I accidentally deleted my project

I've been working on a project recently. I probably have spent 4-5 hours on it over the last couple weeks, but it isn’t a wildly interesting project. It was one of those slow slogs — you know the ones I am talking about. When it came to working on it again over the weekend, big surprise to myself, I had accidently deleted it.

It has actually been a really long time since I’ve lost something I was working on. I’ve burned myself enough times to have hard-wired myself into tapping CTRL+S every few seconds. Backing everything up to the cloud is always what I do when a project is underway. But this project was in a preliminary planning stage — a stage that I didn’t anticipate taking so long. If you must know, I committed that Cardinal Sin of leaving it stored in my Downloads folder. I mean, it was only going to be there temporarily, even if “temporarily” had now clocked in at a couple of weeks.

I distinctly remember the moment I deleted it too. I had taken my laptop to a job and needed to quickly clear up some space. “Just clear out your Downloads folder,” my brain advised me. “You would never leave something important stored in there.”
Thanks, Brain. You know me so well.

So what’s the plan now? Well, fortunately I do actually know myself well enough to know that this is a good time to stand up, take a coffee break, breathe out, and then come back with a fresh approach. Luckily, on this project I can afford to do things differently on this second attempt. But first, I thought I’d share it with you.

Here’s hoping you don’t delete any of your projects soon. And if you accidently do, here’s a friendly sigh and a pat on the back. I’m with you, dude.