My entirely-unsolicited advice about dates:

1] Get into the habit of putting the current date in files and filenames!

• When I’m taking notes, I put the date at the very beginning of a file’s name
• When I’m saving a (non-notesy) file, I’ll put the date at the end of the file’s name¹

2] Start thinking in YYYY-MM-DD format!

• Salesforce stores dates, and the date part of datetimes, in this format. Getting proficient with this format helps me work with Salesforce data.
• The good people who standardize such things (ISO, which it turns out is neither an acronym or an initialism) dictated this standard because it makes computers happy: it
  • is consistent across languages
  • has a consistent length
  • alphabetizes in chronological order
  • can be consistently truncated to get just-the-year or just-the-year-and-month
  • is Y2K compatible (whoo, that takes me back)

okay, tirade over. Happy belated new year, y’all.

Update: create a YYYY-MM-DD datestamp with a keyboard shortcut!

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1. Why? Because that way I can update the date whenever I make a meaningful revision to the file.
   
   The date a file was last modified isn’t always helpful. There are plenty of times I might tweak a file’s format, or fix a minor typo–and those changes don’t rise to the level of a “revision”, imo.
   
   Consciously choosing whether or not to revise the date at the end of a filename helps me truly know its sell-by date.
   
   Here’s an example of a random folder on my drive, filled with assorted files and documentation: ↩︎

. . . notice how

• the notesy files capture the date I took the notes (at the beginning of the filename, which 1. alphabetizes them at the top of my folder, 2. in chronological order), and
• the Visualforce file “Custom Console Component – Example 2017-04-13.vfp” has a date at its end, which captures the last time I made any meaningful revisions to it.