Keeping Your Files Organized, So You Can Find Them Later

This entry won’t perform magic, but may help. For files that are logically sorted by date, I like to use a specific file format. With the ability to scan old pictures, retouch pictures, etc. the “Date Taken” info may not always be accurate. Then there is additional confusion on numeric dates because of the EU, US, and other formats (like MS Excel). We were looking at some dates at work the other day, and things just didn’t look right. Finally, after some research, we discovered that the dates were being recorded in the “more globally accepted” European format DD-MM-YYYY instead of the standard US format MM-DD-YYYY (This was spotted by the BMW guy in our group. He thinks everything European is better. Just kidding.) We were thinking that to avoid all confusion the dates should be recorded as DD-MMM-YYYY, where MMM is the text month (JAN, FEB, Etc.) However, when filing documents, pictures and other data, I prefer the YYYY-MM-DD. I think of it as dates in descending order, large-medium-small. This enables the files to be logically ordered by date (when ordering by date makes sense.) Using EU or US formats will sort by month or day first which is totally illogical and using text months in file names will sort alphabetically rather than in chronological order (although there are some work-arounds like 01-Jan, 02-Feb, 03-Mar, and so on.). Remember to always use the leading zeros for months and days to keep things in order. Slashes can’t be used in folder or file names so that makes using dashes an easy choice. This leaves you with files and folders sorted then you can add a subject (ie: 2011-01-23_whatever). I would also recommend this date format after some descriptive file name (ie: whatever_2011-01-23.txt). This keeps documents logically grouped by filename and then ordered by date revision.