. Perhaps they are renting a house from you or a car? Or imagine you are a travel agent. 

Telling your customers they will be staying from Monday, February 9 to Sunday, February 15 will feel more expansive than simply listing the dates as February 9 and 15.

So that covers when we should or shouldn’t use days of the week.

 But are we better to give a date at all — like February 10 — or instead the number of days, say seven?

Number of days vs a date

Deciding between using the date or the number of days as a deadline depends on how much urgency we want people to feel. This is all to do with momentum.

Dates, like February 10, seem stationary. The date is there, predestined in your diary, and we move towards it.

By contrast, stating the number of days, like five days or seven days, is dynamic. Time seems to move. It was five days yesterday, four days today, and three days tomorrow. This means it feels like it’s moving towards us.

When something is moving towards us, it feels threatening. And when something feels threatening, we act to make it stop. 

College students, for example, were more likely to start their assignments when given the number of days rather than a date. 

So to get people to act, countdown the days rather than give them a date to work to.

How to get your time framing right

In summary:

• Want people to think it’s a short amount of time? For example, delivery timeframe or delay:  do not use days of the week 
• Want people to think it’s a longer amount of time? For example, longer holiday: use days of the week 
• Want to get people to act rather than procrastinate? Example: Respond to an offer or proposal: Do not use days of the week. Use the number of days (e.g., 14, 17) with the date as an optional extra.