Date Everything

Everything loses context eventually.

You can try to keep things grouped together and record context as you go, but that takes time. Even worse, you might not know what the important context for something was until long after it's creation.

Besides, you can never trust that anything is updated. At best, things are accurate to the time they were last edited. The backlog of things to update only grows.

Date it when you start, and you'll always have a baseline amount of information about what it was and when it mattered. Knowing that something is from before something else, being able to definitely say this is outdated, is one of the most valuable pieces of information to have.

Some things have it included by default, like photos or receipts. In digital, metadata gets overwritten and deleted all the time, so record it directly if you can. For physical, it take's two seconds to check the date and scrawl it down before writing something else.

If you don't remember the date, year and month is still valuable to narrow down.

A random post it with three items for the grocery list? If you see it's from last year that's instant trash, no need to check if you are actually still out of eggs.

You can extend this further. Some people will date most objects with when they were bought or created. Personally I'm not ready to start labeling all the objects I buy, but I can't deny it would be occasionally useful.

While you're at it, use the international standard, YYYY-MM-DD. It's standardized, unambiguous, doesn't cause issues with file names, and sorts alphabetically.

You might not think you'll need the year, but that's just recency bias. You have more documents from more than a year ago than from this year unless you keep exceptionally tidy records, and the longer you go without looking at them the more they blur together.

Everyone with a decent photo library knows it's easier to remember how long ago something was than where you put it. Date everything, and you can make that search faster.

Quickly now, it's 2026-01-19 as I write, but it'll be at least 2026-01-20 as you read. I won't be coming back to update this post.

Is it out of date yet?

- Rew

Nightly Notes

I still have to take paper notes for various reasons, and every time I forget to date them I curse myself a week later. Time and context slips by so quickly.

From the outside this probably looks like a sequel to Clock Seconds, but really they're both offcuts from a longer post I can't pin down about living with the fact that we are tied to time.¹

I think time management is a fool's errand.

It's another way of saying life management, which is another way of saying living. We all live, and always in different ways. There are no answers, only decisions.

I wonder what a day feels like to other people.

I doubt it's the same.

I think I think too much about time, or perhaps other people don't think enough about it. How could you not be fascinated by the thing that drives forward our shared reality? There's no escape from it, even for a moment.

There is no other moment.

All we can do our entire lives is pass messages forwards, whether through physical action or literal messages. And we hope our future self is willing to catch them.

I think I'm trying to write about making them easier to catch.

- Rew