Adding religious holidays to my calendar
I made a small tweak to my calendar recently, so it shows me religious holidays – or at least, Christian, Jewish and Muslim holidays:
About a fortnight ago, Stack Exchange was criticised for how they fired a Jewish moderator. The timing was especially unfortunate – it was just before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when a lot of Jews are offline or not working. It was probably just a coincidence, not malicious, but it’s unpleasant either way.
I could imagine myself making a similar mistake, because I don’t when most religious holidays take place. I’m hoping that putting these holidays in my calendar will help me avoid an inadvertent or unexpected scheduling clash. They’re small and unobstrusive, but now they’re visible.
I’m subscribed to the calendars in Outlook, so they appear on my work computer. You can also do it with Google Calendar, or there are websites with feeds that you can subscribe to in your calendar app of choice.
These calendar entries won’t magically plug my knowledge gap, but I hope they’ll cause me to stop and think. “I’m about to do $majorEvent on the same day as $religiousHoliday. Is that okay?”, where previously I would have ploughed on and not realised the conflict.