Perhaps one of my good ideas

When naming files or folders or most things, if I want to include a date I use this format

yyyy mm dd month

for the item names (these items may also be instances or occurrences depending on the context), so that the names are unambiguous, human readable and sort properly.

For example, today is the 8th of September. I render that

2020 09 08 September 

Alternative short form

Alternatively I sometimes use 

2020 09 08 Sep

which is of course  yyyy mm dd mmm

I use this if I'm feeling lazy (quite often) and in some tables where I want to use strict or just shorter field lengths (but that is very rarely necessary... it would have been very useful once but computers are getting smarter and smarter).

Month and Year formats

This is really neat.

If you want to mix files or folders that relate to a particular date with ones that are more general...

The month-specific format is yyyy mm mmm (or there is an obvious longer form for most months)

The year-specific format is yyyy

Do you see how those all sort?

Use as a subfield

Why not?

You can use this date along with other text. You can add the other text before or after the date string, or even both. 

Text added before the date of course preempts the sorting order, or can even disrupt it completely. Text added after preserves it, and if you have several items with the same date establishes a sorting order within that date. It's very neat. 

So the full item name becomes

leadingtext yyyy mm dd mmm trailingtext

and I call this Extended Alder Date Format. Leadingtext and mmm can be either fixed or variable length but leadingtext is best fixed length, as is mmm but only if there's trailing text and it's perhaps not as important. The length of trailingtext most often doesn't matter at all.

Watch this space or experiment yourself... even the rules for text strings preceding the date are pretty obvious really.

Rationale

Unambiguous

Dates are a real pain owing to the question of which comes first, day or month? This overcomes that by including an alphameric string to specify the month. If dd and mm are the same, then it's unambiguous of course, but if not then it's obvious which of the two figures is the month, and by elimination the other is the day of the month.

Readable

A bonus of having the order I do is that dd mmm is a substring that catches the eye. This soon becomes second nature and the day of the month is instantly obvious.

Sorting

That's the most important reason for the order yyyy mm dd of the first few bytes.

It is also the reason of course that the leading zero is essential in the dd and mm subfields. 

And this even works if I have a mix of the long and short forms. It even works if I have used both, creating two things with the two different but otherwise identical names... they sort adjacently (except in May where the two forms are identical, and for which reason I would discourage trying to use this for disambiguation).

And as noted elsewhere, it works well for  mixed date, month and year collections.

Redundancy

Yes, the mm and mmm or mmmm fields are redundant. Tough. Storage and bandwidth are both cheap these days. Mistakes are not and never will be. Do you want to find your files, or do you want them to look pretty from a purist point of view? To me that is a no-brainer. (But then I do not much like purism, mainly because the purist is almost always wrong, in my experience.)

Similarly when sending files to others. Do you want to look good, or do you want to be effective?

I admit that can be a difficult choice, and that in some circumstances you just need to use the more conventional and confusing formats. On the other hand, some of your correspondents will say, hey that's great, I should do that too. And I fancy that these will tend to be the more intelligent and effective of them. But not always!

And I admit to a certain bias.

Examples

and room for more

I just saved a file and named it From Quora 2022 05 26 May nuclear fuel lifetime.doc

This identifies the file by source, timer and content, in a recognisable way that sorts by subject area, then date, then subject details.  

Original?

Of course, if they ask why this format, refer them to this page. You can use the link https://tinyurl.com/alderdate to do this.

I designed this particular format from scratch, but similar ideas are elsewhere on the web.  And I think it's all pretty obvious, so maybe even an identical proposal has priority but I have not found it. If you do, please contact me because I'd like to link to it. 

Known problems

The yyyy field will of course overflow and/or wrap around in the year ten thousand AD.