Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: How I Built a Master Content Calendar for All My Writing Projects in Obsidian. This week, I spent some time figuring out how to create a master content calendar in Obsidian. I wanted something that would show me all the newsletters, blog posts, video scripts, and other broadcast emails I needed to send all in one place. But this isn't what I set out to build. This entire project started with what I...
9 days ago • 5 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Some Great Gift Ideas for Tough-to-Shop-for Nerds. Every year, I get invited by Chuck Joiner to be a guest on one of his MacVoices Holiday Gift Guide episodes. He does several rounds each year, and each round has four guests who each make four picks. By the end, there is a long list of great tech gift ideas. But I always feel a little out of place since I always end up picking at least one analog item....
16 days ago • 12 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Gratitude is Essential for Living a Life of Intention & Meaning We’re coming off the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, which for many is a time of being grateful. Gathering with family and friends spotlights the important relationships in our lives and makes us thankful for what we have. For others, the holidays can be one of the most difficult times of the year. Maybe there are some particularly...
24 days ago • 3 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Design Thinking is Crucial to PKM The Nathan Barry Show is one of the podcasts that has earned a spot in my regular rotation. Normally, the Kit founder does a great job interviewing creators about their businesses. But last week, he had a very different kind of episode where he interviewed Stanford Design professors Bill Burnett & Dave Evans about their "Design Your Life" framework. During the episode,...
30 days ago • 3 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Mind Mapping is an Important Part of Any PKM System. You've been doing everything right with your PKM system. You're capturing notes. Creating links. Adding tags. Building your knowledge base in Obsidian. But when it comes time to actually CREATE something from all those notes? You hit a wall. That's because there's a gap between collecting information and generating insights. And there's a specific...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Your PKM System Has to Have an Output. Recently, I read a newsletter by Ali Abdaal where he talked about an idea he called the creation-to-consumption ratio. It’s a simple formula: # of hours spent creating ÷ # of hours spent consuming For example, if you spent 10 hours consuming content made by other people in the last week and only 2 hours creating something of your own, you would have a .2 ratio. But...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Not All Core Plugins Are Created Equal. Obsidian ships with a bunch of core plugins, but some are definitely more useful than others. This week, I completed a full tier list ranking of all 30 core plugins. My tier list rankings for all 30 Obsidian Core plugins. If you don't recognize the icons, it's because I made them all myself 😂 Here's the full breakdown of my Core plugin tier lists rankings: S Tier...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Humans Are the Ultimate Context Machines One of my favorite new podcasts is the AI & I podcast with Dan Shipper. It's a great podcast if you're looking to make sense of the rapidly evolving AI landscape. One of my favorite episodes was the recent interview Dan did with Box CEO Aaron Levie about the role of AI and why he believes it won't take your job. Aaron does a great job of explaining what the...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Want to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Simplify Your Ideas to Get More Out of Them. Richard Feynman was not only a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, he was also called “The Great Explainer” for his ability to break down complicated ideas and communicate them to others in a simple, intuitive way. He’s also the inventor of The Feynman Technique, a method for developing a deep understanding of complex topics that has a lot of PKM parallels for...
2 months ago • 3 min read