The names

A file name has one job: that the you of six months from now knows what is inside without opening it.

proposal.md fails. proposal_final.md fails worse, because it lies. And proposal_final_v2_THIS_ONE.md is the cry for help of somebody who had no version control.

The shape that works has three parts: when, whose, and what.

By project, not by file typeYou never look for "all my PDFs", you look for "the Acme stuff". Everything from one project lives together, whatever the format.
Date in front, and backwards2026-03-14, not 14-03-2026. Written that way, alphabetical order IS chronological order, and the folder sorts itself without you touching anything.
Underscore for what you want on top_archive and _delete show up first in the list because they start with an underscore. A silly trick that saves you scrolling every day.
Names that still make sense in six months"proposal.md" tells your future self nothing. "2026-03-14 - Acme - Redesign proposal.md" does. It is longer to write once and shorter to find a hundred times.
No accents in file namesThey usually work fine on your machine, but if the file travels — to a website, to another system, to a client on a different computer — they sometimes break. Spaces and hyphens are fine, and read well.

Five rules that settle the rest.

Not like this	Like this	Why
proposal.md	2026-03-14 - Acme - Redesign proposal.md	Says when, whose and about what. No need to open it to find out.
14-03-2026 meeting.md	2026-03-14 - Acme - Meeting notes.md	With the year in front, alphabetical order is chronological order. The folder sorts itself.
invoice final v2.pdf	2026-03-14 - Acme - Invoice 0042.pdf	"Final" and "v2" are not information: they are anxiety. The invoice number is.
Design Ñandú.png	2026-03-14 - Nandu - Logo.png	No accents: if the file travels to another system or to a website, they sometimes break.

Thirty seconds more writing it, a hundred searches less later.

And you do not type any of this by hand either: it goes once into the folder's CLAUDE.md, and the AI names things that way from then on.

No "final", no "definitive", no "v2". There is another tool for that, and it is not the file name.

Why is the date written 2026-03-14 and not 14-03-2026?

Thirty seconds more writing it, a hundred searches less later.

snack 2 of 6 · Migrating the mess