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when in the Navy we wrote the date as dd/mm/yyyy and I have continued that pattern into my 70s on my checks and other correspondence.

Somewhere around the time of the Y2K circus, I fell into the habit of writing dates as yyyy-mm-dd.

That format has two advantages:

While the format is possibly unfamiliar, nobody above room temperature IQ can fail to recognize its meaning
It sorts correctly, even in software that doesn't recognize it as a date

Europeans write the date like that. Not Americans.

Well they finally got something right, but not on their own really. They are merely adhering to ISO 8601, perhaps the only time an internationalist body used common sense. Most times they are merely elitist, and arbitrary. ~cough~ metric ~cough~ ~cough~

when in the Navy we wrote the date as dd/mm/yyyy and I have continued that pattern into my 70s on my checks and other correspondence.

At least the yyyy versus yy is a discriminator and greatly reduces the confusion factor. Our public schools have force-fed our kids mm/dd/yy forever, and still do. And then came email, instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter to spur new inventive shorthand. And we haven't even mentioned all the possible time formats.

Somewhere around the time of the Y2K circus, I fell into the habit of writing dates as yyyy-mm-dd.
That format has two advantages:

While the format is possibly unfamiliar, nobody above room temperature IQ can fail to recognize its meaning

It sorts correctly, even in software that doesn't recognize it as a date

After 2000 I remember sorting a relative's medication and saw lots of expiration dates like 01.02.01 or 03/03/02 and will never forget that. For doctor appointments or court dates or lots of other examples these become useless numbers on a piece of paper. It is stunning the amount of rabbit holes we must explore for lack of common sense.

We live in the left-to-right reading-writing world where we put MSD ( most significant digit ) first and LSD last ( screw with their minds by writing this year as 1620 or 6102 to demonstrate the weirdness of the other ideas ). Computer sort algorithms and GUI file lists naturally default to MSD->LSD. Even with that, have a look through someone's folder or flashdrive full of wildly dated photos thanks to camera/cellphone software lunacy. Each and every possible mistake will be found to exist.

Idiocracy, it's a cookbook!