The year in plain text

At the end of each year I run a script that tells me which files I modified most. It is not a productivity tool — it is a portrait. The files I return to most are the files that held the most unresolved thinking.

This year, the top ten files by edit count were:

1. notes/on-defaults.md — the seed of an essay I have not published yet
2. projects/library-tool/README.md — a project I abandoned in March and restarted in September
3. notes/grammar-of-interfaces.md — eventually became the essay here
4. clients/studio-b/brief.md — a brief I rewrote seven times before the project finally clicked 5–10: various dated notes from the week I spent in Lisbon, which apparently I have been editing ever since

What strikes me is what is not on this list. The finished deliverables, the shipped work, the things I sent to clients — those files were edited a few times and then closed. The living documents are the ones that stay open.

This is probably obvious. But the file-count portrait makes it visceral in a way that reflecting abstractly does not. The year was made of the open files, not the shipped ones.

I am carrying five open files into next year. That feels like the right number.