Comprehensible and consistent file names, as well as a coherent organization, facilitate browsing and searching of your project contents. If you can implement these practices early in your project, they will help you most of all. Here are some recommendations:

1. Organize files into folders according to type of information (e.g., data, presentations, papers) or phase of the project (e.g., raw data vs. cleaned/processed data).
2. When using dates or datetimes in file names (and in your data!), follow the ISO 8601 standard: YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD (without hyphens). This will be unambiguous for other researchers and allow the dates to sort in chronological order.
3. Select 3-4 elements of interest for your file names, such as date generated, investigator initials, type of information, treatment group, trial number, etc. (Select more as needed.) Decide on the sort order in which you want files to appear, and then arrange the elements of the file name accordingly, with a separator such as _ (underscore) or - (hyphen) in between. For example: sensor_20230731_djb.csv for sensor readings collected on July 31, 2023 by team member DJB.