Just over a month ago, I gave an intro tour of Roam Research to the Wildbit team. We have a call of this type on the first Friday of each month, and I'd wanted to do this for a while as a few people on the team started to use it. But each person seems to come away from the first few log-ins to Roam with this same question: How do I use this thing? The truth is, after months of using it, I still didn't have a firm sense of how I wanted to use…
I've been focused on enhancing my reading over the past couple of years (not to as much success as I would like). It's a desire to ensure what I read truly impacts me, to put effort into my reading. Or, as Adler puts it: > And that is why there is all the difference in the world between the demanding and the undemanding reader. The latter asks no questions — and gets no answers. But of late, I've rediscovered another area this is of great benefit: deep listening. One recent evening, an evening…
I have done well to stay away from new productivity apps the past couple of years. I'm still using Things as my main repository of projects and AoR (areas of responsibility) — this has not changed since Things 3 arrived and I wrote about it [https://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-personal-gtd-app-suite/] for The Sweet Setup. The biggest change in recent years has been the use of pen and paper for daily planning and tracking. I still do this today (currently with a Do Journal from Baron Fig, but I'…
My wife gave me an awfully nice gift for Father's Day this year. She took the kids out of town for a week to visit her family, leaving me all alone at home for 6 days. The irony of this being a Father's Day gift is not lost on me. But to all the introverted dad's out there who've been working at home along with your children for the past five months, I feel you ✊ I love 'em all, but I was definitely looking forward to a lot more peace and…
Some time around the point in my life where I started to actually use the internet — maybe late 1999 or early 2000 — I also started to get into electronic music. Previously, I was fully all into grunge (I was late to appreciate that whole genre, but purchasing Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins had changed that and I spent the second half of the 90’s listening to all that stuff). Towards the end of the decade, I picked up a copy of Spin Magazine [https://www.spin.com] that highlighted the t…
I’ve tried to keep things positive in my writing and social presence. But as we move forward in 2020, although I know I should be focusing on how to move things forward on the unjust treatment of black and indigenous people, and that I should help people see the importance of remaining diligent with social distancing and similar measures, I must confess … I’m really tired. It’s been almost five months of living full time at home with our children. And although we’ve had a lot of great days, and…
I mentioned Andy in the last issue. If you spend any time in the Roam community, you've heard of this fellow. And it's due in large part to his own "Digital garden" and his public notes. How and where he stores those notes aside, I spent a lot of time going over this note, plus all its offshoots. > My practice of writing Evergreen notes is heavily inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten practice and its contemporary advocates. I use a different term both because there are some distinctions a…
I very much enjoyed this longer essay from Andy Matuschak on people truly learn. He makes the case that lectures do not work for the transfer of knowledge. > Lectures, as a medium, have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation. Yet if we were aliens observing typical lectures from afar, we might notice the implicit model they appear to share: “the lecturer says words describing an idea; the class hears the words and maybe scribbles in a notebook; then the class understands th…