Name Your Files Like Future You Has to Find Them

Somewhere on most computers there's a folder with files named "final.docx", "final2.docx", "final FINAL.docx" and "final-use-this-one.docx". We've all made that folder. The fix isn't some elaborate system. It's a handful of rules you apply every time, until you stop thinking about them.

Here's what I'd use.

Start with the date, written year-month-day. 2025-03-14, not 3-14-25 or 14.03.2025. Written this way (it's the ISO 8601 format), files sort into chronological order automatically, in any file browser on any operating system. No other date format does that. Put it at the front when the date matters, which for documents, receipts, invoices and photos is most of the time.

Then say what it is, from general to specific. 2025-03-14-invoice-acme-website.pdf. The broad category first, details after. Files of the same kind end up next to each other when sorted, and when you're scanning a list you can stop reading as soon as you've found the right group.

Lowercase, with hyphens instead of spaces. Spaces work fine in most places today, but they get turned into %20 in URLs, need quoting on the command line, and occasionally break a script. Mixed case causes its own trouble because some systems treat Report.pdf and report.pdf as the same file and others don't. All lowercase with hyphens just works everywhere. Underscores are fine too, just pick one and stick with it.

Skip the special characters. Slashes, colons, question marks, asterisks, quotes and the like are either forbidden on some systems or mean something special. Letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores are the safe set. Accented letters usually work these days, but they're another thing that can get mangled moving between systems, so I'd avoid them in names you'll share.

Pad your numbers. photo-01, photo-02 ... photo-10. Without the leading zero, photo-10 sorts before photo-2 in a lot of places. If you'll have more than 99, use three digits.

Version with numbers, never with "final". proposal-v01.docx, proposal-v02.docx. Nothing is ever really final, and numbers always sort properly. When something is actually done and sent, you can add -sent or move it to an archive folder.

Put together, it looks like this:

2025-03-14-invoice-acme-website.pdf
2025-03-20-contract-acme-website-v02.pdf
2025-04-02-receipt-hosting-renewal.pdf
2025-04-15-photos-garden-012.jpg

Boring? Very. But you can find any of those in seconds, and so can anyone you share them with.

For folders, keep it shallow. Three or four levels deep is usually plenty. Most people do well with a top-level split by area of life or work (personal, work, a folder per project or client), then by year if a folder gets big. Deep nesting feels organized when you set it up and becomes a maze six months later. With good file names, search does a lot of the heavy lifting anyway.

A couple of other habits help. Keep an "inbox" folder for stuff you haven't sorted yet, so your downloads folder doesn't become the default home of everything. And when you're renaming a big batch of old files, use a bulk renaming tool instead of doing it one at a time. Windows has PowerRename in PowerToys, macOS Finder can rename a selection of files at once, and on Linux there are plenty of options, including the rename command.

Don't go back and rename your whole archive this weekend unless that sounds fun to you. Just start using the rules on new files today. In a year, most of what you're actually looking for will already be named properly.