# Strategic simplicity [In a discussion about ISO 8601 date formats](https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/694233507500916796/877050822800842773) on the Obsidian Discord (because I will discuss the benefits of *YYYY-MM-DD* formatting), someone asked me why I wouldn’t drop the first two digits of the year, since *21* is simpler than *2021*. Simpler, yes… but **simplicity in systems doesn’t always mean reducing the number of variables. It’s being strategic about the variables you use.** I was asked to give an example about this, and since we were on the topic of dates the Y2K Bug came to mind. Y2K wouldn't have been an issue had programmers not dropped the first two digits of the year (e.g. 1984 became 84). This was done at the time to save memory space, and was effective practice in the short-term, at the expense of the long-term. That was all well and good until we hit 99-12-31… until we rolled over to 00-01-01. In the example of dates, while *YYYY* has more digits than *YY*, it benefits from context. If I had a note called *20 Pandemic Data.md* in my Obsidian vault, you would likely assume it would include data about COVID-19 from 2020… and you’d be wrong. *20 Pandemic Data.md* could be referring to **1920** in which studies suggested that there was a fourth wave of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic… a full century before our contemporary experiences with COVID-19. If the files were named with *YYYY* for date structure, the century helps to create both context and clarity, all for two digits. - *1920 Pandemic Data.md* - *2020 Pandemic Data.md* Better yet, for the benefit of being able to understand a file just by looking at it, including pandemic context here helps. *Influenza pandemic* or *H1N1 pandemic* is not as simple as *pandemic* from a character length standpoint, but if you think about scanning through your files at a later date, you’ll know in an instant what *1920 Influenza Pandemic Data.md* and *2020 COVID-19 Pandemic Data.md* are all about.