I stumbled across a post from this writing blog recently. It’s oriented toward academic writing, but the archives are a treasure trove of interesting pieces about different aspects of writing — drafting, mechanics, productivity, voice. A ton of interesting articles here.
Substack has entered the arena of the social network wars, taking it to Twitter head-on with a new product called Notes. It’s a short form feed style of posts that runs in a parallel track to your long form newsletter subscriptions (the Inbox), and looks remarkably similar to Twitter. But Substack’s big innovation here for a social network is capitalizing on their subscription-centric model — every other general-use social network on the internet to-date has been based on advertising. From the announcement, how Substack will differentiate:
By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money...
Fernando Borretti gets real on the likely-useless time sink that is the perfectionist “tools-for-thought” space:
People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are. Every node that has utility—an interesting excerpt...
About a year ago I started experimenting with the idea of a daily journal. From someone within the Roam community, I heard about the concept of Morning Pages, which is a tool for creative writers to build a muscle for generating ideas. Author Julia Cameron defined it in her book The Artist’s Way:
Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages—they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about...
Last week I picked up Scene and Structure on a recommendation I saw from Nat Eliason. I’ve seen him mention experimenting with writing fiction, which this book is about — the process of narrative structure, staging scenes, the balance between scenes and “sequels” to maintain coherence and tension through writing novels, which is the author’s background. I’ve thought about testing the waters with fiction writing, even if I never publish it anywhere. I think the NaNoWriMo happens in November, so maybe I’ll make a plan to give it...
When I pumped the brakes on my daily writing routine last year, I had designs on some other interesting projects to spend time on that the daily demand wasn’t giving me space for.
Throughout 2019 and 2020, I’d built a decent muscle for repetition and managing good habits through the accountability of publishing monthly reports on each goal. The first of each month I’d put together my stats on progression. I never shared them...
Earlier this month I passed the 2-year mark of writing on this site every day. If on that first day, deciding to embark on this streak, you’d told me that in October 2020 I’d still be going, 2018 me would’ve laughed it off. Doing it even for a few months sounded impossible.
What helped make it reality was converting writing into a continuous background activity, an ever-present filter for thoughts, ideas, and readings to pass through. Every time I read an article or have an idea, I filter it through the writing lens — Would this make a good article? Do...
David Perell’s been putting out a series of 100 posts, 1 per day, brief essays about writing. I enjoyed this one about the evolutionary, and recombinant, nature of ideas:
All creativity is inspired by other people’s ideas. The faster you embrace that, the more successful you can be as a creative. As Brain Pickings author Maria Popova once said: “Something we all understand on a deep intuitive level, but our creative egos sort of don’t really want to accept: And that is the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came...
Anne-Laure Le Cunff created this simple journaling format that looks interesting:
Open your notebook, write the date at the top of a page, and draw three columns. At the top of each column, write “+” for what worked, “–” for what didn’t go so well, and “→” for what you plan to do next.
I’m overdo for a post on my progress so far with a Morning Pages routine (calling it a “routine” at this point is generous, but I’ve been trying), and this looks like it could be merged with that in some way to add some...
I’ve finally joined the newsletter club! Today I sent out the first issue of a new project, a bi-weekly email newsletter called Res Extensa.
My intent right now is for the newsletter to be a less-frequent companion to the blog, with some highlights of recent things I’ve been reading, writing, or interested in.
As I wrote in the email, I once had an RSS-to-email setup using Mailchimp, for folks who wanted to subscribe to the blog without RSS. It’s a bit clunky, and since I started the daily...
In his latest issue of The Diff, Byrne Hobart looks the economic models behind the boom in independent publishing and unbundling of analysis and journalism happening on platforms like Substack:
Bundles tend to grow until they reach a highly profitable mature state—at which point any change in the underlying audience, or the availability of competing products, seriously weakens their economics. The bigger a bundle gets, the more likely it is that a subset of users are all paying for basically one piece of the bundle, which could be...
I enjoyed this deep, transparent history from Nat Eliason on how he built up his website over the past several years. He covers basic technology, content, habits, promotion, and monetization.
The precis:
Tech stack doesn’t matter as long as it’s reliable, supports what you want to do, and doesn’t get in your way
Habit-forming is hard; being intentional and setting goals is the primary tactic
Topics and content don’t matter as much as you think in the early days; the best way to work it out is to start and gradually zero in on what...
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.
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 ✦
Mermaid is a neat project to add a custom syntax layer in Markdown to support rendering diagrams like flowcharts and sequences.
Roam just recently added support for Mermaid in Roam graphs, which renders your diagram live as you edit the markup in a page. This is useful for adding visuals to pages, but I’ll have to mess around and learn its syntax to get comfortable.
The “digital garden” concept is gaining in popularity. I’ve seen a dozen of them recently, with groups like the Roam community taking to publishing their own open notebooks.
Maggie Appleton (an awesome, prolific member of the #roamcult) created this small library of resources for creating your own garden, along with several examples of others in the community. I still have the idea in my backlog of side projects to look at spinning up an open notebook like this.
Ben Thompson posted this a few days ago, something I’m glad to see getting so many likes and retweets:
Blogs = still the best representation of the Internet’s promise. Everyone should have a site that they own, not just a social media account (which are great for promoting blog posts).
Even as it’s gotten so easy to publish your own content with Wordpress, Substack, Ghost, and even GitHub Pages, we live in a time when personal property on the open web is in decline. The...
In Sönke Ahrens’s book How to Take Smart Notes he describes the “zettelkasten” system (the “slip box”) developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann created the system to help himself organize notes and thoughts in a networked model rather than a structured hierarchy of folders. The zettelkasten system has a few elements to it to help model different types of notes, how and when you should write them, and how you associate ideas together.
The fundamental piece is the “permanent note,” one in which...
This one is a simple Chrome extension that reskins Roam with a minimalist design. It doesn’t 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.
What does it mean to “synthesize” knowledge? Joel Chan, author of this post and professor of human-computer interaction, describes it as “creating a new whole out of components.”
In reading, digesting material, and taking notes, you’re 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 it’s addressing these exact gaps:
Cognitive Overhead (aka Cognitive Load): often the task of specifying formalism is extraneous to the primary task,...
With the lockdown, the kids always at home, and no transitions between personal life and work, I’ve been thinking about how to harness the morning time for thinking more effectively.
My most productive hours are early. I usually get the most bang for my buck first thing when I get started, even if it’s just thinking and not building or writing. In a normal day, I even get a lot out of the commute time, the door-to-door 30 minutes or so between home and work — the transition space lets me clear my head before I dig in. With no...
A sign your tool, library, community, or science has made it is when it gets the awesome lists treatment.
I’ve got an upcoming post in the works on my experiences with Roam so far. Lots of the resources listed here are great primers on how others are using it.
I’m liking so far the process of manually typing notes in Roam from highlights in my books. Something about it feels more efficient and leaves me with more meaningful, succinct notes. This could come in handy, though, if I want to pull all highlights directly from Readwise (which I’m still loving, use it every day).
Been reading more about how others are using Roam the last few days. In this post, Sarah Constantin draws an apt connection to Vannevar Bush’s “memex” concept from his 1945 paper “As We May Think”. It was an early influence on what eventually became hypertext — his memex was an electromechanical device that could record and connect ideas on microfilm storage.
Arguably the Internet forms one big memex today. Bush was right in his prediction that “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear”, that “The patent attorney has on call the millions of...
I’m deeper these days into Roam for info storage and notes. It empowers a looser, free-form version of writing (or as Roam describes it “networked thought”) that’s hard to do in a linear note document. I’ve 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 it’s different from other knowledge management systems.
Tom MacWright on chess. Reduce distraction, increase concentration
Once you have concentration, you realize that there’s another layer: rigor. It’s checking the timer, checking for threats, checking for any of a litany of potential mistakes you might be about to make, a smorgasbord of straightforward opportunities you might miss. Simple rules are easy to forget when you’re feeling the rush of an advantage. But they never become less important.
Might start giving chess a try just to see how I do. Haven’t played in years, but I’m curious.
Venkatesh Rao with his position on the state of text media (the “Four Horsemen of Textopia”), from blogs, to Twitter threading, to ebooks and zines.
On blogs and experimenting:
One element of my broader response to the declining marginal value of virality (both financial and psychological) has been my experimentation with blogchains, a format that a handful of other bloggers have also adopted. I came up with it partly as an anti-viral strategy to actively curtail and reverse traffic growth. I didn’t want to unintentionally end up in a bleeding-red go-big-or-go-home regime, since I have no appetite to go...
Tyler Cowen is one of the most prolific people out there. His batting average on producing high-quality content is unreal. Just following his blog, podcast, and Twitter makes one wonder how he also has time for so much reading, teaching, and any other life activity.
A few good ones from the list:
Much of my writing time is devoted to laying out points of view which are not my own. I recommend this for most of you.
I do serious reading every day.
Every day I ask myself “what did I learn today?”, a question I picked up from...
A great piece from the Atlantic’s George Packer, a transcript of his acceptance speech for the Hitchens Prize.
At a moment when democracy is under siege around the world, these scenes from our literary life sound pretty trivial. But if writers are afraid of the sound of their own voice, then honest, clear, original work is not going to flourish, and without it, the politicians and tech moguls and TV demagogues have less to worry about. It doesn’t matter if you hold impeccable views, or which side of...
A fun piece on William Gibson’s latest work of speculative fiction, Agency. I’ve read a bunch of his bibliography, but my favorites (in order) are still Neuromancer and its sequel, Count Zero.
Here’s an interesting bit of history on writing Neuromancer:
“I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the...
This 2013 piece from Dexter Filkins gives an excellent background on Qasem Soleimani, an important figure now well known after his killing a couple of weeks ago, but prior to that hardly known by anyone other than experts, even with his massive influence in the region.
I’m always intrigued by complicated simulation games. I remember a few of these “real-time” MMO games being popular in the early days of online gaming. Glad to see the genre still kicking in an era of low-attention-span gaming...
Time is our most fundamental constraint. If you use an hour for one thing, you can’t use it for anything else. Time passes, whatever we do with it. It seems beneficial then to figure out the means of using it with the lowest possible opportunity costs. One of the simplest ways to do this is to establish how you’d like to be using your time, then track how you’re using it for a week. Many people find a significant discrepancy. Once we...
Blot is a super-minimal open source blogging system based on plain text files in a folder. It supports markdown, Word docs, images, and HTML — just drag the files into the folder and it generates web pages. I love simple tools like this.
An interesting post from Robert Simmon from Planet. These examples of visualizations and graphics of physical phenomena (maps, cloud diagrams, drawings of insects, planetary motion charts) were all hand-drawn, in an era where specialized photography and sensing weren’t always options.
Inspired by Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, I started posting something every day here last year on October 4th. The 1 year mark passed by and I didn’t even notice. It’s become such a part of my mental routine to keep up with that it’s become pretty painless.
Most of my posts are topics I find interesting or links I run across. I find myself zeroing in on themes that tend to appear in my reading patterns. Through the process I’ve also come up with a few recurring “series” type posts to do regularly:
I’ve been looking for a smooth way to dictate notes and thoughts while hands-free from my phone, particularly while running or driving.
When I run I typically wear one AirPod and have my phone inaccessible in a waistband pouch on my back. Since I’m usually listening to audiobooks while running, I don’t have an easy way to log thoughts or perform the audio equivalent of highlighting things.
I never use Siri at all but for a couple of easy, reliable Shortcuts for dictation. I thought this was a perfect candidate to explore the “Hey Siri” activation support with custom commands...
I’ve linked before to pieces about Amazon’s culture of long-form writing and memos in place of PowerPoint for meetings and conveying new business concepts. In their case, the discipline around this kind of thoroughness comes from the top. In this piece by Jean-Louis Gassée, he references Bezos’s own writing in his famous annual shareholder letters. I read these every year. It’s a great example of a practice I value — using writing and long-form narrative to explain the ins and outs of an idea. Bullets, outlines, and emails leave too much room for ambiguity, and...
Day One is an excellent app for iOS and macOS for personal journaling. I’ve 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. It’s 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...
This is a cool little background post from Ryan Singer explaining the origins and his process behind Shape Up, a web book about product development.
One of the things he did when getting started (with no solid idea of how to approach it) was commit to giving a workshop on how Basecamp worked. This created a deadlined forcing function to compel him to come up with the initial content and framework:
I didn’t know how to write a book. But I did know how to give a workshop. So I put a call out on Twitter....
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 “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed...
Amazon is famous for its “No PowerPoint” policy for meetings, requiring that those calling meetings for any new idea, project, or effort write a narrative document to describe the ins-and-outs of what’s on the table for discussion. These documents get circulated to all the right people beforehand for review, so that the team can really drill in on an aligned objective for the meeting with clear data at their fingertips about the pros and cons.
This piece talks about the experience with this process first-hand from a former employee, bulleted out to help understand how it works:
I’m now a couple of weeks into writing a blog post every day. I started doing it sort of on a whim because I’ve wanted to write more often, and a forcing function of “something” every day at least drives me to do the behavior.
Writing out ideas helps me clarify and expand my thinking. For a number of years I’ve tried to keep a personal journal using an app, to varying degrees of success. I’ll go through periods of doing well, then fall off the wagon. My entries there have always had a more personal edge, like documenting...
I posted a couple weeks ago about moving much of my computing activity to the iPad full time. Part of what I had to crack to make that possible was a writing workflow that supported using the tools I prefer, and a method for publishing and previewing with Jekyll.
I’ve been using Jekyll and GitHub Pages for this site for 5+ years. Other CMS systems are interesting and getting better, but there’s something about the total control and simplicity of static sites that keeps me here. This workflow is great with a full Mac setup, but on...
For the last 7 days I’ve only been using the iPad. I’ve had a 12.9” iPad Pro for about a year, but have only used it in “work mode” occasionally so I don’t have to lug the laptop home all the time. Most of what I do these days doesn’t require full macOS capability, so I’m experimenting in developing the workflow to go tablet-only.
Slack, G Suite apps, mail, calendar, Zoom, Asana, and 1Password covers about 85% of the needs. There are a few things like testing Fulcrum, Salesforce, any code editing, that can still be challenging, but they partially...
I write a ton on the computer, whether it’s for our product blog, internal documents, product help guides, this blog (rarely), or many other things, I tend to stick to the same set of tools for different pieces of my writing workflow.
Everything I write, even things like meeting notes only for myself, I write in Markdown. It’s essentially muscle memory at this point. I write for Jekyll-based websites quite a bit, I write issues and wiki pages on GitHub, I keep my personal journal in Day One, and several other places. All of them...
