Am I doing enough?

Being a Christian isn’t about “doing”, but you don’t have to attend church for long to know we’re all supposed to read our Bible, pray, and spend time in worship together. How do we go beyond the basics? I often find myself asking the question: am I doing enough?

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You’re probably using the wrong dictionary

Another excellent read I came across in a newsletter (Sarah Bray [https://www.sarahjbray.com] this time), James Somers talks about dictionaries. That may not sound enticing, but he does it really well! He first describes the problem: > The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you’ve never heard of, or whose sense you’re unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word — like example, or sport, or magic — because all you’ll learn is what it means, and that you alr…

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Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound

It’s one thing to write about how the internet has changed the way we read. It’s another thing to claim how that change in reading as affected us overall. This article from Maryanne Wolf opens with just that: > When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age. What are the problems? Well, the author states there are several: > Multiple studies show that digital screen u…

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Should I focus on habits or my task list?

Habits are in focus at this time of year more than any other. My recent reading of Atomic Habits [https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits] and testing various habit tracking apps has had me evaluating how I get things done and how I plan my time. I’m not alone. Here are other authors writing along similar lines: * Cal Newport: habits vs. workflows [http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/09/11/habits-vs-workflows/] * Ryan Holiday: how to develop better habits [https://medium.com/s/notes-on-changi…

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How to write a novel with Ulysses, part I: organization and the writing process

Matt Gemmell gives some insight on how he writes his novels using Ulysses. > TOLL is the result of two years of work, and is the second book in my KESTREL series. It’s around 100,000 words long, and required a great deal of planning, research, and organisation. I used various tools for the planning stages, but ultimately I moved almost everything into Ulysses, to keep all my book-related material in one place and easy to access. You don’t have to be a novel writer to get some value from this po…

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My zettelkasten

Alan Jacobs gives some insight into how he keeps track of things when doing research for a book. Reading the post, you come to know he’s tried many ways of organizing things, but he’s recently begun following the methods of Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system. He shares how he had thought he was too late in life to adopt this system, but… > But ultimately, when I was working on The Year of Our Lord 1943, I realized that the demands of my research — trying to track the thought and writing of f…

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