The Captured EconomyHow the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey, Steven TelesPublished: 2017 • Completed: October 8, 2022 • 📚 View in Library
The Future and Its EnemiesThe Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress by Virginia PostrelPublished: 1998 • Completed: May 29, 2022 • 📚 View in Library
Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things is essential reading for anyone that creates products. I’ve been doing a re-read of the most recent edition myself.
I also ran across this excellent set of notes on the book from Elvis Chidera. A good Cliff’s Notes version if you want to get a sense for Norman’s main ideas.
Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the “read-later” app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), but some of us still rely on them as essential parts of our reading experience.
The Readwise team has been moving fast the last couple years with excellent additions to the product, and I can’t believe they were also working on this for most of 2021 along with the other regular updates. Impressive.
People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn’t how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the “CAUSE MIRACLE” button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!
Revolt of the Public was published in 2014, a time when most of his diagnosis of political discontent was prescient. But as SA points out, most of the subject matter is received wisdom in 2021.
I still highly recommend Gurri as a writer, and RotP for its analysis of root causes more than its predictions of things to come. More on Gurri here and here, and give a watch to his Revolt of the Public in 10 Minutes talk to get the precis on his work if you’re unfamiliar.
Jonah’s G-File is one of the rare read-every-issue newsletters, and this one is one of my recent favorites:
The government can’t love you, and when it works from the premise that it can, folly or tyranny follow. We need people in our lives, not programs. Because people give us the very real sense that we are part of something, that we’re needed and valued. Programs treat us like we’re metrics in some PowerPoint slide.
Helicopter parenting has a negative perception, as it should, but it’s still done all the time. Helicopter governing should be treated the same, but is also promoted and defended far too often.
I use the Kindle desktop app a fair amount, usually for going back to books I’ve already read for reference, or to review highlights and make notes. It’s always been a pretty bad application, with a strangely dated interface and extremely rare updates, but lately it’s gotten unusable. Maybe it’s unstable on the M1 Mac mini. It now crashes constantly and corrupts the local data, requiring purge and reinstall to fix it.
Instead of fighting with it, I went back to their Kindle Cloud Reader, a web-based version of the same Kindle client that Amazon’s kept around for a decade. Like the desktop app, it gets almost no attention that I can tell. But since it runs in the browser, it doesn’t have the same stability problems as the desktop app, and seems to support all of the same basic reading and annotation features as the other clients.
Until Amazon decides to care about Kindle’s software products, I’d recommend using the Cloud Reader for desktop reading. It’s sad to see them flounder around with their massive advantage in the e-reading space. They can get away with this, of course, as the de facto default platform for e-books still, but it seems inevitable that someone will come along and disrupt this position.
We had a hurricane blow up part of a week of productivity around here, but I still limped along with some middling progress on the year’s goals. I’m behind the targets this year late in the game, but I’m still happy with the results. I can still close the gap on the running target, at least.
I’ve been thinking about an idea Patrick O’Shaughnessy wrote about recently on “growth without goals” — setting up systems to be able to pursue and achieve personal growth without having hard numbers on a scoreboard. Using this site as a public accountability tool helps me to keep these top of mind for continued effort. I’ll have to give this some thought as we near the end of 2020 as to how I want to set up my personal growth systems for 2021. I’m thinking an evolution is in order that creates more space for discovery of new interests without interrupting growth in focus areas.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
588.6 miles
597 miles
650 miles
-8.02
Meditation
1070 minutes
2607 minutes
3120 minutes
—
Reading
24 books
27.53 books
30 books
-3.53
Reading seems like one that’s particularly absurd to quantify as num_books_read. The dimensions of depth and breath of a “book” are so all over the place that the metric approaches uselessness as a measurement. I’ve tried to avoid selecting material I choose to read around “managing to the metric”; the last thing I want is to end up reading 11 garbage quick reads just to hit an arbitrary number. The purpose is defeated if I were to fall into that trap.
One idea that comes to mind as I’m writing this is selecting target study areas to read about — something like choosing 4 or 5 topic areas I want to dive deeper in and measure to how many of those subjects I learn more about. A trackable tool to keep me honest would be useful, but I’m conscious of falling prey to simply managing what’s easily quantified.
With the downramp in the previous daily posting regimen, I’ve used that time mostly to catch up on a bunch of new ideas cooking in (and about) Roam, and put out a couple of newsletters, issues 4 and 5 of Res Extensa. (Subscribe here!)
It’s been fun to do so far. I’ve landed on this idea for the last couple of following a theme topic rather than a simple digest of links or interesting things. That could be interesting, but there are a lot of great “curator” newsletters out there already. Issue 4’s theme was legibility, from James C. Scott’s epic Seeing Like a State, and issue 5 looked at alternate timelines from a couple of different angles.
I made middling progress in areas, like some better runs in the first couple of weeks. Felt good to have some overachieving progress. But then we did a week out of town up in Georgia last week, and my plan to do some trail running didn’t become reality. Between schoolwork (Elyse was still remote-learning from the Georgia countryside), rain, and a surprise tropical storm, much outdoor activity was a challenge, to say the least. We did get in 1 hike, but 5 and 3 year olds aren’t that compatible with long excursions.
I went a full 7 days without running, the longest gap in probably 2 years. While it wasn’t necessarily intentional, it’s probably good for health to get some air space there every now and then.
On the reading side, I finished Stephen Fry’s Mythos, which is his reimagining of the greek myths. I listened to the audio version which is read by the author himself, and if you know any of Fry’s work, you’ll know this is the proper way to consume this book. An outstanding rendition of the tales, more accessible than Edith Hamilton’s Mythology or something like Ovid or Virgil classics.
Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society was both thought-provoking in its claims, and occasionally frustrating by its pessimism about the state of western culture. I tend to agree with many of Douthat’s views on his “4 horsemen” of decadence: stagnation, sterility, sclerosis, and repetition. I’m skeptical of, but open-minded to, the theories of technical stagnation that you read about in the works of Peter Thiel and others. There’s a compelling case to be made that something is going wrong, and Douthat has an interesting take on where he thinks the issues lie. My skepticism is less around the presence of decadence, decay, or drift than it is around the severity of the issues. It’s a worthwhile and provocative read. Along the same lines I’d highly recommend Yuval Levin’s takes on institutional decline in his book A Time to Build from earlier this year.
Good news is I closed the deficit a bit on the running goal, even though it didn’t feel like a particularly productive month there.
COVID makes time fly and crawl simultaneously, through some sort of perverse time distortion. There were just no notable events this month to break up the monotony of online school, Zoom meetings, and tame weekends around the house. Maybe the holidays and better weather we’re entering soon will help get us outside some more.
In The Black Swan, Taleb raises the concept of the “Antilibrary,” using author Umberto Eco’s personal library of tens of thousands of books as an example. Here’s Shane Parrish on Taleb:
A good library is filled with mostly unread books. That’s the point. Our relationship with the unknown causes the very problem Taleb is famous for contextualizing: the black swan. Because we underestimate the value of what we don’t know and overvalue what we do know, we fundamentally misunderstand the likelihood of surprises.
I have no intention of physically stocking thousands of books I haven’t read, but a similar digital idea exists with services like Goodreads and the “To-Read” list. That’s been my method for tossing books into a queue for years (though a queue makes it sound like it’s an order in which I’ll read, really it’s a “these are interesting, I should remember them” list).
Avid readers like myself do enjoy the presence of physical books, though. Several months back I installed some bookshelves in our office/bedroom, which is now also my workspace. It’s the first time ever I’ve had storage space to put my entire library somewhere accessible.
Even though I have a larger library than most, I’m very selective about what physical books I buy. Kindle books I’ll purchase indiscriminately, but I’m conscious about buying more “stuff” to fill the house. With two young kids, that generates as much “stuff acquisition” as we can stand.
I’ve been slowly building out my own digital Antilibrary, though, moving my reading list from Goodreads over to a database in Airtable. When I visit my favorite used bookstores, I’ll pull this up on my phone to browse for interesting things to search for.
If I tracked my time spent in software tools, I’m pretty sure over the last 8 months Roam and Readwise would be top of the list.
All of my writing, note-taking, idea logs, and (increasingly) to-dos happen now in Roam. Since getting serious with it around the beginning of the quarantine, I haven’t used any other tool for writing things down.
I discovered Readwise about a year ago and it quickly entered routine use. My backlog of meticulously-kept-but-underused Kindle highlights was immediately made valuable through Readwise’s daily reviews. The ability to have my highlights deliver recurring value (compound interest!) has made more both more compelled to read and definitely more compelled to highlight and make notes.
One of the favorite uses I’ve discovered for Roam is to make literature notes from books. I’ll page back through a book after finishing it, review highlighted passages, and translate the key ideas and takeaways into a Roam note. The process takes a little time, but is well worth the effort for the resulting outcome. Paging back through usually turns into a light re-read or skim, not just reading the highlights but what also might be worth extracting adjacent to highlights that I didn’t include on the first read. I suppose this is similar to “progressive summarization,” but I’m not following a consistent process here, just doing what feels natural. When I recently went through How Innovation Works to build notes, it took 2-3 hours to translate the highlights into literature note form in my Roam graph. Then perhaps another 30 minutes to an hour to skim back over the notes to clean them up and add links to other pages.
Combining it all
All of these tools and processes make for a powerful system of study. Extracting and linking ideas between sources is fascinating so far as a means for concretely visualizing how ideas bridge between authors. And most importantly, it gives you a resource to mine for remixing source material into your own novel ideas.
A few weeks ago I got early access to Readwise’s latest big feature: direct integration with Roam. Even in beta after only a few weeks of usage, it’s been an amazing addition to this workflow. Let’s dive into how it works.
Readwise ⭢ Roam
First of all, it’s great that this feature works with highlights from any object type. Books, articles, podcasts, and Twitter threads can all be included in your Roam sync, giving more power to Roam as a system-of-record for collected knowledge.
When you set up the sync the first time, you can select item by item what you want to sync into Roam. If you want something to resurface in Readwise, but don’t need or want it in Roam, you can exclude things to your liking. Since it’s in beta, I’ve been selectively pulling in a few at a time each day just to go through them and see how they look on the Roam side (more on this step in a minute).
Highlights example page in Roam
Once your highlights are pushed over into Roam, Readwise publishes a new page with (highlights) appended to the name, and includes a few metadata elements at the top that you can customize to your liking in the sync configuration. One of my favorite things is how it appends highlights under a new block named “Highlights synced by Readwise [[September 9th, 2020]]”, which cleverly functions both as a historical record of when the highlights came in inside the page, but also shows up in your Daily Notes as a sort of log of your daily reading activity.
Over the past few weeks the Readwise team has already made some additions to the syncing options, including the ability to customize the metadata it uses (using Roam attributes, the :: method). The defaults have worked fine for me, but it’s good to have this ability for future tweaks to the PKM process. It’ll also include links to the highlight location, which (in the case of Kindle) deep-link to the location in the Kindle app, or with podcasts (from Airr) to the AirrQuote you saved.
Readwise logs in Daily Notes
Another addition to this workflow I’ve been tinkering with is how to integrate these into the rest of my Roam knowledge graph. Every couple of days I’ve been scrolling back through each page of synced highlights and annotating them with bi-directional links to key terms, ideas, or other pages — basically stitching them in with other content already in my Roam graph. Over time as I look back at previous evergreen notes or when I’m writing new pages, this will provide references at-hand for incorporating into new material in the knowledge graph. This has all the workings of a set of simple tools designed to do what Sönke Ahrens talked about at length in How to Take Smart Notes. Roam, Readwise, and Instapaper are working together to provide a slipstream for knowledge to enter the database, but in a living, breathing way (not just dumping notes into the archive).
The feature just publicly launched this week to all Readwise users, so it’s still early. But so far this is an excellent addition to an already-excellent set of tools for personal knowledge management.
Outside of widening our circles a little from shelter to family and one or two friends, we’re still spending most of our time at home or in outdoor activities.
The start of Elyse’s kindergarten over the last couple of weeks really put a dent into anything other than work or supporting her online schoolwork. By the end of the day I’ve been too burned out to do much running or reading at all. It’s also been raining like crazy here over the last week.
I just barely kept it together with the running habit. I just picked up some new running shoes that have me excited to schedule some more longer runs the next couple of weeks.
In his piece “Why Books Don’t Work,” Andy Matuschak made a strong case that books are a poor medium for knowledge transfer. Even with the most advanced book experiences today (like digital ebook downloads to a Kindle), if you took away the digital e-ink screen, a reader from the 16th century would still recognize books as no different than what they had. We’ve added digital on-demand access, dictionary lookups, and the ability to have a library in your pocket1, but the fundamental model for conveying the knowledge is still what Gutenberg would recognize, based on the “transmissionism” mode of teaching.
Matuschak quotes this great passage from Carl Sagan in Cosmos:
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Knowledge is transmitted, as if by magic, across the decades and centuries. This makes it all-the-more unfortunate how bad our brains are at retaining all that information. We have a mechanism for cheap, reliable knowledge transfer, yet are still bad at hanging onto that knowledge.
One can also be reading books for enjoyment. The act of reading itself can be fun, even if the signal strength of retention is less than perfect. Fiction is like this, of course, where the primary goal is entertainment, not education. Not that there’s no wisdom embedded in fiction — in fact, I would make a case that fiction offers deep insights worthy of remembering2. But I even see nonfiction works on my shelf that I remember enjoying years ago that I’ve mostly forgotten about, certainly in any conscious way that’s useful to me.
The defining purpose of nonfiction, though, is to educate, to convey ideas in a way that disseminates them to a wide audience and allows wisdom to compound over years by connecting dots in readers’ minds. Writers spend hundreds of hours distilling their ideas into works of a few hundred pages that we blaze through in a couple of weeks, retaining little.
Spaced repetition
Purely linear transmission is not the best model for understanding, but it’s the best that we have available to us today, cheaply and readily accessible. People like Andy Matuschak and his collaborator Michael Nielsen are busy behind the scenes working on this problem of how to build tools for thought that can harness the novel advantages of today’s technology. They experimented with this idea in their quantum.country project, using the complex subject of quantum computing combined with a “mnemonic medium” that integrated spaced repetition testing. The results they’ve shown from this experiment are promising evidence for the technique to increase retention. It’s a simple approach — interspersing simple questions within the text — but the problem is one of medium. Our existing reading and teaching tools don’t have affordances for this today.
Until we make headway in those new areas, what can we do to get more out of reading? How can we extract and retain the right ideas from what we read without having to reinvent the nature of books themselves?
Enter Readwise
One of the most useful tools I’ve discovered in the past year is Readwise, a service that’s working to solve this problem and enhance reading retention through a simple workflow:
Readwise syncs your highlighted passages from Kindle, web articles, and even tweets
See a sampling of those highlights in your inbox each day for review, through email or their mobile app (what they call your “Daily Readwise”)
Highlights are selected randomly from your archive, and can be resurfaced with whatever regularity you prefer
It’s such a simple idea that, like all great innovations, makes the most of the pre-existing infrastructure around it. The goal is to help readers retain what they read. I love it because of how simple it is. Readers like me aren’t looking for something scientific or complex; even an incremental improvement in reading comprehension and recall is enough to enhance the overall nonfiction reading experience.
Because I read so much and highlight copiously, my Readwise has over a hundred books, each with dozens (if not hundreds) of highlighted passages. At last check I have around 5,000 highlights in the archive. As they come through in each day’s review, I regularly get to see things I highlighted years ago from books I sometimes barely remember reading. There have been numerous times where a passage has spurred me to go and re-download the book on my Kindle and skim back through. This trigger is exactly what I want out of a service like this: a reason to be more diligent in reading practice, highlighting, and regular review. Just in the past year or so of using it, I’ve been able to dredge quite a bit of fleeting knowledge back up into memory. Without a service like Readwise (even with highlighting), it’s highly unlikely I’d ever remember much more than a two-sentence synopsis of most books in my library.
Readwise follows a spaced repetition model for increasing recall. True spaced repetition systems use specific algorithms to extend the time between recall tests (like the Leitner system). For example, you might first get quizzed on an item a day after first being shown it, and if your answer is correct, then you’ll be asked again in 5 days, 10 days, et cetera. The correct/incorrect answer provides a feedback loop to the algorithm to best estimate the spacing for resurfacing it again.
Tuning your reviews
Since not all the books in your archive are of equal importance to you, you can tweak the frequency that highlights are resurfaced on a per-book basis. I only have a couple in my library that I’ve turned down. Usually the quantity of highlights in a book is a good proxy for how interested I am in retaining info from it, so books with very few highlights are already less likely to appear in the daily batch. You can also dial in the preferences for new versus old books. You can have it favor more recent reads to review information while the reading is fresh, or favor pulling up more items from farther back in time.
Integrations
The most commonly used integration is probably their Kindle sync service. It’s certainly the most high-volume for me. But in addition Readwise can sync from iBooks, and even has a slick camera-based OCR tool for clipping sections from physical books3. You can also pull in highlights articles through Pocket and Instapaper, and even save tweets or threads to include in your reviews. They’ve also got a super slick integration with Notion, if that’s something you’re interested in.
Active recall
A key feature related to the native concept of spaced repetition is Mastery mode, which allows you to generate flashcard-like questions from specific highlights. On each highlight shown in review, you can add it to your Mastery catalog, either generating a question & answer flashcard or a fill-in-the-blank version of the quote (a technique known as cloze deletion). I only do this for concrete statistics and facts that I find notable enough to want to remember. Depending on the types of works you read most frequently, though, this could be incredibly helpful, especially for content like digital textbooks.
In my now-hundreds of Daily Readwise reviews, there have been countless times that a highlight pulled up from the archives has prompted a thought or idea that I jotted down in my notes. Occasionally they’ve even spurred such deep thinking (usually because I see it in a moment of already thinking about a similar idea) that I haul off and write a blog post from it. This for me is the one of Readwise’s core values. Since writing is a medium for learning, a tool in the belt that helps you synthesize ideas for writing is a powerful one.
Readwise has been in everyday usage around here. I recently had a 110 day streak that I broke a week ago, but still I make it a point to pop it open every day when I get the morning push alert and flip through the clips it assembles.
Future Ideas
One unsolved (and maybe unsolvable) area is a way to address audiobooks. Certainly the technologies exist to do playback, capture, and speech-to-text transcription, but it’s a question of integrating these all together in a system that would work. Audible is the largest player by far, but it generally has poor support for integrations of any type, and also generally innovates at a snail’s pace. I’m not familiar with other audiobook players, but maybe one day there’ll be a way for a new entrant to encroach on Amazon’s monopoly in this space.
For podcasts there’s a new player called Airr that’s doing something interesting with this, using a feature they call “AirrQuotes.” It allows you to clip a segment of audio from a podcast, along with the text transcript to send to another app. I could see a future integration here where you could have podcast clips automatically transcribed and added to your Readwise archive. (Update: Airr integration is now live within the Airr app, like they’re reading my mind)
I’ve added a post-processing step to my reading to collect the noteworthy ideas, forcing myself to write a concise summary and bulleted list of the salient takeaways that resonated. I’ve done this now with my last few books and it’s been a fantastic way to parse through the content a second time — sort of like the first “active recall” review. This extra passthrough to aggregate thoughts into a system helps drive compound interest on the ideas.
It’s rare for new productivity tools to stick with me this long. All of the tools in my daily routines are ones I’ve relied on regularly, and it takes a while for new ones to really click. Readwise clicked for me early and earned its staying power right away. If you’re an avid reader, you’ll love it.
Okay, let’s be honest: this is a phenomenal innovation. ↩
Science fiction especially isn’t just my favorite fiction genre for entertainment value, I also believe there’s a lot to be learned about invention, creativity, human behavior, psychology, and more from good speculative works. Check out Dan Wang’s comments on this topic. ↩
I’ve been using this a lot lately and it’s fantastic. Works great for any books you can’t (or don’t want to) read in e-reader format. ↩
A quick touch on progress for July. I can’t believe it’s already been 5 months since the beginning of the pandemic.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
371.27 miles
379 miles
650 miles
-8.05
Meditation
1070 minutes
1821 minutes
3120 minutes
—
Reading
17 books
17.51 books
30 books
-0.51
Nothing that notable this month. Steady upkeep on the running goals, but the summer time in Florida is brutal. Really restricts the scheduling if you can’t do early morning or late evening exercise.
I’ve got a couple of side projects going on that I’ve been pleased with the progress on: a couple of things with the website and some work on personal finances that all feel like good progress.
Jumping off from my Friday post on literature notes, I’ve taken the first step here in what will hopefully become something more meaningful over time.
I just finished up filtering back through all my highlights and notes on Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works over the weekend. Part of what this process helped me figure out is a standard model for organizing literature notes by section, so if I publish the complete notes, they’ll be browsable by part and chapter of any book I have notes for.
All I’ve got up right now are Summary and Key Takeaways sections. I’m going to make myself put together both of these on any book with published notes, which will require deep thinking to distill the content of the book into a few paragraphs and bullet points. Again, I want to publish my key learnings here, not necessarily a complete synopsis or review. Reviews have a different place on the blog, and I’ll still be doing those separately from this.
I like this idea and think it’s something I‘ll enjoy doing. The forcing function of having to write sensible, consumable notes not just for myself, but for others should lead to better thinking. The effort to build coherent notes should be useful for others and create an archive I can openly reference in future writing. The long-term vision here is to eventually draw connections between books, making references between ideas for deeper insights. And if others learn something along the way from my effort, that’ll be fantastic.
If the work is in the open, it’ll make it better and more polished, though polish isn’t a hard requirement. I’m just hopeful that others may find it useful.
“But what about fiction books?” you ask? Or books that are shallow, or simply not good? That’s easy: no one’s making me go through this process for every book. Over time, if there are books in the library that have no published notes, that should speak their value and worthiness. I tend to have pretty discerning taste for what I’m willing to spend time on, so some books may get “read” enough to determine they don’t need to be on the shelf. I do plan on making notes on fiction, but we’ll see how that works out.
I have some other ideas in store for this later on. This is just a start.
With the last several books I’ve read, I’ve been trying to force myself to work through and document literature notes for my highlights, key ideas, and takeaways from books. Using a process (that perhaps I’ll one day go through in greater detail here) in Roam, I’ll scan through all of my highlights and write up notes on the content, editing it into my own words and phrasing. One of the goals of this process is to increase retention and recall, and as Sonke Ahrens suggests, it’s best not to simply copy and paste highlighted text into a document.
With this flow, what typically happens is that I’ll only write a note for about 75% of what I’d originally highlighted, but also expand on some of them with additional thoughts. So for a book with roughly 200 highlights, I could end up with a Roam page of literature notes of, say, 250 or so blocks. Where relevant and possibly useful down the road, I also try and follow the threads to original sources and insert links to those, but not for everything. Wherever there’s specific data cited or something I find particularly worthy of a future read, I’ll capture it1.
I’ve been thinking about what I could do next with my Library to make it more useful and interesting. I want to find a way to publish my literature notes alongside or within those book pages. From the Library index page I could then mark which books have notes available and make them searchable and discoverable for anyone. This ties to a long-term goal I have to create a system for evergreen notes that could link between book notes and core ideas. Libraries of books are great, but what about one where you could quickly get access to the ideas within?
This is all experimental at this stage, but anecdote so far says I feel like I have a much deeper grasp on the material for which I’ve gone through this effort. If reading is for the purpose of building knowledge and retaining it, it should be well worth this up-front investment of time to get the payoff from all the reading I do. The next step is to incorporate the tactics of progressive summarization to enrich the literature notes and wire them in with other ideas. Being intentional about rediscovery and serendipitous resurfacing of information has been amazing at augmenting memory for me. Combining all of this with my regular use of Readwise makes reading such a more fulfilling experience.
The best books have as much gold (or more) in the bibliography than in the body text. ↩
I do most of my nighttime reading with my Kindle, but lately I’ve been reading a couple of books that don’t exist in ebook format. I actually do prefer reading paper books as an experience, but I still favor the ebooks especially for highlighting, but also for the obvious benefits of portability and availability.
Most of the clip-on book lights out there are clunky and annoying. Years ago I had something called a LightWedge that was pretty clever, but too expensive, fragile, and heavy for regular use.
I went out looking for a simple, affordable option that also had no blue light, since that can interfere with sleep quality. I found this option from Hooga that’s quite nice so far:
It’s a flexible, low-profile LED light that only has a single amber colored option (which is great). It charges via USB, and also flattens down nicely to fit in a bag when mobile or traveling. The clip on it works well. I just clamp it on to the back bunch of pages so it doesn’t interfere with page-turning. It stays out of the way but has a firm enough clip strength to stay on just fine.
Highly recommended so far. I’ve used it for several hours with no charging yet. Just what I wanted. For $10 it’s hard to beat.
These updates during the quarantine are weird. In some ways time feels like it’s standing still, in others it feels like it’s flying by. Every day feels mostly the same. Even though some has opened up in our area, we’re still basically in isolation from friends.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
317.49 miles
324 miles
650 miles
-6.62
Meditation
1070 minutes
1556 minutes
3120 minutes
—
Reading
15 books
14.96 books
30 books
+0.04
It wasn’t that interesting of a month from a goals perspective. I’m continuing to close the mileage gap that I fell into early in the year. I’m hoping in July to bring that one into the green. Other than that, nothing notable this month other than powering on through this quarantine. Seems like it’s going to last a while longer now.
I know where he’s coming from here. I probably consume half my books in audio form, and on certain dimensions here I would agree. My general pattern is very selective in what I’ll choose to listen to instead of read in text. Fiction is typically pretty safe, and with non-fiction I tend to make a judgement call on how much I’ll want to take notes, highlights, or generally move more slowly through the ideas. For example, right now I’m reading both From Dawn to Decadence and The Open Society and its Enemies, two books that are not only in the 800+ page range, but also are full of rich references and other things that make me want to take my time with them.
Often even after listening to a book, if it’s particularly thought-provoking I have no problem also buying a Kindle version to flip through and annotate after listening sessions. I’ve done this probably 10 or 12 times and it works fine for me. I think everyone would agree that re-reads are much more fruitful for deep comprehension, and doing it this way with audio-then-text is sort of like having a primer on the material that makes the text reading far more productive.
I would also add that audiobook listening itself is a skill. When I first started listening to books, it took me a while to get comfortable with the activity. I’d listen to fiction and totally lose the plot after a few minutes, unable to follow along with what was happening. Now that I listen to audio routinely, along with thousands of hours of podcasts, I believe my auditory comprehension rate is much higher than it was, say, 10 or 15 years ago.
So I think if you combine treating it like a skill you can improve with time, being selective about what you choose to consume through audio, and augmenting listening with text for certain engaging books, audiobooks can be a high-signal new channel for knowledge.
Just a quick update this month. With the pandemic still going, lockdown in a state of unknown non-committal from any authority, and the madness going on around the nation the past week, all of this seems kinda trivial. I’m sure we’ll power through past it, but I’m just doing my best to keep the habits going. I’m still fortunate to get to plow forward mostly unimpacted by it all.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
257.89 miles
272 miles
650 miles
-14.58
Meditation
1070 minutes
1308 minutes
3120 minutes
—
Reading
13 books
12.58 books
30 books
+0.42
I’ve been reading some great books lately. No particular update this time on that front, but From Dawn to Decadence is fantastic, I just started Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works, and Ra is one of the most interesting fiction works I’ve read.
Meditation hasn’t gotten folded back into the routine yet. I’m going to leave the goal in my updates and plan to get back to it and catch up by year end.
April was the first full calendar month of COVID lockdown. In the beginning of the month I started getting comfortable with the working-from-home setup. I have a decent desk setup and a large master bedroom-slash-office space, which until early March I’d barely used since we moved in. It’s gotten a workout now for 2 months of all-day work. I’ve got one of these adjustable desks that’s nice and wide, with plenty of light in the room, so aside from the zero separation between work and life zones, it’s not too bad.
In this past week though the strain is coming on. Some of it is certainly the 2 months of social separation from anyone (which is especially bad for the kids, which is, in turn, bad for us), but I think working as a distributed company is weird, too. Productivity has still been high, and since we were already about 30% remote anyway, it hasn’t been the huge adjustment for us that it has been for many others.
Let’s look at the goal progress:
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
198.46 miles
215 miles
650 miles
-16.54
Meditation
1070 minutes
1034 minutes
3120 minutes
+35.7
Reading
11 books
9.95 books
30 books
+1.05
So I fell off the schedule completely in the middle of the month on the meditation practice. I went a few days without doing it, and then just fell apart with consistency. There wasn’t a specific reason other than laziness, and not building it into a morning routine as I had planned. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the practice, but I do intend to get back to it. One thing I’ve still got to get figured out is a more solid morning routine to create the transition from personal to work life more smoothly.
I closed the gap pretty well on the running schedule. The weather’s been unpredictably cool out a lot for Florida spring. We typically have the occasional cooler temperature in April, but this year we had a lot of days in the mid- to upper-70s to work with, which was fantastic for workouts. The kids have been along for the ride on many of them, probably most of them. It helps to get them out of the house; we usually go over the neighborhood bridges and go near some of the water and look for any manatees, fish, and whatnot. With that mild weather there have been some beautiful days to get out lately.
I closed out a bunch of books I’d had in progress for a while. I’ve referenced Martin Gurri’s work a few times here recently, and his The Revolt of the Public is one of the most insightful books I’ve read to explain the modern state of affairs with the culture war, political landscape, social media, and more. It was a lot broader than I’d expected, but highly recommended.
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a classic I’d had on the list for a long time. Very glad I spent the time with it. A grim work of historical fiction about Stalinist Russia and the Great Purge.
I recently added to my Library section to include the books I’m currently reading. At the top of the page now I’ll be including books in the rotation. You’ll notice that I’m always reading multiple things at once. Usually the batch is either a) modal: I’ve got something on Audible, a paper book, maybe a couple e-books, or b) type: nonfiction, fiction, etc.
So March has wrapped, probably the longest month we’ve had in many years.
The shake-up in schedule, work-life patterns, and disruptions in everything from kids, to family, to day-to-day activities played absolute hell with my progress on goals.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
141.04 miles
162 miles
650 miles
-21.01
Meditation
860 minutes
778 minutes
3120 minutes
+82
Reading
6 books
7.48 books
30 books
-1.48
Let’s start with the “okay” news. On the meditation front I’ve been doing alright, but made a decision to switch from using Headspace to Oak. This was partially to shake up what was feeling like a lack of improvement, but I recognize that the tool is not the problem when it comes to disciplined practice of any sort. After reading Tom’s comments on Oak, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve been preferring unguided modes to help work on concentration myself; the cues can actually be a distraction in that way once you know what you’re supposed to be doing. Will see what happens here over the next month with our new normal.
Running was an unmitigated disaster this month. Way too many days off and missed for no particular reason other than the mental disruption in the daily flow. It’s counterintuitive that more time indoors and at home would make less time for running (it really hasn’t), but not having clear breakpoints in the day, plus the kids being home 100% of the time, has made this a difficult adjustment for things like exercise. I’m going to make a concerted effort to do mid-day runs with the kids in tow, even if that means higher quantity of shorter workouts. I’ve got to figure out a way to get a pattern going again.
Books appear behind, but don’t feel that way. I’ve done exactly what I’d intended all along at the start of the year, which was reading longer, deeper books — quality over quantity. I’ve really enjoyed the thread I’ve been following with the history of tech, and I’ve got a few more in the queue I’m looking forward to.
A quick update for February. No big revelations or movements on goals, just slight progress.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
97.76 miles
107 miles
650 miles
-9.09
Meditation
600 minutes
513 minutes
3120 minutes
+87
Reading
4 books
4.93 books
30 books
-0.93
I’ve struggled with building longer meditation sessions into my routine. I think the only way it’s going to happen is if I can get a pattern of sitting down in the morning before the kids are up. At night things are just too unpredictable — kids might stay up late, too tired, have to do runs, unmotivated.
Running was a little better than last month. I stayed a bit ahead of the curve through the month to close the deficit a bit, but still had several multi-day-off periods.
As I’d mentioned in my Goals post at the start of the year, I plan to read some deeper books this year so I reduced the total number. A focus on quality material and better retention is the priority. I also have about 6 or 7 in motion right now, which is abnormally high even for me.
Discovering Readwise a few months ago caused me to resurrect my long-dormant Instapaper account. Instapaper was my go-to “read later” service, but I also used it as a general bookmark archive. After a while I’d fallen into only using it for the latter, which then made me go back to Pinboard since the single function of bookmark tagging is its specialty. I’m still using Pinboard heavily to archive interesting things, but I’ve found a new use for Instapaper with Readwise’s integration.
Readwise’s main feature is to sync all of the highlighted passages from your Kindle (via your Amazon account) and sent you a daily digest of 5 highlights from previous reads, with the goal of increasing retention of things you read. For any high-volume reader, you’re well-familiar with the problem of forgetting most of what you read, certainly any details beyond the basic gist of a book.
I didn’t know how much I wanted a tool for this until I started using it.
With its Instapaper integration, it’ll sync articles and their highlights into your Readwise archive, which then can be included in your daily reminder digests. Over the years I’ve toyed with tools like Evernote or Google Keep for clipping quotes or passages from web content, but none of them stuck for me or were that useful. The information going into an archive solves only part of the problem. What you want is a way to remember and reference those bits you clip from the web.
A related feature Readwise supports that I’ve used a few times now is archiving Twitter threads. Replying on a thread with @readwiseio save thread will store those posts in your Readwise account and include them in your daily highlight reviews alongside Kindle and article content. It works best for threads of things that are time-insensitive like ones on history, advice, business strategy, etc.
The Instapaper support has filled a gap in making bookmarking of articles more useful when you can play back interesting things you read that are worth remembering.
The Kindle launched in 2007, making ebooks accessible as a format not only because of a compelling device, but also a marketplace for content. Suddenly most books were available instantly for $10 a piece. No more trips to the store, expensive hardcovers and paperbacks, and importantly, no more paper taking up shelf space. As much as I love the Kindle, I have a growing list of gripes about the experience. Like with John Gruber’s recent post on the iPad, criticism comes from a place of love for the platform, and a disappointment with how little innovation there’s been over 13 years.
I still prefer the paperback format for pure experience, but the practicality of Kindle nearly always wins out. With Readwise I’ve gotten so used to heavily highlighting in my books, and it’s too much work to annotate in paper format when I’ve then got to transfer them somewhere else to ever see those notes again.
I’d used the Kindle iOS app since the beginning, but didn’t buy a Kindle device until 2015 (the Paperwhite, third-generation). I use both the app and the device every single day, so over time I’ve built up a back log of feature requests and documented shortcomings. There’s great opportunity for Amazon to make some amazing improvements.
But first, let’s start with the things Amazon’s done right.
What Amazon has gotten right
Whispersync — After acquiring Audible in 2008 (audiobooks) and Goodreads in 2013 (social network for readers), they’ve added some integration between the platforms. Whispersync started as their cloud service for syncing progress between devices for ebooks. A few years ago they extended this to sync progress between the text and audio versions, if you own both. For times when I’ve read books that I have on both platforms, this is a fantastic feature. Works pretty reliably, and is a neat technology.
X-Ray — I first saw this on Prime Video. The best description of X-Ray is that it’s like the old “Pop-Up Video” show on VH1, which would show “did you know?” style annotations on top of music videos. In video it allows you to see, in real-time, which actors are on screen and quickly look up their filmographies and whatnot. X-Ray for Kindle is similar: it breaks down common terms and keywords, themes, and subjects, with ways to navigate to those parts of the book.
One-tap purchasing — This is always a delightful process. Search for a book (or see one recommended) and in one tap it’s downloading. I’ve bought dozens of books on a whim this way.
Highlighting & annotation — I’ve been an avid book highlighter for years. Readwise now raises the value of annotations 10x. In the Kindle iOS app, the share sheet on a highlighted passage also lets you save a slick shareable screenshot of your highlight on social media.
Audible narration — This is more technically cool than practical. If you own audio and text versions, you can download the audio inside of the Kindle mobile app. When playing the narration, it moves the text along with it. I’ve never used this in practice, but it’s impressive.
Plenty of things to love. But now time for my personal recommendations.
Requests for the Kindle platform
Tighter social integration from Goodreads — Both the Kindle device and mobile apps now have connection to your account on Goodreads. They can see your “to-read” list, can mark things as read or currently reading, and can sync progress. But they haven’t done much of anything with the social aspects of Goodreads. I’d like to do things like enable seeing highlights my friends made in a book, and maybe an ability to put comments on those highlights just directed to specific friends. It could spark conversation around book topics you might not know had mutual resonance between you and a friend. Goodreads in general hasn’t gotten a lot of love since Amazon made the acquisition, but it’s integration with the live reading experience is one of the biggest places to expand into. It’d make the service more purposeful and engaging.
Progress adjustments — When reading books on multiple platforms, it’s possible for your “furthest read” progress to get out of whack (for example, if you flip ahead to look at a footnote, more on those in a second). Then the waterline for where you’ve reached in the book gets baked and is impossible to adjust. It’d be nice to have a quick interface to enter the desired furthest read point that resyncs everywhere.
Better footnotes — If you’ve read many nonfiction books (or a heavy footnoter like DFW), you’ve been annoyed by the inconsistency in how footnotes are formatted in books. Most of the time, tapping a footnote zooms you to the end of the book. They’ve recently added contextual back buttons to return where you were from the footnote, but if you flip around pages near the footnote, it’s possible to end up resetting your furthest progress point to 98%, where the footnotes are at the end. Some books (feels like a minority) have more functional overlay footnotes. When you tap those links a small popover appears at the bottom with the footnote text without leaving the page. This is even an improvement over most paper books. The former problem with footnotes at the end of the ebook is actively much worse than page-flipping in paper formats.
More consistent formatting — This one may be largely out of Amazon’s control; I don’t know much about the process of authoring ePub/mobi files. But Amazon could certainly help more to provide an “IDE” for authors and publishers to use best practices for the platform when converting their works into ebook format. It seems like after 13 years there’d be much less of this inconsistency than I see from book to book. Footnotes are screwy, progress measurement is all over the place. Some books mark the 100% point at the end of the main text, some at the full end of the file (after the index/glossary). Page numbers are also an inconsistent mess.
Deep linked references — The one that I’m the most interested in. Imagine this: you tap a citation link that displays a popover on the screen, then tapping a particular citation could deep link into an interactive “clip” from the source material’s ebook format, also showing links to add that source to your wishlist, or even buy for your library. It could even let you highlight from books you don’t yet own, and create a separate shelf of books on your device of referenced works you might be interested in reading in full. Over the years they’ve added both dictionary and Wikipedia lookup on selected text. I see this as a similar way to bridge into related, adjacent content. Would benefit readers and, if well executed, Amazon and publishers by more widely referring users to other works.
Semantic web of references — If citations and references were deeply linked, you could also build a reference graph. If I’m reading Tom Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, I could pull up a tab that shows all works referenced within, and also all works that reference it. Go both ways with it. Picking through bibliographies is frequently how new things get added to my reading list. This would give readers an exposed graph of related works or authors they may find interesting.
Book lending — This is probably a long shot, but it’d be neat to be able to temporarily “lend” access to a book to, say, a friend on Goodreads, with a “return” date you could customize that revokes access and returns to you. Perhaps you could cap the limit to 60 days or something. It could give the social reading experience more of that feeling of sharing knowledge and reading experiences with friends. It could also show your highlights and annotations, like someone reading a highlighted hardcover book you lend them.
Reading metrics — When did I start a book? When did I finish? How many days did it take to read? How many pages did I read each day? Data nerds like me would eat this up. Probably not of mass market interest, understandably. You could add gamification here, but I’d be reticent about that since the purity of reading doesn’t need any more distractions out there to keep you from deep immersion in something. Twitter and Instagram are already doing a great job at stealing users’ attention away from books.
Have any active Kindle users out there formulated their own lists like this? I’d love to hear others’ ideas. Maybe with enough of a conversation about them, Amazon could respond positively.
The first month of 2020 is already in the books. 31 days blew by already?
It’s been a rollercoaster of a first few weeks, with some vacation at New Years, shot out of a cannon with a reinvigorated team at work, a trip to Miami, and a trip to Jacksonville.
I already fell behind on the targets with all that’s been going on. Once I can fall into a better rhythm with some normalcy in the schedule (which should be happening over the next couple weeks), I think I’ll be fine to catch up.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
43.14 miles
55 miles
650 miles
-12.07
Meditation
350 minutes
265 minutes
3120 minutes
+85
Reading
2 books
2.55 books
30 books
-0.55
My running’s been reasonable, if not frequent enough to stay on track with the increased goal over last year.
Reading I intentionally re-prioritized some longer stuff, and I’ve been working through a couple that are great so far, but one in particular leads down all sorts of Wikipedia side trails while reading it.
Since I began tracking my books in a spreadsheet in 2018, I’ve got a bunch of data I can now look at on my reading habits.
One thing I took a stab at was a “duration chart” that could show the reading patterns over time, based on when I started and finished each book.
Using this stacked bar chart style, you can see which books I stalled out on and put down for long periods. Not a judgment on those books’ respective merits, more of a criticism of my dodgy reading habits. The Federalist had probably a full 6 month fallow period where I forgot about it.
Periodically I want to read on my computer, particularly when sitting at my desk. Amazon publishes a web app called Cloud Reader for reading Kindle books, which emulates pretty closely what their mobile apps look and feel like.
I found out they’ve got a full desktop client also, which seems they’ve had for years but I never discovered or tried it out. It turns out to be one of the better applications for reading ebooks I’ve seen, even though Amazon clearly hasn’t cared about it in years (if they ever really did).
The main reading interface looks just like what you’ll see on the other Kindle apps, but with more flexibility to change the reading pane size and layout given the differences in desktop screen sizes.
Since I’m an aggressive digital highlighter and note-taker, my favorite feature on the full macOS app is the “Notes and Highlights” drawer you can pull up and browse so easily. With that, the full table of contents panel, and fast search, the navigability of books in this app is much better than the mobile apps or the actual Kindle device (I have a Paperwhite). E-books still aren’t a great format for denser material, or for books prone to page-flipping, heavy on footnotes, or with reference diagrams. Maybe this format will make some of the denser material in my library accessible for digital reading and highlighting.
This was a busy one. Between the All Hands earlier in the month and the week off for the holidays, those are brutal to maintaining the routine (though great to get a break and spend time with both workmates and family, respectively).
Here are the stats with one month left to go:
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
574.02 miles
457.53 miles
500 miles
+120.53
Meditation
3503 minutes
3340 minutes
3650 minutes
+163
Reading
51 books
45.75 books
50 books
+5.25
Once I hit the 600 mile mark on the running in the next couple of weeks, I’m planning on taking the rest of the year off to see if I can rehab the foot and ankle pain that’s built up. I’m past the goal line now on a couple of these, which feels good.
The only content feeds I regularly peruse anymore are my RSS subscriptions and Twitter. I’ve been trying to pull away a bit more from looking at Twitter so often. This is a common problem these days that people are responding to in much different ways. You’ve got folks like my co-workers Bill & James coming at it with a sanitization strategy, trying to clean up their feeds in various ways. Then you have those on the “Waldenponding” end of the spectrum (like Cal Newport) — deleting apps, deleting accounts, and fully checking out from the digital firehose.
My approach so far has been to simply be more conscious of how often I reflexively open the app as a muscle memory movement whenever I have slack time. These apps (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) all feed off of the “in-between” time when sitting on the couch, standing in line, et cetera. Then as happens with most of us, that slack time encroaches on non-slack time and soon we’re scrolling through Instagram while at dinner with someone or playing with the kids. We all do it, and it takes conscious effort to control. What’s helped me lately are the Screen Time reports iOS sends regularly that show the week-over-week trend in device usage and how it breaks down. As a week goes by, I try to remember that every few-minute-long Twitter session accrues against my total and will put me at an increase over last week — a small mental kick toward putting the governor on Twitter usage. Since I always have Kindle books at the ready, with each opening of Twitter a little bug in my brain says “why don’t you read a few pages instead?”
Over the weekend I decided to try out James’s method of using Twitter lists for a more targeted feed1. So I created a private “bestof” list and gradually curated (so far) 43 people into that list. In the Twitter iOS app, a list can be pinned to the main view and becomes a pane you can swipe over to. In two days of usage it’s been an excellent substitute to the main firehose feed of infinite content. Because lists, from what I can tell, don’t display algorithmically-generated feed items, you get a simple reverse-sorted feed of posts from all accounts in the list. If I open it up after 5 or 6 hours have gone by, a minute or so scrolling down gets me back to where I was. I can read all of the posts over that time period. Reaching Twitter “inbox zero” has been impossible since about 2010 — following too many people, but also Twitter is on a mission (understandably) to never let you run out of things to read.
I still plan on keeping the Twitter habit as curbed as possible in favor of higher bandwidth books and papers, but this is a huge step in the right direction for filtering the signal from the noise.
Trying to wrangle the main feed is too much work. I just left it alone. ↩
A while back I started a text file for logging the best quotes I run across. I put up a page to document those here publicly. No sense in keeping good stuff to myself when I can share my favorites.
A few highlights:
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
I’ve been periodically adding new ones from my readings. Now that I have better systems for recording them as I encounter them, I’ll start building up the archive.
The big achievement this month was the culmination of the half marathon training, ending October by finishing my first one.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
520.12 miles
416.44 miles
500 miles
+103.68
Meditation
3208 minutes
3040 minutes
3650 minutes
+168
Reading
47 books
41.78 books
50 books
+5.22
The other notable movement was surpassing the 500 mile goal, which happened on this run and I didn’t even realize it at the time. I was able to knock out the mileage goal 2 1/2 months early. Back in March I definitely didn’t expect to be much over the target at all, let alone a full 100 miles beyond the pace mark. At this rate I’m pretty confident in hitting the 600 mile mark, especially with the nicer weather around the corner. I might do one more race in December, likely only a 10 or 15K.
This month I finally finished The Federalist, which I’d put down for a while. I made extensive notes throughout it. I’m looking forward to flipping back through for a refresher soon. Such a phenomenal work to put together such a deep, thoughtful, still-relevant rationale for strong but limited governance.
The other read this month that definitely made my “best of” list for the year was Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. A riveting story of a small team developing an early minicomputer. This story had to be one of the inspirations for Halt and Catch Fire, turning rooms full of geeks into a fast-paced drama.
In September the training push continued for the half marathon. I did a personal record 88 miles in the 30 days, for an average of just about 3 miles per day the whole month. Somehow I’m not dead yet, but the aches and pains were there to prove it.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
460.88 miles
373.97 miles
500 miles
+86.86
Meditation
2893 minutes
2730 minutes
3650 minutes
+163
Reading
42 books
33.66 books
50 books
+8.34
I think I’ve got the joint, knee, and foot pains to a manageable stage and seem to be turning the corner on that. My post-workout stretching process has been more diligent, shoes improved things, pacing, and proper rest days inserted in there. I’m really looking forward to the weather playing nicely in October and getting the temperatures down, at least a little.
The best books this month were for sure the two short story collections I read: Ted Chiang’s Exhalation and Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie. Both of them phenomenal blends of fantasy, speculative fiction, and historical science fiction, with imaginitive and thought-provoking short stories and novellas I’m still thinking about.
We’re moving into the final quarter of the year going strong on all of the goals. By the end of the month I’ll be able to report back on my experiences with the first 13.1 mile race of my running career.
I signed up for Readwise earlier this week after seeing it mentioned in Twitter somewhere. If you read a lot of ebooks on Kindle and make highlights, it’s a useful tool for recall and remembering what you read. Each day it sends you a brief digest with 5 highlighted passages from books you read in the past. I’m even getting reminders on highlights I made in books from 7 or 8 years ago. Already it’s made me consider going back and re-reading some things. It’s a neat service.
This month I made a concerted effort to kick it into a higher gear with the running. Mid-month was the start of the Strava training plan I’m going to try and follow for race preparation.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
372.51 miles
332.88 miles
500 miles
+39.63
Meditation
2563 minutes
2430 minutes
3650 minutes
+158
Reading
36 books
29.96 books
50 books
+6.04
The longer mileage is feeling good. I wasn’t sure what to expect when doing longer times with only single days of recovery in between, but it’s really not bad. The latest few runs have actually felt great cardio-wise right up until the end. The limiters at the moment are the heat (nothing I can really do about that) and some calf muscle and plantar fasciitis pains in the left foot. I’ve been doing lots of stretching and foam-rolling after runs, though, to try and counteract that, which I think is working alright so far. I’m trying to pace my mileage increase so I don’t end up with a real injury that really throws a wrench into the plan.
For books this month the most notable was the finale to Cixin Liu’s Remembrance trilogy, Death’s End. I haven’t had the time to write up many thoughts yet on that series, but it’s up there with the all-time best science fiction, for sure. Another pleasantly surprising read was Simon Winchester’s Pacific, which is a broad history of events and places on the Pacific Ocean since the 1950s. It’s one I plan on writing a longer piece about sometime down the road.
So that’s August in the can. Having pushed the running to 40 miles over the pace mark, I think I should be able to get to +60 at least by end of September, perhaps even higher if weather and health permit.
I had surprisingly good results on goals this July given how much was going on all month.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
300.57 miles
290.41 miles
500 miles
+10.16
Meditation
2270 minutes
2120 minutes
3650 minutes
+150
Reading
33 books
26.14 books
50 books
+6.86
On the exercise front, I was able to get the same quantity of runs in even though we started out with the holiday weekend, which always makes sticking to patterns and habits challenging for me. Plus all month long has been exceptionally busy (more than usual) at the office. I’m planning on starting up a more formal training schedule in August in prep for a couple of long races later in the year, so I already tried to incorporate some long runs on the weekend at a lower tempo pace to start building the endurance. I got 46 miles in versus the 42 from June. For the first time this year I officially closed out the month 10 miles ahead of the pace mark.
On a different exercise-related note, I’m trying to bring cycling back into the regimen, mostly for cross-training with the running routine, but also because I enjoy being able to commute to and from the office.
I’ve still been able to squeeze in reading time somehow with a couple of really enjoyable fiction reads in The Dark Forest and Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu collection, two that have been in the backlog a long time. Both are well worthy of longer write ups at some point. I’ve just now cracked open Liu’s final installment of that trilogy: Death’s End, which has to be an exciting climax given how original and expansive book two was.
I’m 3/5ths of the way there now on the running target, feeling good. Let’s see how early I can hit all these marks.
So that’s a wrap on the month of June. This was my best month so far in terms of a consistent plan and feeling more productive with staying on target. Even with an out-of-town trip to visit the Cape and Jacksonville for a few days, which threw a brief wrench into the running plan, I was still able to climb enough above the target line get to my highest mark so far.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
253.54 miles
247.95 miles
500 miles
+5.59
Meditation
1920 minutes
1810 minutes
3650 minutes
+110
Reading
28 books
22.32 books
50 books
+5.68
At some point mid-month I was actually about +10 miles over the goal line for running, but a 4 or 5 day break for that trip chopped it back down. It’s okay, though, since that’s exactly the point in overachieving for brief periods — creating the flexibility to go off-schedule if needed. I completed the Shore Acres running project, got under contract with a buyer for the old house, and had an all-clear follow up visit last weekend.
We’re halfway through the year and still tracking on all the goals. Let’s see what July’s got in store.
Fantastic visualizations from the WSJ team. Shows the history of satellite expansion divided by country, year, and orbits, both LEO and geosynchronous. A great use of maps for storytelling.
This is a concept pulled from Taleb’s The Black Swan, which I recently enjoyed. As he notes, the antilibrary can function as a reminder of how much there is to know, and (as is a main point of The Black Swan, we tend to underestimate the value of what we don’t know).
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Definitely rings familiar, for me, as someone with a large collection of books I’m anxious to read, but may never get to.
The Facebook-designed and sponsored Libra is a more interesting idea than the much-discussed “FacebookCoin” entrance into cryptocurrency that’s been rumored. The gist is that it’s somewhere between an open blockchain and a closed system, with a consortium of funders in place to share control and add stability in the currency. I’m interested to see where this goes given Facebook’s massive reach to expose it to regular people. See also Ben Thompson’s sharp analysis of Libra from earlier this week.
Books are one purchase I don’t restrict my spending on. I’m not a big buyer of “stuff” in general, but I don’t hesitate at all about my money going to reading. I do try to be circumspect to not overwhelm myself, and to limit that spending to ones that I’m highly interested in and likely to read. I tend to think along the same lines as Shane Parrish here (and, by extension, Charlie Munger):
Books contain a vast amount of knowledge and knowing what most other people don’t know is how I make a living. While books can be expensive, ignorance is costlier.
This is why books are necessary. Charlie Munger loved to quote a line from an old machine tool ad: “The man who needs a new machine tool and hasn’t purchased it yet is already paying for it.” You’re already paying for the knowledge you need but don’t have yet.
(I’ll admit, this may be a way to self-justify the expense, but hey, you can waste a lot more money a lot more frivolously than on books.)
In recent years I’ve tried to keep the diet of books diverse between fiction and nonfiction, quick high-level stuff and deeper, richer ones. Since my interests are so varied already, covering a healthy swath of subjects isn’t a challenge. Over the years I’ve discovered my interests leaning toward “first principles” and classics. My very-occasional haulsfromused bookstores show my preference for a lot of original sources and old standards for the library.
I’m also an avid user of Audible and read more (by volume) via audio than print. It’s become so second-nature to me to listen to books, I’ve become much more adept at retention of information from listening than I was before. I still avoid reading deep stuff or books with heavy visuals in audio form if I can. People think I’m crazy when I say I always listen to books while running, but I’ve gotten so used to it that music while exercising sounds weird to me.
Now you might ask: why not support the local library instead of buying? I wholeheartedly support libraries and want them to continue to thrive, but the process of searching for, checking out, and returning books adds overhead to the process of reading that I’d rather not bother with. Not to mention the selection may not even contain half the books I’m looking for. Again, it’s a personal thing. Part of that is due to my own patterns of reading sometimes 4 to 6 books simultaneously, with 1 or 2 in there that might take 6 months to finish. Once my kids get older and start spending time at the library, it may tip my behavior in that direction, as well.
For the second half of the month I got into a good rhythm with every-other-day running. I was even able to push almost 5 miles beyond the pace target to end the month. I started running with the kids again in the jogging stroller, which I haven’t done really at all since Elyse was little (2015-16). It’s good because it gets them out of the house, adds some cargo to push for additional workout, and gives Colette a nice break if I take them when I get home at the end of the day.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
211.61 miles
206.85 miles
500 miles
+4.76
Meditation
1595 minutes
1510 minutes
3650 minutes
+85
Reading
22 books
18.62 books
50 books
+3.38
I was able to do more of what I’d talked about doing in previous months with more frequent, shorter runs rather than having to force the longer ones to stay on pace. Consistency is everything when working on a long-term goal like this. The last 8 sessions have been in the 3-4 mile range, which I feel works well right now — a good balance of exercise without taking too much time, so I can still squeeze them in later in the evening.
With my reading I’ve got too many threads open at the moment. I’m bad about getting 5 or 6 books in progress simultaneously, so sometimes it takes me longer to finish them up. This month I read Matthew Walker’s excellent Why We Sleep1, which is an excellent scientific deep-dive into how sleep works and all of the interplays between sleep quality and other health factors. I’m looking forward to writing up something longer about it here sometime in the next few weeks when I have time.
June has quite a bit lined up both personally and professionally, but I don’t see anything in the way of plowing through on the goals all month.
Check out the 3-part interview series he did with Peter Attia for a good summary of much of his book’s material. ↩
I was able to stay on track this past month toward my 2019 goals.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
164.51 miles
164.38 miles
500 miles
+0.13
Meditation
1285 minutes
1200 minutes
3650 minutes
+85
Reading
19 books
14.79 books
50 books
+4.21
We’re still in the throes of prepping our old house for sale, so between that and work at the new house, that’s occupying a good bit of time. I have a goal to have the house listed in the next couple of weeks, so that’ll be a relief to have successfully behind us. With our All Hands early in the month and a trip to San Diego right after, staying the course was a challenge to make the time. I mentioned last month wanting to do a higher volume of shorter runs. I did a bit better, with 11 runs instead of 9. With a more regular schedule I’m sure I could improve further.
Meditation practice has been steady. I’d still like to work in longer sessions, but I feel the only way I’ll get that done is to wake up early and get started before anyone’s up. I’ve tried 20 minute sessions in the evening once or twice, but by then I’m too tired to focus properly and I end up dozing off. Practicing early in the morning will be a challenge, but I’ll give it a shot a few times this month if I can and see how that goes.
Month three is in the books. A seriously eventful month for us, so I’m surprised I was able to stay ahead of the curve.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
123.65 miles
123.29 miles
500 miles
+0.36
Meditation
975 minutes
900 minutes
3650 minutes
+75
Reading
15 books
11.1 books
50 books
+3.90
We closed on the new house on the 15th, had an out-of-town trip to Jacksonville right after. Plus there was packing, moving, and child-management throughout. With all that going on I’m surprised I was able to stay on track, particularly with the running. I know last month my main observation about my performance was the fewer, longer runs I was planning to avoid. Turns out I didn’t do a great job. This month I’ll chalk that up as intentional — all of the time commitments this month made me push harder on the days I could run to make sure I could get in the miles and stay on track.
There’s still plenty to be done on the house front, but we’re past the worst of it. For April, I’m going to target more frequent runs in the ballpark of 4 miles and see how that works.
We just crossed month number two of the year, so here’s another pulse check on how I’m tracking against some personal goals for 2019. I’m tracking on all fronts, slightly better positioned against the pace marks than I was at the end of January.
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
84.06 miles
80.82 miles
500 miles
+3.24
Meditation
660 minutes
590 minutes
3650 minutes
+70
Reading
10 books
7.27 books
50 books
+2.73
With meditation practice I’ve widened my plus gap more than last month through some longer sessions. Experimenting with longer 15 or 20 minute sessions has been positive, but I don’t want to push that too far and demotivate the daily routine. I’m also still working out how to best fit that practice into my schedule in a consistent way — inconsistency in the timing (sometimes morning, sometimes night) makes it challenging to do longer sessions.
I came out ahead on the running this month. Not losing a week to illness like I did in January certainly helped, but I was able to do a week-long trip out west without disrupting the routine too much. One thing I’ve fallen into over the last couple weeks is fewer, longer runs rather than frequent, shorter ones. It’s been okay for the most part, but I could see that irregularity breaking up the pacing too much, so I need to do better about an “every other day” general goal. Having 2 or sometimes 3 full days off in there requires 10K+ distances to be able to keep on pace (Bill actually wrote on this topic recently, also). Every so often I have an evening where I go out with an intent to do 3.5 to 4 miles, but end up stretching to 6 just because I feel good. It’s fine for that to happen occasionally, but I don’t want to risk injury. Yesterday I did a 3.5-miler with a half-numb mouth (I had just gotten a filling at the dentist less than an hour before), so that was interesting. But I kept on pace!
There were a couple of great books in my reads for the month. In particular John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country is one I’m looking forward to writing about soon.
I haven’t had much time lately to spend on my cartography projects, but that should change in the next couple of months. I’m still rolling with the daily writing routine. There’s no sign of a shortage of topics to write about. I thought this would be much more challenging than it is, but I guess (like any habit) the key is routine. I tend to write longer-form things in spurts where I’ll add to 3 or 4 posts in one sitting so I gradually can build a backlog of content. Post ideas come to me at all times of day, so having a ubiquitous capture method to always log those somewhere is helpful to keep track. Making the time for writing each evening definitely takes commitment. Getting a bunch of it done while I’m “in the zone” helps to lighten the load on other days where I don’t have the mental bandwidth to write very much. For example, on a long flight a few weeks back I wrote about 3 or 4 posts in one sitting.
In other personal news, we’re under contract for a new house in Shore Acres, which is exciting. Will post more here as that develops!
On to March. We’ve got a visit to Jacksonville, Elyse’s spring break, Disney on Ice, and some other fun things planned.
Email is seeing a resurgence in an age when everyone’s been crying that email is dead. The comeback is not so much as a tool for intra-office communication (though it’s still alive and well in most organizations, Slack has overtaken email in ours), but as a publishing medium.
Newsletters have become a popular means for connecting with readers, helping publishers (and especially independent writers) cut through the noise that pervades social media channels. The constant feed of non-stop, clickbait-ish content makes it hard to cut through that waterfall with deep analysis or thoughtful writing.
Blogs are still around, but since they require engaging readers deeply enough to get them to visit your site, it’s challenging to compete with Facebook and Twitter for the attention share.
I still prefer a combination of RSS feeds and Pinboard bookmarks for managing my own feeds (plus Twitter), but I also find some of the new email content folks are putting together to be a nice compromise from the traditional blog. Sort of the best of both worlds combining the longer form subscription to content like blogs + RSS give you with a direct approach to deliver 1 thing per day or week to a place you’ll always see: the email inbox.
Here’s a summary of email newsletters I’ve been enjoying, all of which I read consistently (otherwise I’d unsubscribe!):
The Exponential View — Azeem Azhar on technology, business, trends, society. Full of interesting links and commentary.
Stratechery ($) — The strategy and business of tech, by Ben Thompson. One of the best reads to keep up with the macro industry trends. Lots of original analysis on a variety of topics.
Product Habits — Links about building products, marketing, and startups. Put together by Hiten Shah.
Axios PM — Axios is doing some interesting things with the traditional news model. I use the Axios PM as a daily touchpoint on what’s happening in the wider world of news. Delivered in the afternoon each day.
FT World News ($) — International perspective on the news from around the world.
Daily Stoic — Ryan Holiday’s daily bite of stoicism. Always a good reminder to snap back to reality.
Cleaning the Glass ($) — One of my favorites, with deep analysis of basketball topics from Ben Falk, former analytics guy from the Sixers and Blazers.
These run the gamut; some are free, some I pay for personally, and some we have corporate subscriptions to.
It’s interesting to see these trends ebb and flow. Even as social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook cross the decade mark, having been large, mature platforms for about that long, people are still figuring out how to make use of them on both sides — producers and consumers. Authors are rediscovering that email still provides one of the most predictable form factors for connecting directly with a reader, without having to go through gatekeepers.
This is the first year I set some goals on a few things. I’ve never been strongly goal-oriented, so I thought I’d put some stuff down to hold myself accountable and see if it helps build some healthy habits into my routine. Also, I thought it might be fun, as long as the goals were aggressive but attainable.
For the month of January, here’s how things stack up with each area. We’ve got my progress in the first column, the pace mark I should be at to keep on target, the total goal, and “plus-minus” is where I net out against the goal:
Activity
Progress
Pace
Goal
Plus-Minus
Running
41.77 miles
42.47 miles
500 miles
-0.7
Meditation
340 minutes
320 minutes
3650 minutes
+40
Reading
5 books
3.82 books
50 books
+1.18
I ended January technically behind on running, but caught back up with a 4+ miler today.
I’m ahead of the pace on the other fronts. After 1 month it didn’t feel like a stretch to achieve any of them. Meditation is all about building it in and making the time. Running is about committing and not backing out even when I don’t feel like it. And reading more or less comes naturally, but it leaves little time for things like TV and whatnot. The running target has definitely felt the hardest to keep up with. Part of it was getting behind with a head cold the first week, but even without I’ve got to put in about 10 miles per week to make it happen. What that first week did was demonstrate how hard it is to catch back up after going 8 miles or so into the negative. Too many days missed (vacations, illness, other commitments) could really screw me up.
My nonfiction interests have evolved quite a bit. When I browse what’s new, recent, or recommended I find most of it uninteresting. I now find myself picking up books I wouldn’t have attempted several years back; I’d have been too intimidated by their length or complexity.
But now I’m comfortable with those and interested to visit “first principles” on whatever the topic is. Rather than reading current takes on economics, I’d prefer to pick up Adam Smith, Hayek, or Keynes. Instead of modern political writing, I’ll go for Locke, Hamilton, or Burke.
That’s not to say I don’t enjoy contemporary writing. If newer works make reference to the original thinkers (which any worthwhile ones do), they’ll cite sources you can pick through to build a gold mine of other interesting angles to take on the same subject.
One of the biggest issues that plagues modern publishing is that books are too long. I don’t know enough about the industry to understand the reasoning, but more often than not I find a 300 page nonfiction book could be edited and condensed to 200 pages with no lost meaning or description. In fact it could result in a more concision, making the point quicker. I’m typically not in a hurry to get finished, but an author belaboring a point can diminish its effectiveness. Books in the “self help” category tend to exhibit this problem worse than others, in my experience. Biographies can be long-winded, also; but to me the experience of reading a biography sort of implies that you want to go deep on the subject’s life and experience.
This year’s books made an eclectic list. I don’t make big plans on what my “up next” looks like, but I’ll be curious to look back again this time next year to see how my interests have moved.
⭐️ Where Is My Flying Car?
⭐️ Helgoland
Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution
⭐️ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
A History of Nazi Germany
The Captured Economy
How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
Scene and Structure
⭐️ Underland
A Deep Time Journey
Childhood's End
The Tacit Dimension
⭐️ The Law
The Future and Its Enemies
The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress
Knowledge and Decisions
The Conservative Sensibility
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
A Leadership Fable
