You are Writing the Date Wrong
For the past 10 years or so, I've been writing the date using the format specified by ISO 8601. In short, you write the date from the largest unit to the smallest unit. So the date this post was written looks like 2025-07-02. That means July 2, 2025.
Why should you switch to this format? If you write dates with numbers, especially in the United States, they can be misinterpreted elsewhere in the world. For example, February 6, 2025 would normally be written as 2/6/25. Those in Europe may see this as June 2, 2025 because they put the smallest unit first. When you use dates in a business setting, misinterpretation like this can be very expensive. Your shipment of widgets may have been due on February 6, but you planned to send them by June 6 and deliver them late.
Photo by ISO 8601 fixes this uncertainty by establishing a universal way to write the date. Largest to smallest.
YYYY-MM-DD
It goes even further - the specification also explains how to write out the time following the date. It follows this pattern: year, month, day, hour, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds.
As an example, September 19, 2024 at 2:47 p.m. is represented as 2024-09-19 14:47:00.000. Note that it uses two digits for the month, and two digits for the day. This is important to keep the date the same size, regardless of the date.
There is also one unexpected benefit to using this format. If you include it as the first part of a file name when saving your files, you can easily sort your files by date. Because two numbers are used for the month and two for the day, this sorts correctly!
I know what you are thinking - writing it this way is a pain! I thought so too, until I found out about espanso.
It's a privacy-focused, open source, cross-platform text expander. What this means is that after setting it up, I only need to type ;tod (my shortcut to insert today's date) and it automatically replaces that with the date in ISO 8601 format. I also have shortcuts set up for yesterday (;yes) and tomorrow (;tom). Now it's easier than ever to insert the date in this format!
In case you need it, here are my configuration settings for espanso:
# My custom text conversions
- trigger: ";tod"
replace: "{{today}}"
vars:
- name: today
type: date
params:
format: "%Y-%m-%d"
- trigger: ";yes"
replace: "{{yesterday}}"
vars:
- name: yesterday
type: date
params:
format: "%Y-%m-%d"
offset: -86400
- trigger: ";tom"
replace: "{{tomorrow}}"
vars:
- name: tomorrow
type: date
params:
format: "%Y-%m-%d"
offset: +1
We ought to arrange calendars as we arrange art on our walls and ask: how does this task fit next to the surrounding ones? - Sendhil Mullainathan