Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: The Basics are Pretty Basic A few weeks ago, David & I were recording a Focused feedback episode, and the topic of a minimum viable productivity system came up. And it dawned on me that we really don’t need a whole lot to make sure that we stay focused on what really matters. A calendar. A task manager. A place for notes. That’s basically it. Every workflow, every system, every tweak and optimization...
6 days ago • 7 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. The Big Idea: Your PKM Practice was Secret Tastemaking Training for the AI Era. There’s a recognizable pattern to AI slop. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The “It’s not just X, it’s Y” sentence structure used over and over. The smooth, generic, vaguely helpful tone that could have been written about literally anything. The five-bullet structure where every bullet starts with a strong verb. The “Let me break...
20 days ago • 8 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: How Sahil Bloom Created a New York Times Bestseller Using a Pocket Notebook The author of an instant New York Times bestseller. A newsletter with more than 800,000 subscribers. A back-cover endorsement from the CEO of Apple. These are pretty impressive accomplishments for any creator. And Sahil Bloom proves you can achieve these kinds of results without a complicated system. He doesn’t have a vault of...
27 days ago • 10 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: You Need an Ideal Week Template For years, I’ve been doing something every quarter that almost nobody else I know does. It’s not flashy. Twenty minutes of work sets the architecture for the next twelve weeks of my life. It’s quietly one of the most important planning rituals I have, and the one that makes the biggest difference in whether I actually have time for what’s most important. I sit down with a...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Playing to Play vs. Playing to Win I love me a good quote. I’ve got a whole collection of them inside my Obsidian vault. And the other day, I came across a doozy by Rick Rubin (author of The Creative Act): “We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun.” When I heard that, it kind of stopped me in my tracks. Because I think most of the PKM advice out there quietly...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. A couple of years ago, I built my own habit tracking dashboard in Obsidian. But looking back, that version had a few problems: It relied on a plugin called Tracker that added friction (and occasionally broke when Obsidian updated) It was painfully slow to load whenever you viewed your data Customizing the charts was a pain and meant digging into hard-coded snippets So with an assist from Claude, I rebuilt the whole...
about 2 months ago • 8 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: From a Full Day to an Hour — How I Hired Claude as My YouTube Script Writer I’ve wanted to make book summary videos for a long time. I’ve read the books. I’ve taken detailed notes in Obsidian. I’ve spent 90 minutes on the Bookworm podcast discussing each one at length. The material was all there. But every time I thought about actually making these videos, I ran into the same wall: they took me an...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. Most Obsidian users I talk to don't really know what to do with properties (the YAML metadata at the top of their notes). Which is a shame, because properties are one of the most powerful features in Obsidian for driving a PKM system that actually works. A MacBook Pro with highlighted Obsidian properties. Simply put, properties are structured metadata attached to your notes. They let you organize, sort, filter, and...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. A picture of someone using Obsidian on a laptop. Want to give your Obsidian vault an instant upgrade? In this short newsletter, I want to share 10 quick tips that can help your vault start to feel a little more powerful and a lot easier to use. Use the Quick Switcher — Navigate to any note instantly with ⌘-O, no file browsing required. Bonus tip: configure this to be your mobile quick action for navigating notes easily...
2 months ago • 1 min read