The blog

Imag­ine hav­ing an email or chat con­ver­sa­tion with some­one and dis­cussing a suit­able date for some­thing. You look at your cal­en­dar and when you see the date in ques­tion, you think: ​“Hm, did­n’t I talk about that date with some­one else too?” A bell rings, but not loud enough for you to remem­ber what it was about that day. You search your emails for the date but can’t find any­thing. Oh well, it must not have been any­thing important.

Two peo­ple want to do some­thing then

You decide to nail down a date and it’s not more than a day before you receive an email from the oth­er per­son you thought of, who writes: ​“There, now I’ve fig­ured it out. Can you still do that date we loose­ly talked about?” Then it dawns on you! Oh, right, it was that per­son you could­n’t remem­ber who it was. You look through the con­ver­sa­tion thread and see that you referred to the day as ​”the 23^rd” instead of ​”2026 – 03-23”, which you were search­ing for. Now you’re busy on that date! Will you miss out on some­thing you want­ed to be a part of?! Confusing.

What if instead, you could quick­ly find out every­thing you’ve talked about with every­one regard­ing that high­ly sought-after date? You can do that from now on if you decide on a for­mat for how you write dates and stick to it consistently.

Do this

If you rec­og­nize the sit­u­a­tion I described, choose a for­mat for how you write dates in emails, chats, and oth­er con­ver­sa­tions. I’ve per­son­al­ly cho­sen the for­mat ​“2026−03−23”. It does­n’t mat­ter what you choose — just be consistent.

Write like this from now on. In doc­u­ments, pre­sen­ta­tions, pub­li­ca­tions, and sim­i­lar for­mats, you should use appro­pri­ate for­mats, but in con­ver­sa­tions where you want to find what you’re look­ing for quick­ly, use just one for­mat. Even if the per­son you’re writ­ing to uses a dif­fer­ent for­mat, write in your way — or write the date in your way some­where in the text, so that you can find it when you search.

If you’re talk­ing on the phone or dis­cussing a date with some­one direct­ly in the same room, try to find a rea­son to send an email so that you can write down that date. Maybe you need to con­firm what you said? If noth­ing else, write an email to your­self after­ward where you men­tion the date as a reminder for your­self: ​“We talked about pos­si­bly doing some­thing on 2026-03-23.”

Less has­sle with the calendar

If you write dates in the same way in your con­ver­sa­tions, you’ll quick­ly find every­thing you and oth­ers have writ­ten about a spe­cif­ic date when you search. You’ll quick­ly see what ​“it was” about a par­tic­u­lar day and reduce the risk of promis­ing your­self and the day to mul­ti­ple peo­ple simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. You’ll spend less time and ener­gy fix­ing dou­ble book­ings and can instead have more time for what you pre­fer to do dur­ing the day.

How do you do it?

How do you make sure you find every­thing you talked to some­one about on a par­tic­u­lar day? Do you have a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent trick than this one? Please write and share your thoughts!

(Find­ing a meet­ing time on short notice, espe­cial­ly when sev­er­al peo­ple need to attend, can some­times be tricky. One tip I got from a read­er was to book pre­dictable meet­ings far in advance!)