Dinner over candlelight with an e-mail. Getting caught in the rain with a word document. Long strolls on the beach with your special spread sheet….no wait, not THAT kind of dating! Ensuring that your filing system’s file names have the date at the beginning of each of your file names is something that we all need to be doing. I know that there are many different ways that we can write the date down, but to add the date to a file name, I’m going to be talking about the ISO Standard of having in the year, month, day order (So 2020-12-01 for today’s date).
Puts them in order automatically – Having the date at the front of the file name is a quick and easy way to have your files in order. With either type of operating system (Windows or Mac), when you have a bunch of files in one folder location, they will automatically be sorted by the file name. If you have letters only as file names, then they will get sorted alphabetically. This means that “Amazon receipt” will get sorted higher than “Working document.” If you have a number at the beginning of the file, the lower number will have a higher sort. 01 will get a higher sort than just 1 because, in computer code, it reads the numbers individually in their order, and the 0 comes before the 1. How this relates to dates is if you have a file from October 12, 1997, and you have a document from October 12, 2020, the record from 2020 will get sorted higher. In this case, it would be 2020-10-12 as vs. 1997-10-12. This sort also allows for the grouping of documents by month or day. If you have fifteen documents in May of 2020 and two documents from June of 2020, the computer will bunch all the 2020’s but then separate them by the month.
It’s really simple – I recognize that different people have different ways of writing the date down based on what they learned when they were kids. I learned how to write the date in full (So December 1, 2020), but that doesn’t really work for computers. It’s also a lot harder for you because spelling out every month will take more time. It’s much easier to use numbers because if you use the names of months, April will come before January.
Consistency is key – No matter where you are in your journey to organize your digital life, being consistent about it is critical if you start something new. If you’ve been working with a filing system for a few years and you’ve decided to start putting dates in the front of the file name or if you’re just getting started, it’s essential to be consistent. I would highly advise using the ISO standard that I talked about at the top of this post.
One of the most critical things about having and maintaining your filing system is ensuring that you can find the files you put in later on down the road. The easiest way to do that is to put a date at the beginning of your file names. It makes it so that all of your files have an automatic method of being organized so that no matter where you put them in your filing system, they will have SOME level of organization. It may seem tedious at the beginning of your filing journey, but trust me, it will be well worth it in the end when you’re looking for specific files later on.
How do you date your files?
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Yes please this was very helpful
Thank you