5typos.net
Dates Are Content
I found an old notebook with notes and writings. If it weren’t for a small date scribbled on the top right, it would have been really hard to pinpoint when I wrote it.
In fact, I have many similar notebooks with stuff on them that I can’t bother to deduce when they were written. Just 10 characters — if you use ISO dates — are the difference between curiosity and archeology.
This isn’t limited to the analog world. Text files in a computer are great at keeping metadata on creation and modification dates … until you do a restore, and it all gets flattened to today.
A date is part of the content. It can provide context, a sorting parameter, or an organizing convention.
Just like habit makes any writing without a title feel unfinished, a lack of date should make it incomplete.