For example,
60 seconds = 1 minute
60 minutes = 1 hour
24 hours = 1 day
7 day = 1 week
29-31 days = Month (approx.)
365/366 days = year
It's like for the imperial measurement of distance, where 1 mile = 5280 feet...
Edit: just to clarify, I'm more or less keen towards any consistent, decimal-based measurement systems like base-10 or base-12.
if you count the joints you get 16. it's useful for working in hexadecimal. also, using your method, you can count to 60 if you use the fingers on the second hand to count the number of times you got to 12.