# Operations with time duration

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/operations-with-time-duration/64983
**Category:** General Usage
**Tags:** dates, time
**Created:** [July 20, 2021, 1:58pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/operations-with-time-duration/64983 "2021-07-20T13:58:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 10

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![cjdoris](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/cjdoris/32/213133_2.png) [@cjdoris](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/cjdoris)
#### Post date: [July 20, 2021, 4:54pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/operations-with-time-duration/64983/10 "2021-07-20T16:54:30Z")

</div>

When dealing with calendar periods, which is what Dates is for, a period is a discrete indivisible unit. It doesn’t make sense to talk about “half a minute” because how do you add half a minute to the time 12:00:00? The answer is not 12:00:30 because a minute is sometimes 61 seconds long.

See [Dates · The Julia Language](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/stdlib/Dates/#TimeType-Period-Arithmetic) for more detail.

You can use Unitful.jl though:

```julia
julia> using Unitful

julia> t = 1u"hr" + 5u"minute" + 2u"s"
3902 s

julia> t/5
780.4 s

```

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/operations-with-time-duration/64983)._