You probably already know, that there's a handy Recent Items menu in Apple menu in the top left corner. But wouldn't it be better to have it somewhere easier to reach, like in the Dock?

There's another defaults for that. Open Terminal (in Applications > Utilities) and paste this:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'; killall -QUIT Dock

Note that new icon in the right side of your Dock. It shows Recent Applications, which can be also practical, but you can change it to Documents or even Servers.