I can't speak to stevewillows' answer, but my girlfriend uses a similar naming scheme in her architecture work. The project folder contains a year-month prefix

I can't speak to stevewillows' answer, but my girlfriend uses a similar naming scheme in her architecture work. The project folder contains a year-month prefix indicating when the project started, and any year-month prefixes below that indicate when that part of the project was initiated. It maps the project in time for her: this folder tells her when she first talked to the client, this folder tells her when design started, this folder tells her when she got the first construction bids. The date on the top-level folder is extremely useful when looking through old projects. Just from consulting those files so often, she knows when most of her major projects were started and finished and how long each phase took, which is something I don't remember (and can't reconstruct) for most of the projects I've worked on. She has folders like this going back ten years. I can't even imagine what that would look like for my projects. I'm a bit jealous.