Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. đź’ˇ The Big Idea: 3 Planning Questions to Help You Do More of What Matters. I recently came across a research paper that makes the case that we only follow through on what we intend to do about half the time. The reason for this is something known as the intention-behavior gap, which is defined as the distance between what people mean to do and what they end up doing. One of the big reasons for the intention-behavior gap...
10 days ago • 5 min read
Prefer to read this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Using AI isn’t psychological fraud. Pretending you did the thinking is. I was listening to a recent Deep Life podcast episode last week and heard Cal Newport describe a concept he calls “psychological fraud.” “I think when we read text that we believe a human wrote, we simulate the mind of the [writer] in our mind. We’re actually interacting with this conception of another entity. If you didn’t actually write those...
17 days ago • 5 min read
Prefer to read this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: The Obsidian Web Clipper Works Best When You Use It to Capture Ideas, Not Articles Last week, I published a video on how to use the Obsidian Web Clipper. The whole point of the video is that most of what we clip never gets looked at again, so we should clip a lot less and focus on the ideas, not the text. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the collector’s trap: PKM tools have made collecting almost effortless, and...
24 days ago • 6 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: 3 simple questions can change your life — if you give them enough space. "Just slow down." That sounds like good advice. But it's also nearly impossible to follow when everything is late, and all of it feels urgent. It's tempting to go looking for something new when you feel this way: a new app, a new system, a book that finally explains what you're missing. But you probably don't need a new revelation....
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: The value of your vault comes from what you leave out. A couple of years ago, I was in London for the Relay 10th anniversary show and decided to visit the British Museum. I discovered that the museum has 94 galleries and over 807,000 square feet. That’s about the size of 14 football fields, including end zones. It’s massive. And there are some genuinely fascinating displays, including the Rosetta Stone...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: The Thinking Is the Point Last week, I came across an interesting article by Brennan Kenneth Brown, which asked a very direct question: Has there been a meaningful increase in understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems? His answer was no. He couldn’t find a study, a body of work, or much of anything beyond people on forums reporting that they feel less anxious. What he...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. Last week I listened to the Deep Questions podcast, where Cal Newport warned against a concept he calls checklist productivity—the belief that if you get the right information about the steps that matter and then execute them, success will inevitably follow. The problem is that checklist productivity just plain doesn't work. Anything truly worth doing tends to be difficult. You can't break down something like writing a...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Prefer to read this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Obsidian FINALLY Shipped a Kanban View for Bases. Here’s What You Need to Know. For the last couple of years, I’ve been managing my creative projects in Obsidian using a couple of community plugins and a little bit of duct tape. So when Obsidian 1.14 shipped a native Kanban layout for Bases last week to Catalyst supporters, I got real excited. I’ve wanted this view ever since Bases first shipped. Unfortunately, it’s...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Prefer to read this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Why You Have Trouble Following Through on Things You Say Are Important. Back in June, I attended an Immunity to Change session led by Cat Mulvihill at Jay Clouse’s Lab Offline event. Then last week, Cat joined David & me on the Focused podcast to talk about her Momentum Formula and the roadblocks that keep us from following through on what we say is important. Somewhere in between, I was finally able to overcome one...
2 months ago • 5 min read