Damn you David Sparks, you convinced me to put the date (YYYY-MM-DD - ) in the file name

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Damn you Davis Sparks, you convinced me to put the date (YYYY-MM-DD - ) in the file name. As long as I’m on the Mac, I can use TextExpander to make that happen.

But I find myself trying to manage files on my iPad and phone a lot more and was trying to get away to put the date in easily.

Using voice control and shortcuts Shortcuts I Ccan format the date I want it and I can Copy it to the clipboard, but I can’t get it out of the clipboard so that it inserts at the the cursor.

Apple says they do not have a Pace feature that can be triggered in a shortcut.

I had the Paste app installed, but I did not see how it could be used to actually Pace the context of the clipboard. I deleted it to see if it was getting in the way but it did not seem to be.

Any other app that works with Shortcuts, that would just go ahead and paste the contents of the clipboard.

I Have tried double tapping to paste, but because it’s at the beginning of the file name it often ends up selecting the first word and becomes more trouble than it worth.

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My method of inserting text is to:

  1. Long press to enter cursor move mode, there’s a magnifier for exact positioning
  2. Drag cursor to where I want to insert the text
  3. Tap the cursor to bring up the paste option

You can also single tap each end of a word to position the cursor at that end of the word. Depending on your use case that might be quicker. You’ll still need to tap cursor to bring up paste option.

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Not what you are asking, but just a suggestion about the date. It’s better to use underscores “2026_05_23” rather than hyphens “2026-05-23” because the hyphens make it look like a math expression and the underscores won’t do that.

I read David Spark’s “Paperless” 13 years ago and have been doing this ever since. File renaming is done with Hazel. I’d think that you could do that in Shortcuts as well.

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The use of dashes as a separator is quite widespread and stems from ISO 8601 which is the One True Way of writing date[time]s. Personally, I tend to omit the separator when using as part of a filename (e.g DocumentAboutSomething_v20260523.docx) as it keeps the name shorter, but continue to use it when it is the only part of the filename (e.g. Documents/Payslips/2026-05-23.pdf).

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I remember reading somewhere that this is bad, but I use YY.MM.DD. It has never caused me problems, but I always feel guilty about it.

Having the date in the file name has saved me so much time and energy.

-Eric

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How about just 260523? It is shorter and I have no trouble reading it. I have been using this for years as a prepend to file names. I have a TextExpander shortcut for this so I can use it in many contexts. When I need more granularity, I use YYMMDD_HHMM. (260523_1023)

I am pretty comfortable in this century 2000 and will be here for the rest of my life so I do not bother with 2026. 26 will do.

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Davis Sparks? I hear Sparks Davis is his jazz pseudonym…

I’m on team yyyy-mm-dd mostly because my boss at my first real job was a stickler about it. Typically prepended.

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I’ve got files going back to the 20th century, so a 2 digit year won’t do. It’s the Y2K problem in retrospect.

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I’m on YYYY-mm-dd_ rest of filename My reason for the full year is I have notes and info that reference dates in other centuries and I use the date as a way to sort stuff like that. The earliest filename date I have is in the 1800’s I have a lot in the early 1900’s

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I think the significant take-away is by putting the date in the file name itself (any format you want) we gain independence from the edge conditions and bugs in file systems and especially backup/restore systems.

Sure, that’s probably a remnant of many of us coming up through the '70s and suffering all the problems, but from time to time I’ve still run into funky dating of files so the habit is permanent.

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On a related note, by force of habit, when I explicitly want save a version or create a new version, I still try to always “save as…” a new physical file and not rely on internal versioning in the file itself or the app managing the file.

That’s actually a lot harder with smarter file systems that share non-duplicated blocks of a file on disk where potentially having disk or storage error on one version of a file might actually affect several older versions too?

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Well for those you can use 19850523. Or even 850523. The later will not alphabetize correctly but the twentieth century stuff will still stay together and be recognizable and sort correctly within its group.

It is not an ongoing problem because that century is no more. I am older than you are, and I don’t have that many files from before 2000. I try and minimize the length of my file names for most of my files. I use column view and long file names are inconvenient.

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Not sure how, but I ended up with a space as my date delimiter (gasp, my formative working years were in Unix so I know how blasphemous this is).

To me this format is less cluttered and lends itself to humans reading the file, and our wonderful machines don’t get street about it either.

2026 05 25 - Some kind of description that helps me to find stuff

However that said, in this day and age of advanced search, auto versioning and rollback in cloud services, seems less any less required. Maybe I need to revisit this, shorter filenames would be useful (especially on mobile devices) so maybe by 2028 I can drop the date (year chosen only because it rhymes)?

However most of the time, sorting files based on a fixed “when did I create this thing” is useful. Something that survives local, external and remote file systems, and also various cloud services…and also where the item has been sent via email, iMessage, WhatsApp…over iPhone, iPad, MacOS & Windows. Especially in these situations where the file create, modify and open dates can be messed up.

Plus, sorting all your files by the file name and getting a reasonably task start organisation, helps me to find stuff quickly.

As to other options, and through the view of sorting by filename:

MM-DD-YYYY - useful for finding stuff that you have recently worked in a specific month, no matter what the year. Not a use case I have very often.

DD-MM-YYYY - same reasoning as above, however not down to a specific day in the month. I would suspect a very very narrow audience.

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Based on your screenshot I believe your shortcut misses a setting in format date: click on „Date“ and select „current date“ or something in the selection above the keyboard. In its current form I believe it tries to rename an empty value … the „Date“ is not really a date but a placeholder?! Maybe it will then work?

Via shortcuts it’s also easy to rename the file directly, so you would not have to fiddle with the clipboard and maybe paste the desired date manually?
See my screenshot for an idea (sorry for the german UI :innocent:). It currently only takes today’s date but could be adjusted to any date or entry you want.

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Biggest productivity hack, ever.

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Eric, I’m with you except I use the full year-YYYY.MM.DD. I can remember an old MPU episode where David and Katie got in this discussion. Katie was a dot person as well as I remember.

Allan

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Then I don’t feel as badly about it.

I was orienting a new admin assistant to how files should be saved in a shared folder that she and I both had access to, and when I showed her how easy this “date in name” trick made it to track down old documents, she was floored. She said maybe it’s not too bad working for a geek!

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Sorry to resurrect the what’s the best format to put a date in debate, what I was really looking for was Help on the shortcut, format date will give me the right date in the format I want, but I can’t get it out of the shortcut to where the cursor is on the iPhone.

Any shortcut experts out there?

I’ll try and do a translate on the German suggestion, but I don’t hold out much hope.

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There is no way to automatically paste the contents of the clipboard anywhere in iOS.

You have to paste. It is an active process that has to be completed by the user himself using the GUI or cmd - v when using an external keyboard. Sandboxing at work.

“My feeling is Apple needs to include it as a new clipboard action in shortcuts as paste clipboard.” (via https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/17fppa7/comment/k6e7rwl/)

Again, I think they actively may have chosen not to do so.

The only other option I can think of is using a custom software keyboard like the ones that come with text expansion tools like Text Expander or Rocket Typist to trigger their expansions.

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I quickly set my iPhone to English, hope that screenshot makes it easier :blush:?

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In my example you don’t need to position the cursor anywhere as it renames the file directly. The variable „varName“ is used to hold the original filename, the „text“ action then combines the adjusted date format with the original name - basically putting the date at the front and the last action replaces the old filename with that new filename.

Hope it brings you in the right direction.

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