The most useful thing I taught a high school senior

It was once my privilege to mentor a young man. We studied James and then studied and memorized Philippians together. (Daily memorization gets you through a text faster than weekly study, FYI.)

Somewhere along the way he saw my system for naming files starting with the date in a particular format:

yyyy-mm-dd - description.ext

I told him if you do that, then an alphabetical list of your files is also a chronological list. Single-digit numbers must be two digits for this to work properly. For instance, today in February would be 2019-02-15.

At first he thought this was unnecessary because files already have date stamps on them.

Yes, but if you change the file, then the date stamp gets updated. If you want to consider a file dated far in the past, the datestamp is not useful for that.

He later told me this was the most useful thing I ever taught him.