Sometimes in a journaling session itās hard to get yourself writing. You need a kickstart, an idea to latch onto and get your brain moving. I know I do when itās 5:30am and I sit down to write.
So I built a simple tool for displaying journaling prompts called Muse. Itās open source on GitHub. You can run it yourself and edit a single file to add or modify the prompts it uses.
This is the first entry in my mission to ship at least one small tool or product each month this year.
So far this year Iāve gone headlong into whatās possible with AI development, specifically using Cursor. Iāve been using it to write code, write blogs, and even write this post.
The potential for āpersonal softwareā is profound here. Thereāve been a few times already where I wanted a simple script for automating something, and it wasnāt even worth bothering to look around for pre-existing ones. I just had Cursor help me make my own. So Iāve decided to ship something once a month: a full project hosted and usable around a single idea.
When it comes to journaling and Morning Pages, I occasionally reference a list of journaling prompts I keep to help me get going. So in that spirit I built this tool, Muse.
Using a bulleted list of prompts in a markdown file, Muse will randomly display a prompt with each roll of the dice. I decided to build it with React and Expo to potentially make it available on mobile.
Iām not sure how much Iāll use it, but itās a fun little project.
The source is on GitHub here. You can modify the prompts.md file to edit or add any of your own prompts, too.
GPT Researcher is an autonomous agent designed for comprehensive online research on a variety of tasks.
The agent can produce detailed, factual and unbiased research reports, with customization options for focusing on relevant resources, outlines, and lessons. Inspired by the recent Plan-and-Solve and RAG papers, GPT Researcher addresses issues of speed, determinism and reliability, offering a more stable performance and increased speed through parallelized agent work, as opposed to synchronous operations.
Iāve been tinkering around with this tool for doing deeper topic research. It uses the ChatGPT API and GPT-4o to conduct multi-phase agent-based research. Adds sources, citations, and can be directed with specific tuning. Very interesting.
Great book, incredible illustrations.
The novelty, design, craftsmanship, execution, cinematography, all unmatched. Absolutely incredible work.
He took a centuries-old, classic bench design and added function to support his specific workflow needs.
I have incredible respect for populating your workspace with beautiful, functional things. If it makes you enjoy the work, youāre more likely to do it, and more likely to push yourself to higher standards.
I recently was getting our Silhouette vinyl cutter back out, since Colette hasnāt used it in a while. The software for the thing is still ancient and janky ā hard to believe anyone uses it at all.
But I found this new tool for creating vector-based designs for any kind of cutting machine ā vinyl printers, CNCs, laser cutters. It looks like an excellent general tool for creating SVGs you can import into all manner of cutting machine proprietary applications.
All the cool conversation is on no-code tools these days, but the OG no-code platform has been around for 35 years: Microsoft Excel. Even from its early days, it had all the hallmarks of todayās no-code tools: a combo of flexibility, forgiveness, and raw power to wrap your hands around data, and to scale your skill level in parallel with the complexity of your output. Excel was one of the first great democratizers of the computer as an assistive building environment, taking the process of building software from requiring low-level code to visual abstraction. Like all great tools for builders, it affords a variable level of power proportional to the capabilities of a user ā a computer novice that knows the principles of math can make basic formulas, someone slightly more proficient might learn a macro, and when graduating to developer status, you could write full programs in VBA.
In this article, Packy McCormick (what a great name) and Ben Rollert go deep on Excel, itās backstory, why itās āLindyā, and modern SaaS businesses building on āunbundlingā Excel into specialized apps.
Jonathan Rauch on pluralism and the necessity of disagreement in the search for truth.
His book Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, but is as relevant today as ever. The book is a defense of what he calls āliberal scienceā, our decentralized process for knowledge discovery that relies on relentless-but-gradual error correction:
Liberal science, by its very nature, has little tolerance for fundamentalism; conversely fundamentalism is a threat to liberal science. Fundamentalism, defined by Rauch as the āsearch for certainty rather than for errors,ā is the antithesis of scientific inquiry. Fundamentalism seeks a monopoly on knowledge from which it can deny the beliefs put forth by all others. Rauch even notes that there are fundamentalist free-marketeersāthose who refuse to accept the possibility that cherished economic axioms may be flawed, or at least in need of revisionāand he challenges them to enhance their intellectual rigor. If classical liberals are willing to accept the self-correcting actions of the marketplace to properly allocate valued resources, they should also allow the self-correcting mechanisms of liberal science to separate knowledge from supposition.
Due to its nature as a decentralized system, liberal science frees knowledge from authoritarian control by self-appointed commissars of truth. āIn an imperfect world, the best insurance we have against truthās being politicized is to put no one in particular in charge of it,ā notes Rauch. Liberal science achieves this end. It avoids despotism in the intellectual realm as it does in those of politics and economics.
A great guide here from Ramses at RoamStack
I set up RoamHackerās Roam42 suite for SmartBlocks a few weeks back, and itās game-changing. Iām still a novice with it and have only used a few of its tools, but this sort of extensibility and programmability is whatās making Roam the most interesting text platform.
This is a solid, brief guide on how to frame Jobs to Be Done statements.
āHelp me brush my teeth in the morningā is not a great example of a Job to Be Done statement.
āHelp me brush my teeth in the morningā is joined at the hip to an existing solution (a toothbrush) and thereās only so far youāll be able to expand your thinking within that bubble.
A way to describe the Job to Be Done when a person is brushing their teeth that could lead to more innovative product design is:
āKeep my teeth healthy.ā
As little as Twitter has moved as a product in the last several years, the amount of time I spend on it clearly demonstrates that thereās gold there that no other product can replace.
If you curate your following list well, the quality level of the interactions you can have and people you can meet are incredible. I havenāt found another social network as good at finding interesting ideas.
A limiting aspect of Twitter is how biased toward ānowā it is1. Itās inherently an ordered timeline. Algorithmic recommendations surface some recent things, but not from beyond a day or so. Much goodness is bound up in the Twitter archives, but itās nearly undiscoverable. If you find an interesting new person to follow, you only get this extremely recent window into their interests.
I saw this new project from developer Geoffrey Litt, something he calls Twemex: a memex for Twitter. It shows promise to resolve this problem. Itās a simple Chrome extension that layers in some missing features for exposing the historical gems embedded in peoplesā timelines. Iāve been using it for a couple weeks and itās an excellent addition to the product.
I'm building an extension that makes Twitter a better memex:
ā Geoffrey Litt (@geoffreylitt) December 13, 2020
āļø Highlights: see someone's best tweets, not just most recent
š On This Day: revisit past tweets for inspiration
š Search: find tweets to quote, w/ shortcuts for useful filters
DM me if you want to try the beta! pic.twitter.com/8dzJg00CyS
It adds a persistent sidebar for all of the pages on Twitter, which includes different things depending on context.
Firstly it has overhauled search. Since it lives in the Twemex sidebar view, you can live search while youāre drafting a thread, finding similar ideas (and filtering down to your past tweets or people you follow) to quickly link into past thoughts.
Second, thereās a fun āOn This Dayā feature that shows on the main timeline feed that resurfaces your own tweets from the same day in years past. Always fun to see what you were into. Sometimes it might even provoke you to revisit old ideas.
And third (my favorite), when you visit a userās Twitter profile, you get a āBest Ofā selection of their past posts. At a quick glance it gives you a sense of previous ideas, links, and material a user posts, which helps you select and curate your following lists better. I follow a lot of people on Twitter, but always first peruse timelines to determine if theyāre worthy of a follow.
Geoffrey shows searching of likes and bookmarks, highlight curation, and profile notes (to let you annotate why you followed someone). All excellent additions thatāll make Twitter so much more useful. Itās still in private beta at the moment, but Iām sure will be available as a public extension early next year. Follow Geoffrey on Twitter to see its development.
Sometimes you run across extensions or add-ons like this that should just be native product features. Twemex should just be the āTwitter Sidebar.ā
Also, as it happens, one of its advantages. Twitter is the best representation of a global water cooler you can find ā©
In his piece āWhy Books Donāt Work,ā 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. Weāve 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 ātransmissionismā mode of teaching.
Matuschak quotes this great passage from Carl Sagan in Cosmos:
What an astonishing thing a book is. Itās 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 youāre 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 thereās no wisdom embedded in fiction ā 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 Iāve mostly forgotten about, certainly in any conscious way thatās 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 readersā 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.
Purely linear transmission is not the best model for understanding, but itās 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 todayās technology. They experimented with this idea in their quantum.country project, using the complex subject of quantum computing combined with a āmnemonic mediumā that integrated spaced repetition testing. The results theyāve shown from this experiment are promising evidence for the technique to increase retention. Itās a simple approach ā interspersing simple questions within the text ā but the problem is one of medium. Our existing reading and teaching tools donāt 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?
One of the most useful tools Iāve discovered in the past year is Readwise, a service thatās working to solve this problem and enhance reading retention through a simple workflow:
Itās 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 arenāt 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 dayās 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, Iāve been able to dredge quite a bit of fleeting knowledge back up into memory. Without a service like Readwise (even with highlighting), itās highly unlikely Iād 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 youāll 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.
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 Iāve 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.
The most commonly used integration is probably their Kindle sync service. Itās 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. Theyāve also got a super slick integration with Notion, if thatās something youāre interested in.
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 theyāve 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 Readwiseās 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.
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 itās 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 snailās pace. Iām not familiar with other audiobook players, but maybe one day thereāll be a way for a new entrant to encroach on Amazonās monopoly in this space.
For podcasts thereās a new player called Airr thatās doing something interesting with this, using a feature they call āAirrQuotes.ā 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 theyāre reading my mind)
Iāve 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. Iāve done this now with my last few books and itās been a fantastic way to parse through the content a second time ā sort of like the first āactive recallā review. This extra passthrough to aggregate thoughts into a system helps drive compound interest on the ideas.
Itās rare for new productivity tools to stick with me this long. All of the tools in my daily routines are ones Iāve 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 youāre an avid reader, youāll love it.
Okay, letās be honest: this is a phenomenal innovation. ā©
Science fiction especially isnāt just my favorite fiction genre for entertainment value, I also believe thereās a lot to be learned about invention, creativity, human behavior, psychology, and more from good speculative works. Check out Dan Wangās comments on this topic. ā©
Iāve been using this a lot lately and itās fantastic. Works great for any books you canāt (or donāt want to) read in e-reader format. ā©
Roam Research already has a deep community of users coalescing around it, building extensions, custom styles, and poking at the edges of how it could be extended. In this post, David Crandall outlines some possibilities of what could be in Roamās future, breaking it out into various ideas at the presentation, service, and database layers. His diagram does a great job articulating what else could be possible with an open Roam API.
Especially interesting to me:
I linked a few weeks ago to a new tool called Memex, a browser extension that touts itself as bookmarking for āpower users of the web.ā Its primary unique differentiator is how they approach the privacy angle.
Iām a couple of weeks into using it and it brings an interesting new approach to the world of bookmarking tools like Pinboard or Raindrop, both of which Iāve used a lot. Raindrop has been my tool of choice lately, but itās heavy for what I really want, which is a simple, fast way to toss things into a box with tagging nomenclature to organize.
On the privacy topic from Wednesdayās post, Memex is approaching their product with similar principles. Itās is a browser extension only with no ācloudā element to it like most other services have. All of your data is stored client-side, and the only attachments to the cloud at all have to be opted-into, like syncing backups to Google Drive. Itās got an open source core also, for maximum transparency on how it works. Reading the vision document gives you a sense of where theyāre headed:
The long-term mission of WorldBrain.io is to enable people to overcome information overload and the influence of misinformation through collaborative online-research.
We canāt research and understand all the topics we are exposed to well enough to not fall for misinformation. But we all are experts in some of those topics and could help each other understand them better ā if we were able to share our existing knowledge more effectively with each other.
Decentralized knowledge management and web annotation is a movement I can get behind. Iām reminded of what Fermatās Library is doing with academic papers ā creating a meta layer of knowledge connection on top research source material. Passages highlighted in Memex could be referenced from other pages to denote connection points or similarities, building a user-generated knowledge graph on top of any internet content.
With Memex you never have to leave the browser. It overlays a small right-hand sidebar on hover with commands for bookmarking, adding tags, or displaying annotations. And theyāre following through on their promise for power users with keyboard shortcuts. It also offers the option of indexing your browser history, which if youāre using DuckDuckGo but still want to archive your history for yourself could be useful. I donāt care much one way or another about this particularly, but itās cool to have the option.
From mobile they have something interesting going. Thereās a āMemex Goā app that works well for quickly bookmarking things from the Share Sheet on iOS. Syncing is a paid feature that works through a pairing process with end-to-end encryption to move data between mobile and desktop, synced over wifi. I havenāt tried this yet but Iām looking forward to checking it out. Seems like occasional syncing is all youād need to move data between desktop and mobile, so this model could work fine.
I donāt think Memex has any integrations yet with other tools, but ones that come to mind that Iād love to see at some point are with two of my favorites: Readwise and Roam. From a technical standpoint Iām not sure how one would integrate a client-side database like what Memex has with a server-side one, but perhaps there could be a āpushā capability to sync data up from Memex on-demand to integration points. With Memexās highlights, perhaps I could decide if and when I want to send my highlights up to Readwise, rather than Readwise doing the pulling. In the case of Roam, even simple tools to drag highlights or bookmarks over as blocks in Roam pages would be a cool addition.
Not that we needed another bookmarking utility, but Memex looks like an interesting take. Itās a browser extension focused on history, bookmarking, and annotation, but all stored in a local database. It has an end-to-end encrypted syncing service, as well.
The roamcult has been on a streak of creating tools to extend and improve Roam Research. Here are a few that Iāve been using lately.
This one is a simple Chrome extension that reskins Roam with a minimalist design. It doesnāt change much about the utilitarian interface, just some simple spacing and colors (plus Dark Mode support).
A simple Chrome extension for clipping quotes into your Roam database. It takes the snippet and source URL and formats them into a nice block to link into your notes.
A toolbox of useful utilities to make Roam better ā FuzzyDate is a quicker way to enter date links, spaced repetition tools for memory, custom CSS, custom shortcuts.
This isnāt really a tool, but this documentation page shows the extensive set of special codes and objects you can use in Roam markup.
I just installed this iPad app for sketching, which intrigued me for a few of its features. Iāve tried dozens of apps, but they tend to fall too far into the art camp or the note-taking camp, without very many that serve both categories well.
My go-to for the last few years has been Notability. Itās great for most of what I want, which is for writing with interspersed sketches and annotations.
Though I havenāt used it much yet, Concepts seems to do well at both. My favorite feature is its infinite canvas, where I can continue sprawling out a sketch in any direction, versus a vertical or constrained sketch space. I guess my main use case tends to be a hybrid of note-taking and brainstorming / mind-mapping, so this one is intriguing so far.
Dan Wang on American industrial production:
Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should think of bolder proposals than sensible but long-proposed tweaks to R&D policies, re-training programs and STEM education.
What the U.S. really needs to do is reconstitute its communities of engineering practice. That will require treating manufacturing work, even in low-margin goods, as fundamentally valuable. Technological sophisticates in Silicon Valley would be wise to drop their dismissive attitude towards manufacturing as a ācommoditizedā activity and treat it as being as valuable as R&D work. And corporate America should start viewing workers not purely as costs to be slashed, but as practitioners keeping alive knowledge essential to the production process.
āBikesheddingā is a common term in tech circles. When starting on a big new software project, start by asking a design team for opinions on which programming language to use and youāll get to see it in action. It applies all over; humans love an opportunity to look like theyāre contributing meaningfully, especially when they perceive that they should know something about the subject:
Bike-shedding happens because the simpler a topic is, the more people will have an opinion on it and thus more to say about it. When something is outside of our circle of competence, like a nuclear power plant, we donāt even try to articulate an opinion.
But when something is just about comprehensible to us, even if we donāt have anything of genuine value to add, we feel compelled to say something, lest we look stupid. What idiot doesnāt have anything to say about a bike shed? Everyone wants to show that they know about the topic at hand and have something to contribute.
Hat-tip to Julian Lehrās recent post for the referral to this one. Itās a simple menubar app that gives you a search interface to unicode symbol sets. The speed here is phenomenal; so much faster than the built-in emoji keyboard (plus it has a much larger library).
What does it mean to āsynthesizeā knowledge? Joel Chan, author of this post and professor of human-computer interaction, describes it as ācreating a new whole out of components.ā
In reading, digesting material, and taking notes, youāre by definition creating small components of information that you then ideally piece together to form knowledge.
The difficulties with synthesis described in the post align well with the reasons I talked about in my review of Roam and how itās addressing these exact gaps:
- Cognitive Overhead (aka Cognitive Load): often the task of specifying formalism is extraneous to the primary task, or is just plain annoying to do.
- Tacit Knowledge: if relevant information for developing formalism is tacit, asking people to formalize it will interrupt the task, with serious consequences for the quality sof the work.
- Enforcing Premature Structure: people donāt want to commit until theyāre sure what formalism is actually useful for their task (and whatās extraneous and only annoying).
- Situational Structure: Useful structures and formalisms vary significantly across people, situations, and tasks.
The idea of āincremental formalizationā is interesting. Tools should favor the free-form mode for exploratory, unbounded thought documentation, and incrementally suggest, expose, or automatically self-organize the information into structures:
Incremental formalization addresses the cognitive overhead problem by spreading it throughout the task a bit more evenly, as well as removing it mostly from the earlier parts of the task, where minimal friction is needed to maximize exploration. It also helps with the premature and situational structure problems, since you donāt have to commit early on to a structure that may not serve you well (or even hurt your performance) later on.
My Roam workflow really does strike this great balance with affording a flexible, open-ended place for stream of consciousness, while the selective insertion of linked references creates emergent order in the system.
We watched this a couple nights ago. Itās hard to tell how objectively good it was, but I loved the heck out of it as a decades-long fan.
Iāll have to try out this tool that Tom built for checking links. When Iāve run those SEM tools that check old links, I get sad seeing how many are redirected, 404ād, or dead.
This is an excellent walkthrough on how to make screencasts. Iāve done my own tinkering around with ScreenFlow to make a few things for Fulcrum. Itās something I want to do more of eventually. A good resource for gear + tools, preparation, and editing.
Roam Research has been making the rounds on the internet in the last couple months. Iāve written a little bit here about it, but promised this longer overview of how itās working for me so far.
Roam is a tool for note-taking, described as a tool for ānetworked thought.ā With a glance on Twitter youāll find all sorts of comparison pieces to Evernote, Google Docs, or Notion. Iāve tried all of those (Notion for quite a bit) and I find the experience of using Roam completely different.
Most applications for notes are both modal and hierarchical. When working on a text document, it lives in a folder with other related files. A half page of notes from a meeting has a specific place it should go. But because you donāt always want to deal with filing things logically, itās easy to end up with thoughts and ideas out of place, caught up and buried in meeting notes because thatās what you had open when a thought popped into your head (or even worse, arbitrary quick captured scratch docs you open once and are promptly disconnected from everything).
Roam solves this problem by destroying the top-down hierarchy of knowledge management tools. Instead of worrying about where to put a new document (Roam calls them āpagesā), you just make a new one anywhere. All pages are peers. Itās like a wiki in that way, but it feels more fluid, more natural and less mechanical. Making new pages is a matter of double-bracketing any word or phrase. With a quick piece of formatting which Roam autocompletes, [[Knowledge Management]] gets its own page, from which I can view the other Linked References. The Linked Reference is the secret weapon, a killer idea well-executed in Roamās simplistic but blazing fast interface. Each page also detects and shows āUnlinkedā references, places where a string appears without an explicit link.
I described it to someone through analogy to a CRM. Roam is a CRM for ideas: call it āIdea Relationship Management.ā Since Iāve been using it as a sort of productivity journal (Tiago Forte calls this the āsecond brain, living in it the whole work day. Itās like an operating system for managing information ā always on, always absorbing new data. And, like a real brain, linked reference synapses form between the information neurons.
The idea graph is what breaks you free of organizational burden. The need to find where to put thinsg, once a point of friction in note-taking (that is, if you ever wanted to be able to find a piece of jotted information again) is gone, replaced by a new way to navigate your knowledge graph via organically produced links.
Hereās a scenario that happens all the time to me (and Iām sure others) that no other tool has handled well until now:
I walk into a product marketing meeting. During the meeting weāre going to solidify our messaging strategy and requirements for a new feature launch. I open up a new file for the meeting Product marketing sync ā 2020-04-13 or similar is a typical nomenclature. That file likely contains bullets and a series of messy individual lines related to things each person is going to do, topics people mentioned, action items for myself (which need to go elsewhere to have a prayer of being remembered). However, interspersed within the discussion I jot random thoughts on sometimes semi-related topics, but sometimes something completely off the reservation, that I still want to capture. During the marketing discussion I get an idea for a future blog post with a couple of topics. Where does that go?
Most commonly today the answer is ānowhereā and Iām lucky if I remember it again. In Roam I just type it in a āRandomā subsection in the bottom of my meeting notes. Who cares where it goes if I can link that by topic from elsewhere?
A quick tip: next to any random, non-sequitur thought like this, put #idea next to it. That then becomes its own page, with Linked References collecting up all the ideas dispersed through your graph.
I love that I can navigate to an abstract idea, like my page about āAntifragility,ā and find all of the articles, books, or other notes that connected with that idea. The ROI happens with Roam once you start rediscovering links or ideas you already noted without making the connection beforehand. Itās like stitching together threads that would have been previously in silos, invisible to one another. If you then also separate those notes in time, its nigh impossible to keep those connections front of mind. I havenāt been using Roam very long yet, but even in a few weeks I stumble back onto notes I wrote that I donāt remember writing.
Information falls out of your head and into your Roam database spontaneously organizing itself, expanding organically. After heavy use for a few weeks, navigating through the database feels like descending into your own Wikipedia rabbit hole ā like swimming through your previous thoughts.
I find myself taking notes on all sorts of things I never used to, or at least rarely did. Here are a few:
Most of that Iāve never kept running notes for, but Roam makes it actually fun to make notes on all of these things. Since I put date tags on a lot of my notes files (if relevant), notching back through the days shows Linked References to things I was working on those days.
For people, any time I have a call or meeting Iāll include a āPeopleā line with links on all their names. Likewise for any mention of them in other pages. Then navigating to a person shows those LRs to all the relevant notes, ideas, conversations, often linked from Daily Notes, so thereās a visible timeline to the references. Itās the closest thing Iāve seen yet to the mythical personal CRM Iāve seen reference to.
A knowledge graph needs some form of interface to navigate around it. Without the top-down hierarchy of a file tree, the root page of a structureless content database would typically feature search as an entry point for navigation. Roam does have an excellent page search, but it has another anchor that I love: Daily Notes. Each day Roam automatically creates a new date-stamped page for that day, which is the default main page when you open the app. Whatās great about this for such a free form system is that you always have that anchor to link from. If you want a new page for a fleeting idea but are worried a new page will be disjointed from your universe of ideas, and donāt want to search for another page that idea might fit, just spawn it off of Daily Notes. Make a āRandomā or āIdeasā section for the day and add it. Iāve been using this technique for quick stuff and it serves a couple of useful purposes:
An added cool thing here, thanks to Linked Reference backlinks, is that any page in which you insert todayās date shows up as a LR under that day.
What I notice in regular usage of Roam, with Daily Notes as the āhome screenā of the tool, is thought taking on an organic structure. The links grow and the dots connect as youāre working. Going and forming connections or describing the organization of your thoughts never need be done with intent ā itās all implied as youāre writing.
In the month that Iāve been actively using it, I have Roam open on my second display all day, with notes continually flowing into the database as they happen. In all the other note-taking tools and systems Iāve used in the past, the friction for tracking ideas was never this low.
Any line can be converted into a to-do with a checkbox, which then appears in a special [[TODO]] page that Roam automatically manages. Itās super fast to toss things in there to remember later, regardless of page locations. I pin the TODO page into my sidebar for quick access. Cmd-enter on any line converts it into a to-do.
Since Iām a Todoist user for all of this before, Iām now waffling on which tool I should use for tasks. Iām still in both, but I can see some hope for eventually moving all of that into Roam since itās solving so many other things related to productivity management. The main struggle is that capture into a to-do list inbox (like what I do with Todoist) from mobile isnāt great yet. Browsing to Roam on your phone takes you to a simple āQuick Captureā interface, which inserts blocks into a #Quick Capture section in your daily notes. This is great to have for the random passing thought to go somewhere, but as Iāve used it so far it still requires me to fold those into appropriate places I want them after the fact. Not bad for ideas, but Iād prefer something more devoted to true to-dos for that purpose.
Another random tip: Questions dawn on me all the time I donāt know the answer to, but want to remember to revisit. At the end of the line Iāll just type a #?? tag. Browsing to the [[??]] page then aggregates all the open questions. h/t to Matthieu Bizien who simplified this for me.
Just search that hashtag and youāll find a community of hundreds of super active, impassioned Roam users all out there evangelizing the product. In some ways, its spartan user interface, semi-opaque shortcuts and tricks about how it works promote cult-like adoption patterns. Its learning curve becomes a badge of honor for a certain type of user. Getting over the hump after a few days of heavy usage delivers a sense of satisfaction if youāre able to tame it to do your bidding.
Some of the product limitations in terms of help and onboarding to expose its power-user features are a function of a small, focused team of a few with a lot to build. Right now itās a power-user tool designed by its intended users. With growth, they plan to expand their product design team which Iām sure will change this rapidly. But it does seem that theyāve embraced the productās opacity to promote the #roamcult. Hopping into the public Slack or looking at videos of how people use it on YouTube will give you an insight into how obsessed the early users are.
The Roam white paper is an excellent resource, recommended to anyone curious about the product direction and the core ideas driving its development. Founder Conor White-Sullivan also has a number of video interviews on YouTube that I found super insightful to get a background on why the product works the way it does. Heās also an interesting person in general, and a great Twitter follow.
Roam has clicked for me as the tool for notes I didnāt know I needed. Iām still learning new ways of using it. Itās fun how adaptive Roam is to change; the process of discovery of new ways of Knowledge Management is rewarding. I can just start formatting a new page however I want, and it doesnāt damage the graph of interconnections.
Iām excited to see where the product goes as it continues to take off.
I found and started testing out Raindrop.io for managing bookmarks. Pinboard has been my go-to for this for years, to which Iāve added the resurrected Instapaper for anything like articles (to support Readwise flow).
The lack of a good mobile app for Pinboard makes that process pretty weak; and Iād say I end up adding half my bookmarks and āread laterā stuff from the iPhone.
I imported all the bookmarks I had in Pinboard over there, which worked perfectly smooth. Raindropās desktop macOS app is fantastic, as well.
Recommended so far. May write about it in more detail later once I get a feel for how it fits into my personal process.
Iām deeper these days into Roam for info storage and notes. It empowers a looser, free-form version of writing (or as Roam describes it ānetworked thoughtā) thatās hard to do in a linear note document. Iāve been working up a post on Roam and where I feel it fitting into my own workflow.
This piece gives a good overview of it and how itās different from other knowledge management systems.
Discovering Readwise a few months ago caused me to resurrect my long-dormant Instapaper account. Instapaper was my go-to āread laterā service, but I also used it as a general bookmark archive. After a while Iād 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. Iām still using Pinboard heavily to archive interesting things, but Iāve found a new use for Instapaper with Readwiseās integration.
Readwiseās 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, youāre well-familiar with the problem of forgetting most of what you read, certainly any details beyond the basic gist of a book.
I didnāt know how much I wanted a tool for this until I started using it.
With its Instapaper integration, itāll sync articles and their highlights into your Readwise archive, which then can be included in your daily reminder digests. Over the years Iāve 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 Iāve 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.
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 theyāve got a full desktop client also, which seems theyāve had for years but I never discovered or tried it out. It turns out to be one of the better applications for reading ebooks Iāve seen, even though Amazon clearly hasnāt cared about it in years (if they ever really did).
The main reading interface looks just like what youāll 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 Iām an aggressive digital highlighter and note-taker, my favorite feature on the full macOS app is the āNotes and Highlightsā 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 arenāt 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.
As a keyboard shortcut user, Iām always on the hunt for ways to keep my hands on the keoard. Shortcut snippet tools like TextExpander are also catnip for speeding up typing. Iāve gotten used to many of the emoji shortcuts in Slack (the colon-based :thumbsup: type snippets), and this extension for Alfred extends this to the wider macOS environment. Pretty handy.
Iāve been home the past couple days to attend to some projects ā getting an aluminum patio cover installed and having shutters put in on most of the windows. My timeās been occupied by holiday season preparation, general housecleaning, and shuttling the kids to their activities. In the downtime Iāve dropped back into a few of my favorite tool restoration YouTube channels to see whatās new.
I watched this great new one from Black Beard Projects where he restores a 1950s-era bench grinder. Degreaser, paint stripper, electrolysis, and a load of elbow grease convert this thing back into a fully functional grinder you could put right back to regular use. I love the new tool heās got for corrosion removal from small parts: an ultrasonic cleaner:
This one from the LADB channel was great: an antique corn sheller that goes from having spent a number of decades exposed to the elements back to its original yellow glory:
Itās hard to watch that beautiful, deep metallic oiled steel get covered up with paint. But I suppose if itās about restoring a 100 year-old tool to be alive for another century, I guess I see the point.
And one close to my personal interests: the My Mechanics channel restoring an old coffee grinder. Iāve watched a ton of these videos and Iām surprised that this oneās the first where Iāve seen a sandblaster for cleaning parts. Maybe since most of these folks are doing this in their garages thatās too specialized of a tool, but it seriously reduces the labor required in cleaning many smaller parts. This restore is pretty extreme; he even machines his own screws with a CNC lathe.
Iād love to try my hand at some simple stuff restoring small hand tools and see what I could do.
This is a handy tool for searching book metadata, built by Tom MacWright. Itās a āuniversal converterā for book IDs in various services, like Goodreads, OpenLibrary, and WorldCat.
Itās open source and also has an API. Iāll have to see about factoring these other IDs into my own Library reading log.
Day One is an excellent app for iOS and macOS for personal journaling. Iāve had it for a number of years, but have always been fairly irregular in my usage. Most of what I log there is photos of the kids and other kid-related memories and activities we do.
This new feature adds support for templates, which give you a bit of a prompt to fill out once a day. Itās an interesting idea to make documenting a more regular activity. When I was more active (prior to using this blog largely in this capacity) I would just scratch down quickly what I was thinking about. But the blank canvas to write on left me stumped sometimes as to what to write. Iāll try out the Day One ā5 Minute PMā template for a couple weeks at night and see where that leads.
Iāve been reading some of Hayekās famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a central thesis for most of his works. His argument was for bottoms-up, decentralized systems of decision-making instead of centralized, top-down systems:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate āgivenā resourcesāif āgivenā is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these ādata.ā It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
This short film of drone footage showcases the amazing, almost-alien, landscapes of Iceland. This guyās channel has a lot of interesting quick films like this.
A fuzzy finder for the command line. Just install it from Homebrew with brew install fzf and improve your file searching on the shell. No more having to remember find command syntax.
This is a new notes app from Brett Terpstra (creator of nvALT) and Fletcher Penney (creator of MultiMarkdown). I used nvALT for years for note taking on my Mac. This new version looks like a slick reboot of that with some more power features. In private beta right now, but hopefully dropping soon.
Progress itself is understudied. By āprogress,ā we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of āProgress Studies.ā
Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen co-authored this piece for The Atlantic making the case for a new science to study how we create progress.
Looking backwards, itās striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past. In antiquity, the ancient Greeks were discoverers of everything from the arch bridge to the spherical earth. By 1100, the successful pursuit of new knowledge was probably most concentrated in parts of China and the Middle East. Along the cultural dimension, the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, and in the process created the masterworks that are still the lifeblood of the local economy. The late 18th and early 19th century saw a burst of progress in Northern England, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In each case, the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort. Present-day instances include places like Silicon Valley in software and Switzerlandās Basel region in life sciences.
George Hotz is the founder of Comma.ai, a machine learning based vehicle automation company. He is an outspoken personality in the field of AI and technology in general. He first gained recognition for being the first person to carrier-unlock an iPhone, and since then has done quite a few interesting things at the intersection of hardware and software.
I was a big del.icio.us user back in the day, pre- and post-Yahoo. For anyone unfamiliar, it was one of the first tools (before Twitter) for sharing web links and making bookmarks social.
I signed up for Pinboard around the time it launched. Creator Maciej CegÅowski had an interesting concept for making his service paid, a tactic that could allow it to generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining and avoid the acquisition & stagnation that del.icio.us suffered at the hands of Yahoo after they acquired it in 2005.
When it launched it cost around $3 to join, a one-time fee to get in the door that could fund development and hosting, but most importantly deter the spam that plagued del.icio.us over time. His idea was to increase the signup fee by a fraction of a cent with each new user, which functioned as a clever way to increase revenue, but to also incentivize those on the fence to get in early.
I stopped using any bookmarking tools for a while, in favor of using Instapaper to bookmark and read later mostly articles and things. But a couple of things pushed me back to Pinboard recently. First there are all the items I want to save and remember that arenāt articles, but just links. Instapaper could certainly save the URL, but thatās not really that serviceās intent. Second is the fact that I donāt even tend to use the in-app reading mode on Instapaper to read articles anyway; most of the time I just click through and read them on their source websites.
Since Iām keeping track of and documenting more of the interesting things I run across here on this site, Pinboard helps to keep and organize them. Pinboardās description as an āanti-social bookmarkingā tool is an apt one, for me. I have all of my bookmarks set to private anyway. Iām not that interested in using it as a sharing mechanism ā got plenty of those already between this blog, Twitter, and others.
For mobile I bought an app called Pinner that works well to add pins right from the iOS share sheet, and also browse bookmarks. Iām liking this setup so far and finding it useful for archiving stuff and using as a read-later tool for the flood of things I get through RSS and Twitter.