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.

Citation

@article{yaltirakli202011findmtime,
  title = "How I keep track of what I've been working on",
  author = "Gokberk Yaltirakli",
  journal = "gkbrk.com",
  year = "2020",
  url = "https://www.gkbrk.com/2020/11/find-mtime/"
}