Use standard date and time format

Date

My brother’s birth day is 11-04-1994. It is natural to get confused as 04-Nov if are an US/Europen citizen. His birthday is on 11-April. So, it is always better write (or store in system) date unambiguously despite your locality.

DD-Mon-YYYY

is my favourite for several reasons because it uses constant 11 chars. Prefer to prefix 0 if DD is single digit. You can do that to your pen signature as well. It is tamper proof. So, the right way is 11-Apr-1994

Time

Similar thing goes for time as well. I am in India and we follow IST. There might be others who are reading it from a different time zone. You might have responded to email the next minute. But based on how email clients are configure might show a different time of you reply/received time. It compounds with AM+PM thing. So, let’s follow a 24 hours standard time along with mentioning your shift or your time zone. e.g GMT+0530 or IST. That way it is unambiguous.

HH:MM:SS GMT+/- hhss

If you are on linux,

date +"%d-%b-%Y %T (GMT%z)"
06-Jan-2021 18:31:38 (GMT+0530)
date +"%d-%b-%Y %T (%Z)"
06-Jan-2021 18:32:02 (IST)

Again this uses constant chars irrespective of date and time 24/7 (for another ~8000 years ). By the way GMT and UTC mean the same.

Currency

Similarly, for currency: $ and Rs. Better to use USD or INR instead.

Let’s me stop here for now.

Up and stay safe.

Cheers,

Rajz