Especially on busy times, it is possible to forget the projects I’ve been working on. While I tend to remember the big ones, some small projects slip away from memory. This is troubling when someone asks if I’ve been working on anything interesting recently, or if I feel like I haven’t been productive. Seeing how many thing I managed to work on can be a good morale-booster.
This problem became more apparent recently when I started to publish “Status Update” blog posts, in which I write short notes about the projects I’ve been working on. Instead of looking through used to-do lists or diaries, I found a more effective solution using the POSIX tool find, specifically the -mtime flag.
When you call find with -mtime, it searches for files based on their modification dates. Here is the snippet I use to find the files I’ve worked on in the last month.
find ~/projects -mtime -30
The parameter -30 stands for the last 30 days, it can be modified as you wish. For example -7 would filter for the last week.