A single repository has held my personal notes for employee talks, blog post drafts, coordination notes, and financial analyses for years. Too corporate for a public remote. Too personal for a corporate one. So it lived in a OneDrive folder. Mounted drive, spaces in the path, cut off from every other project on the machine. And no place for anything truly private. A notebook you can hardly leave the building with.
The scratchpad isn't where this started. Before the repo, there was a diagnosis diary from 2017. A box where my wife and I collected the good and the bad since our wedding in 2007. Nightly notes about work that robbed sleep. Different formats, different platforms, different decades. The same instinct: when something matters, write it down.
When encrypted push freed the repo from OneDrive, it moved to where everything else lives. A blog became possible.
The sensible next step would have been to split. Corporate here, personal there. An afternoon of work.
I didn't.
When I looked at the commit history, employee talks next to blog drafts next to customer questions and proposed answers, it looked right. The combination wasn't a filing accident. It was a description of the person doing the work. The same person who wrote the diagnosis diary and the nightly notes.
It's already starting. The way I write blog posts reshaped how I prepare employee talks. That connection only happened because both lived in the same place. As more artifacts come in, more threads like this will surface. You can't plan these connections. You can only put things close enough together and let them happen.
The best thinking I've done never happened in a work notebook or a personal one. It happened lying awake, when everything mixed with no clear boundaries. When the artifacts were scattered, I carried the connections in my head. I knew I'd written something relevant months ago, but it was in the wrong folder, the wrong system. The thought moved on before I found it.
Over a hundred commits across more than three years. The markdown files are the source of truth, not any CMS or platform. If the tool changes tomorrow, the content stays. The diagnosis diary, the nightly notes, our box: they're all coming in. Different decades, scattered across drives and formats, converging into one place. The connections I've been carrying in my head will finally be in the text. Because I'm trying to be one person, and the artifacts should try, too.