Keeping two versions of my personal statement in sync — a lesson in wasted effort

Made the mistake of maintaining a "detailed working version" and a "cleaner filing version" of my personal statement in parallel for a while, thinking it would help me experiment freely without messing up the version headed toward filing. It mostly just created confusion and double work. What went wrong: changes I made in one version didn't automatically propagate to the other, and I lost track more than once of which version had the most current thinking on a given section. I eventually consolidated back down to one single working document and just used version history (per the naming-convention habit another post here describes) to preserve earlier drafts I might want to reference, rather than maintaining two live parallel versions. The lesson: a desire to experiment freely is legitimate, but solve it with version history on one document, not by maintaining multiple simultaneously "live" versions that inevitably drift out of sync with each other.