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Keeping a paper trail
I write almost nothing down. The handful of things I do write down end up in a folder with a date on it, and after a year that folder is the only honest record of what I was thinking.
The problem with notes is never writing them, it is finding them again. A note that lives in a chat log, a scratchpad, or the margins of a book has a half-life of about a week. A note that lives in a folder named after the day it was written has a half-life of roughly forever.
One folder, one thought
The rule I settled on is dull on purpose: a post gets its own folder, and the folder holds exactly one index.html. Nothing else to learn, nothing to configure. If you can open the file in a browser, the post exists.
journal/
keeping-a-paper-trail/
index.html
Naming is the only real decision. Slugs in lowercase, dashes instead of spaces, no dates in the name — the date lives inside the page, not in the filesystem, so renaming a post never breaks a link.
Dated, not filed
Sorting by date sounds like a filing system, but it is really an honesty device. Reading last March’s notes in order tells me something a single polished page never could: what I was stuck on, what I changed my mind about, and how long each of those took.
The archive is not a portfolio. It is a record of being wrong at a measurable rate.
Some of it will be embarrassing in a few years. That seems like the correct outcome for a folder whose whole purpose is to be read again later, by me, in a hurry.
What this changes
- Writing gets cheaper — a post is a folder, not a project.
- Nothing rots: plain files outlive every tool I reach for next.
- Search still works, because a folder of text is a folder of text.