What happens if Section 230 is repealed?

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Donald Trump has been pushing hard for Section 230 (part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act) to be repealed, but what happens if is it?

For starters, it’d make things much worse for Trump.

The bulk of Section 230 is this statement:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

In other words, if users post something on a website, the owner of the site can’t be held liable for it (aside for things such as federal crimes). It’s kind of like if you send something illegal through the mail, the USPS doesn’t get in trouble for it. It’s a good thing.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has this to say about the potential of Section 230 being eliminated:

Given the sheer size of user-generated websites it would be infeasible for online intermediaries to prevent objectionable content from cropping up on their site

Rather than face potential liability for their users’ actions, most would likely not host any user content at all or would need to protect themselves by being actively engaged in censoring what we say, what we see, and what we do online.

So what happens if Section 230 is repealed? No one knows for sure, but here are some possibilities:

No more reviews

Amazon and Yelp thrive on Section 230, allowing reviews that they’re not held liable for. Either they’ll need to moderate every single review, but more likely they’d just get rid of them to avoid the risk.

Facebook and Twitter dominate

Facebook and other sites would possibly need to pre-approve every single post and comment. That would be bad enough, but Facebook and a few other large networks are the only ones with the money and staff to do it. There’d be essentially no way for a new social network to compete without a huge budget for staff and moderation.

In Trump’s case, instead of occasionally getting “fact-checked” on Twitter, every Tweet of his would have to be pre-approved and he would no longer have that instant communication channel to the world.

Bye-bye, Wikipedia

Wikipedia is all about user-generated content, so it would disappear very quickly. Basically, anywhere that you can post on someone else’s site (like on social media), your ability to do that would be considerably reduced or removed.

So what should happen?

There’s not an easy answer. A full repeal of 230 would be disaster, but things are pretty messy already when it comes to fake news and censorship. Some tweaks to 230 could be good, but sorting those out will be a painful process. My point today is that the calls to “Repeal 230!” are seemingly misguided, and it’s a much more nuanced discussion that needs to happen.

The next few years should be interesting to watch, and will have massive impacts on how the internet will look in the future.

The Digital Efficiency Framework

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It’s 10:30 Monday morning and you now have 742 unread emails in your inbox. You have three notes you scratched in your notebook, your boss just asked for a few things, and you have no idea what’s in your Evernote anymore. Things are a mess.

Digital tools are great. Never in our history have we had access to so much knowledge, as well as so much access to one another. The consequence is that we are becoming overwhelmed with our digital workload.

As much as I love digital tools, getting out of them is the key. If you can ever finish your digital work for the day, you can then use that time for more valuable offline thinking, time with your family, time for hobbies, or whatever else needs to be done.

My goal with this framework is to help you escape your digital prison, while separating the content from the tools. You’ll hear me talking about things like “consumption lists” and “reference data” in an effort to keep things clean. However, I know that people love to hear about new tools so I’ve included a list of my favorite tools for each area at the end.

Information about this framework, including this post, can always be found at DEFramework.com.

The three parts

The framework ultimately consists of just three areas:

  • Processing, to help manage the stuff that gets thrown your way.
  • Inputs, to help you control what actually gets thrown your way.
  • Growth, to always be improving.

Let’s dig in.

Processing

The first piece of the Digital Efficiency Framework is Processing. Processing is all about managing what comes your way. As things come in throughout the day, you need to be able to quickly put them in their place.

This isn’t really a single step, but a series of actions to take depending on what kind of content arrives in your various inputs (which we’ll discuss in the next segment).

The key to remember is that all inputs must process to zero. These inputs can come from email (a lot of them!), notes to yourself, phone calls, sites you read, etc.

When it comes to inputs, particularly email, many items just need a response or a forward or a quick task done. You should knock those out and archive the email. In many other cases, though, there are a variety of things that could be done.

When it comes to processing the stuff that comes your way, there are really six types of things you need to deal with.

  1. Events – For your calendar
  2. Useful sites – Bookmarks
  3. Things to read/watch – Bookmarks that you really want to get back to which go on your Consumption List
  4. Things to remember to do – Your Task List
  5. Things to just remember – Quotes, stats, names, etc, which go in your Flashcard / SRS tool
  6. Other stuff – Everything else

Let’s dig into each of those.

Events

Some of your inputs will be about an upcoming event; this could be a weekly status meeting, or it could be your dream vacation in Italy. Either way, get those on your calendar.

If your boss emails you and says “Let’s meet next Tuesday at 2:00 about the Acme project”, put that on your calendar, respond, and then archive the email.

Useful Sites

You may come across a useful website, either from something someone sent you or perhaps just in your daily browsing. When it comes to saving sites, there are two ways to save them.

Sites you need often

If you have a site that you need to reference frequently, I often find it best to use the native bookmark tool in your browser. Those tools don’t scale well for a ton of bookmarks, but make it pretty easy to quickly go to your top 20 sites.

In my case, this includes things like Google Photos, weather sites, and various agency tools (CRM, task list).

Sites you just want to save

More common are sites that you just want to save. This could be medical info, Google tips, products you like, information to help with parenting, etc. Those typically should not go in your browser bookmarks or you’ll have a huge mess. I use a different tool for those, which you can find in the tools section at the end.

Things to read/watch

This is different from a normal bookmark. I consider bookmarks to be for reference, for things you may want to look at again. What we’re talking about here are specific items that you want to reach or watch, so these will go on your “consumption list”.

This is a list that you should revisit as frequently as is reasonable so it doesn’t get out of hand. If I come across an article that I really want to read, bookmarking means it’ll likely never get read. Instead, I put it on my consumption list and I know that it’ll resurface again when I have time to work through that list. This works for articles, videos, or anything else that you’d specifically like to dig into when you have some time.

Things to remember to do

Or, put another way, your task list. How you execute that list will be completely up to you and your job, and is really too broad for the scope of this. Just make sure you have a solid, reliable place to put your tasks. Some ideas for this are listed in the tools section at the end.

Things just to remember

This is a system that many people don’t have in place, but I find it invaluable. If you see a great quote or a stat and think “I should remember that”, then do it. Nothing is worse than saying “I should try to remember that quote” and then literally doing nothing to actually try to remember it.

This will go into your “Flashcards / SRS” (Spaced Repetition System) tool. Spaced Repetition is a deep subject, but in short it’s a way to memorize information over time. As you learn each item a bit more deeply, the “repetition” gets further “spaced”, so items may only show up in your flashcards every few months. Once you get it going, you could have hundreds of cards in your system, but only a dozen to review each day. It can be wildly useful. We’ll discuss SRS a bit more as we move forward, and here is a deeper post about SRS if you’d like to learn more.

Other stuff

This is the tricky one, as you’re going to have other things come in that you just want to store somewhere.

Some examples might be:

  • Paint colors used in your house
  • Books you want to read
  • Gift ideas
  • License plate numbers
  • Blog post ideas
  • Contacts
  • Printer cartridge model numbers
  • Code snippets
  • Apps to try
  • Book notes

The list goes on and on. Having a specific place to store that info is huge. There are vastly different approaches that you can take, but having a place to put them is the main thing. As with others, see my tools list at the end for some ideas of where you can store this kind of information.

Now that that you have some pieces in place for processing the inputs that come your way, let’s look at the inputs themselves.

Inputs

Inputs are all of the ways that digital information gets to you. Some of them you can control precisely, some you can control a little, and some you have no control over. The more you can control the inputs feeding your digital life, the better. As things flow into your world, you can use the processing steps from above to deal with them.

Ultimately, the more you can control your inputs the easier it is to get them to zero. As I mentioned before, all inputs must process to zero. Yes, this includes your inbox. This doesn’t mean your work is done, but just that everything is in their proper places (events on the calendar, tasks on the task list, etc).

As David Allen says, it will help you have a “mind like water” and give you amazing clarity to attack the day. You might have a calendar full of meetings, a bunch of stuff you want to read, and 37 items on your task list, but everything is where it belongs and is waiting for you to tackle it when the time is right.

There are three main types of inputs: Controlled inputs, Variable inputs, and Uncontrolled inputs. Let’s look at each three.

Controlled Inputs

These are items that you have 100% control over, because you literally put everything into them. No one else feeds these inputs, and no algorithm has control of them. This is really two areas:

  1. Your flashcard / SRS system, which you should get to zero each day.
  2. Your “consumption list”, which can only hold so much. You may never catch up, but it’s not infinite.

Variable Inputs

This is where most of your stuff will show up, but other people can feed these systems and make them messy. The key here is that they can all be worked to zero. They include:

Email

The best thing you can do for your email is to consider everything in there an action, not a message. Everything needs something from you (even if it’s to just delete the message), so figure out that “something” and move on to the next.

If you leave things hanging around in here, you’re letting other people dictate your priorities.

With every message in your inbox, you can do one of five things:

  1. Delete. Just get rid of it. If you want to keep it around, then “archive” instead, but get it out of your inbox. Related, you should always be unsubscribing like crazy.
  2. Delegate. If someone else needs to handle it, then let them handle it. Forward and move on.
  3. Respond. Some emails need a response, so you’ll need to get back to them.
  4. Defer. Some emails you can just pause on for a bit to see what needs to happen, but these usually turn into “respond” (for details) or put them on your task list.
  5. Do. A lot of emails can just be dealt with immediately, so do it and move on. If someone needs their password reset, then go reset their password. I’m a big believer in to-do lists, but if you can avoid the meta work of adding to a list and just knock it out, do it.

You can also look to move some of your future emails to other systems. For example:

  • Internal emails are frequently being replaced by tools like Slack inside of organizations.
  • Urgent communications can happen via text.
  • Project updates should be in your project management software, not in your inbox.

RSS / News Feeds

I’m becoming a bigger fan of RSS as time goes on. If you’re not familiar with the term, RSS is simply a way for you to get updates from many sites in one place. Rather than you visiting 20 sites to see what’s new, those 20 sites all show up in your RSS reader.

This offers a few huge advantages:

  1. You control the news that comes to you, and you don’t let a never-ending algorithm decide for you.
  2. You don’t need to worry when sites go dormant. If they don’t post an update, it wastes none of your time.
  3. You can process to zero. You have a fixed list of sites you get news from, and they have a fixed list of items. You’ll never hit the bottom of Google News, Reddit, or Facebook, but you can (and should) get your RSS reader to zero fairly often.

You should block a little bit of time each day to clean up your RSS feeds. You don’t necessarily need to read the items in-depth, but just process it to zero. If you see a good idea in there, add it to your to-do list. More often, though, you’ll come across a great story that you want to read so you can add it to your consumption list and move on for now.

Quick Notes

These are notes to yourself that you take during every area of your life. It might be in a meeting, in the car, listening to a podcast, or anything else.

As David Allen has said, “only think about cat food once”. Constantly trying to remember something silly like “don’t forget to pick up cat food” is a huge waste of mental energy. Get thoughts out of your head and onto paper, and then process through them when you have time.

As you’re processing your notes, some can be done immediately (like “change the mouse batteries”), and others need to be processed elsewhere using the steps from before.

Uncontrolled Inputs

Uncontrolled inputs include social media sites, news sites, Reddit, things like that. I consider these to be entertainment, not proper inputs. They’re all neverending, and algorithms heavily dictate what you see.

I’m not saying to avoid them, but treat them how they deserve to be treated — as toys. Get your proper news and ideas via RSS so you can get to zero and move on with your day.

That said, I certainly spend some time in these areas most days, but I don’t rely on any of them for information. Enjoy your time there, chat with friends, but treat them as the entertainment venues that they are.

Certainly there are exceptions, such as if you’re a social media manager, but social sites are explicitly designed to suck you in for as long as possible, so use other methods for your inputs when you can.

Growth

A big part of our era is the never-before-seen ability to become better as time goes on. As with other parts of your digital life, though, the areas in which you can learn can easily spiral out of control as well.

For these areas, visit them as often as you can. Specifically, try to visit and process some of them daily, and some as time allows (which will vary greatly from person-to-person).

Daily

Flashcards / SRS

Try to study these to zero daily. You control what goes in here, so keep it small to make it doable. If you do it correctly, spaced repetition systems are like magic.

RSS / News Feed

As with SRS, try to get this to zero daily. Again, you’re controlling what goes in here, so simply unsubscribe if anything gets too noisy.

As time allows

Your Consumption List

Work through this as you’re able, perhaps even block off some time on your calendar for it. I have a personal task each day to try to read at least one thing from this list.

Books and Podcasts

Any notes from books will typically end up in your Reference Data, and perhaps in your SRS. It’s important to read books (or listen to audiobooks) and listen to podcasts on topics of interest, so making time for them is a big thing. Determining where to fit this into your daily or weekly schedule is up to you, as the opportunities vary greatly among different occupations and stages of life.

Steps to get started

That was a lot to cover! To make it a little easier, there are really just three steps to get started with this:

  1. Get your systems in place
  2. Keep it simple
  3. Focus on consistently getting your inputs to zero.

Get your systems in place

You likely have most of these set up to some degree, but you really need them all so that all of your information has a home.

For most of you, you already have:

  • Calendar
  • Email
  • Bookmarks
  • Tasks
  • A reference system of some kind
  • Quick notes

That means that all you really need to add is:

  • An RSS reader
  • A “to consume” system
  • SRS / Flashboards

These don’t need to be overwhelming items, and you certainly don’t want to make things even more cluttered in your life. Add in the items that you’re missing, and then make regular habits of zeroing out your inputs and getting everything processed to where it needs to be.

Keep it simple

The key to most of these is to take care of what needs to happen on a consistent basis. For example, a 30 minute SRS review that you do a few times a week is worthless; a two minute review that you do every day is much more valuable. Start small, and build up as time goes on if you’re getting value from it.

Focus on consistently getting your inputs to zero

This isn’t too difficult once you get rolling, but you might be in a big mess right now. A good way to start might be to go “instant zero”

  • Email: If your inbox is a huge mess, just move everything to a folder to work on, and keep your main inbox at zero going forward. Work on that “old stuff” folder as you have time.
  • RSS: If you get way behind here, remove the troublemakers that post a ton and just “mark as read” for the rest.
  • Quick notes: Move everything into a folder to work on, or just process through it like mad. Remember that with quick notes you don’t need to “do” the items on each note, but just move it into the right processing bucket. My quick notes sometimes stack up too much because I want to execute directly from there, so I force myself to just process the notes into their proper systems.

My tools

I hope you’ve found this helpful! If you have questions or ideas, please feel free to reach out and I’ll answer what I can.

My specific tools tend to change fairly often, which is why I largely kept them out of this post. However, you can always find an updated list at mickmel.com/tools

Planning for Growth

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I’ve always considered myself to be a pretty good planner, but as I’ve learned more I’ve realized how poor a job I often do. Over the past year, I’ve refined my processes quite a bit and I feel I have things in a much better place (though always looking to improve).

For me, planning really consists of two pieces:

  • Planning for the day/week/quarter/year ahead.
  • Keeping a rough log of what happens so I can use that knowledge going forward.

Planning Ahead

There are a lot of tools out there on goal setting, so we won’t be digging too deeply into that. A good place to start would be books such as “Your Best Year Ever” by Michael Hyatt for help in that area. In terms of goals, I see it essentially like this.

You should have roughly 100 lifetime goals, worked into 10-12 goals each year, perhaps 3 goals each quarter, and then a “big three” each week and each day that point toward those goals. Those daily and weekly big three don’t always point toward your quarterly goals, but should be set with those in mind.

My yearly planning and quarterly planning are similar, where I look at my overall goals and try to plot things out. The weekly and daily planning are where things get tactically useful for you.

Be SMART

This article isn’t about goal setting, but it’s worth touching on how goals should be developed. Ideally your goals should be “SMART”, using the framework that George Doran came up with decades ago.

  • Specific: What exactly are you trying to do? “Get more fit” is not a goal, but “lose 20 pounds” works much better.
  • Measurable: How will you measure what you are doing? Using the example above the “20 pounds” is a very easy metric to track.
  • Attainable: To lose your weight, you might set a goal to run 10 miles every day. That’s specific and measurable, but not likely attainable. Setting goals that are attainable is important. Don’t make them easy, but don’t put them too far out of reach.
  • Relevant: Make sure your goals are relevant to your bigger life plans. A goal might be to complete an Ironman triathlon, but if you don’t have the time or desire to work out that frequently, it will be a difficult goal to attain.
  • Timely: Your goals need a timeline. “Lose 20 pounds” is a good goal, but with no backstop you’re never really behind. “Lose 20 pounds by May 1” sets some guidelines and you can do the math on how to get there.

So if one of your annual goals is to lose 20 pounds, you need to work that into your quarterly goals. Those could be weight measurements, or just activities. For example, your goal for the quarter might be “Go outside and walk at least one mile three times per week”. That’s specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

As you get into your weekly and daily goals, those walks can be part of what you need to do.

Weekly Planning

Much of what I do each week is based on concepts from Michael Hyatt’s “Full Focus Planner”. It’s an excellent paper planner, and really shaped how I handle my weekly planning.

While I no longer use the paper planner (I went back to digital), the lessons from it were invaluable.

People generally work through their weekly planning on Friday afternoon, over the weekend, or on Monday morning. I do mine on Friday afternoons for two big reasons:

  1. If you get it out of the way on Friday, your head will be a bit more clear on the weekend knowing that next week is already firmed up.
  2. If you are confirming meetings for the following week, people are likely to respond on Friday afternoons, but not on Sunday evenings.

Here is an example of how that looks in Roam Research:

No matter what tool I use, the basic content is always essentially the same:

  1. Work through the “Big Three” goals for the upcoming week.
  2. Go through each day of the week individually, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
  3. Add other tasks for the week, such as workouts, car pool, food planning, etc.
  4. Look at wins from the past week.
  5. Ask a few other questions such as:
    1. “What worked and what didn’t?”
    2. “What will you keep, improve, start or stop based on the above?”

I find this 60 minutes each Friday to be some of the most valuable time of the week, as it keeps me focused on my goals, prepared for the week ahead, and cognizant of what happened the previous week.

Daily Planning

My daily planning really consists of two areas. The main one is filling in the scheduled events, for things that I know are coming (meetings, etc). Equally important, though, is tracking the unscheduled events that pop up each day.

Scheduled Events

As part of my weekly planning I look at each individual day in the upcoming week. I manually build out pages for each day coming up, and manually populate it with my plans and goals for the day.

To answer your question, yes, it’s redundant to do it that way, but that’s intentional. Just taking a moment to review each upcoming meeting will give you a chance to jot down ideas for the meeting, confirm details with attendees, or even decide that it’s no longer necessary.

In addition, it can be a good time to add alarms to your phone if you see a situation where you might lose track of time before a meeting and need that nudge.

Here is an example of how I’ve done that in the past, with this sample from Notion:

Unscheduled Events

Perhaps of greater value is keeping a log of unscheduled events that pop up throughout the day. You don’t need to log everything you do (unless you want to), but it’s very valuable to log bigger things. If done right, it’s like magic.

For this, I’m talking about things like random phone calls, unexpected meetings, and content that you consume and find useful (articles, videos, etc).

For those, just add them to your daily log and below is an example of that. The red arrows highlight some of the things I added during the day, like an unexpected call at 2:43pm (“14:43”), various notes on other planned calls, and a new online gaming system that my daughter and I were trying out.

There are two big reasons that I do this.

First, it can be helpful to be able to look back to see when someone called you and how that call went. It takes 30 seconds to jot that down, but could be great to have on hand next week when you have a follow-up call for that.

Second, it can help tie interesting things together. For example, I took some notes at a business luncheon one day and put them in my daily log. A few months later when I was reading a book passage that sounded very familiar, I was able to find that passage in my notes from the luncheon and connect the dots. That led me to dig a bit more into the speaker from that luncheon (Kevin Paul Scott), as well as gain more context around the ideas in the book (Essentialism).

Planning and goal-setting don’t come natural to a lot of folks, but taking the time to set things up can make a huge difference in how smoothly your days go and what you can get out of them.

If you need help getting things organized your end for solid planning, my Roam Research course covers much of this very stuff and will give you a great outline for getting started.

Praise and criticism are both vapor

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In listening to a recent meditation track from Headspace as part of a recent clarity break, the focus of the clip was on this:

purchase prednisone

Praise and criticism are two sides of the same coin. If we believe in one, we believe in the other. Better not to get attached to either.

A similar thought was written by Jack Canfield, in his excellent book The Success Principles:

What others think about you is none of your business.

That’s easier said than done, for sure. We all care what others think, and I’m no exception. As part of writing daily, though, I’m almost certain to come to a poor conclusion or take the wrong side of an argument.

Seth Godin, who I’ve mentioned on this blog many times, has said repeatedly that he’d continue to blog every day even if no one read it. He’s writing primarily for himself, not for us. That’s what I’m trying to do as well.

Hopefully the the process of thinking through my thoughts via this writing will lead to mostly good conclusions. When I get praise for my thoughts, I’ll enjoy that and move on. When criticized, I’ll try to just learn from that and move on as well.

To write more, read more

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m trying to write every day. So far, so good. It’s been excellent, but it’s not always easy. There are times when I’m not sure what to write, and I find the reading is often the solution.

David B. Clear sums it up rather nicely by saying that writers’ block comes from a lack of inputs. Austin Kleon has a similar take, simply saying that problems of output are problems of input.

Read Writing

The first place to start is to read what others are writing. I’m developing a pretty solid process for that, and it helps immensely. I have a variety of reading-related goals that I try to hit every day (and I hit ~most days) and that makes blogging so much easier. As I’m reading and taking notes, I use a #blogideas hashtag in Roam Research and I always have a list of good ideas in there. The more I read, the more I put in there.

As David says, you can go well beyond reading to get ideas:

So don’t just rely on the written word for inspiration — books, blogs, and magazines. Add movies, TV, music, and podcasts to the mix. 

Austin goes a bit further and ties in a bit more overall adventure:

When I stall out, it’s time to start taking things in again: read more, re-read, watch movies, listen to music, go to art museums, travel, take people to lunch, etc. Just being open and alert and on the lookout for That Thing that will get me going again. Getting out the jumper cables and hunting down a battery.

In any case, if you have a desire to do more writing you should feed that habit by reading a lot more too.

More about clarity breaks

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I mentioned the idea of a “clarity break” yesterday and thought I’d unpack it a bit more. It’s a concept that I’ve struggled with over the years, but find great value from when I do it regularly.

The EOS Worldwide blog defines it as:

A clarity break is a regularly scheduled appointment on your calendar with yourself. You define what regular is – a half hour daily, two hours weekly, a half day monthly. It’s up to you. The doing of it is what matters.

Next find a place to meet with yourself… I like Panera Bread personally.

Just take a blank pad with you. Using technology tends to become a distraction. We are tempted to just do one email or just surf the web for that one project back at work. Don’t do it.

Back to you and that blank pad. Stare at it and your mind will help you. The important things will surface. Ideas will pop up. Try it. You’ll be amazed.

It really can be quite amazing, though it’s also rather intimidating. You’re sitting there with a blank piece of paper and nothing worth writing. If you can break past those first few minutes, though, things will start to roll. For me, the content varies a lot: sometimes it’s mostly work-related, sometimes more personal tasks, and sometimes just random. Not every session is perfect, but collectively they add up nicely.

The idea is not unlike your time in the shower, when you let your mind wander and you often come up with new ideas or remember something you were supposed to do. This is just an intentional version of that.

Getting Ready

I’ve done a few things to help make my sessions more useful, and one is better prep. First, I take another look at my calendar for the coming days so I can have that fresh in my mind.

Next, I do a short meditation session with Headspace. I’ve never been much on meditation, but taking three minutes to clear my head before I start is key.

I kind of relate it to this ridiculous scene from “The Waterboy“. Coach Klein leaves his head for a few minutes, but when he’s done he’s ready to dig right in. That’s how I am with Headspace; I try to relax for a few minutes, and when it’s over I snap back and dig in.

Ideas to use

From there, I have a few prompts that I give myself each time.

  • Highlights: What are some things that have gone well recently?
  • Gut Feelings: What am I feeling? What am I nervous about?
  • People: I think about the other three people in my house, and the other six people at our company, one at a time, to see if anything pops up. I’ll often have random thoughts like “Oh yeah, I need to check in with Brooke about project X”.
  • Goals and Priorities: Looking ahead, does anything show up there?
  • Random: I leave a section on the side for any other random things that come to mind.

I don’t do them in order, and I rarely have something in every category. They’re just good prompts to get things rolling and then I follow wherever my thoughts take me.

In my case, I use my reMarkable tablet for these breaks. It has no apps or features, and is essentially just digital paper. No distractions, but can save and sync my notes. Perfect for something like this.

Do you ever intentionally take these kinds of breaks?

My big reading shortcut

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Over the past year I’ve been trying to read a lot more. I’ve succeeded in reading quite a few books, but I’m also “semi-reading” quite a few more. Michael Simmons has coined this as Fractal Reading, and while I don’t follow his practice exactly, it’s pretty close.

Full books

First, there are some books that I simply know I want to read cover to cover. This includes things like Seth Godin’s new book The Practice, or the highly-acclaimed book Caste from Isabel Wilkerson. I buy the book on Amazon and read through it, taking notes along the way.

Other books

Blinkist

For most everything else, I start in Blinkist. Blinkist offers book summaries that are around 15 minutes each, giving a great overview of the book. As of now they have around 4,000 books in their system, and their subscription costs around $16/mo (after a free trial).

As I read through the book on Blinkist, I highlight any areas of interest. When I finish, I skim back through it again and copy my highlights and the “blink headings” into Roam Research.

This gives me a great overview of the book, and at this point I may decide to go read the full book. Either way, my next stop is over to Goodreads.

Goodreads

Among the other features that Goodreads has is a list of “quotes” (highlights) from other readers, sorted by the most highlighted items. This often gets some precise quotes and insights that Blinkist glossed over.

I copy those into Roam Research as well, and I now have a pretty good summary of the book, including quotes and references, and it’s only taken around 40 minutes.

Here’s a good example from “Growth IQ” that I recently read; you’ll notice the sections at the bottom for “Notes from Blinkist” and then “Notes from Goodreads”

Final steps

From here things can go a few directions:

  • I might be done. If it was just an ok book, then I’ve got my highlights and overview, I learned a little bit, and I’m done.
  • I might write about it. Many of the posts on this blog include notes and quotes from books, and many of those came out of this process.
  • I might read the full book. If I find myself wanting more, my next move is to purchase the full book and dive in there.

I tend to subscribe to the advice of “don’t finish bad books”, but I usually come at it from the opposite direction. By following this process first, I rarely find myself in the middle of a “bad book”, and I’m able to get the overall ideas and concepts from many more books this way but still go deep on a full book when I want to.

Personally, my goal each day is to “Blink” one book, and then spend some time (which varies wildly) reading from whatever full books I’m working on. I don’t always hit both, but I often do and it’s working out quite well.

If you need more insight and guidance on how to make this happen, I cover my book/reading techniques quite a bit in my course on Roam Research, so I encourage you to check it out.

Don’t propose on the first date

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Reading Time: < 1 minute

Back in 1997, the show “Dharma & Greg” ran for five seasons on ABC. It was about a couple that decided to skip the messiness of dating and get married the same day they met. Here’s a clip from the first episode if you’ve not seen it before.

It was a great show, and a big reason why is because the concept is crazy. Who would get married on their first date? We all know that’s nuts, but businesses try to do it all the time. Donald Miller, the man behind Storybrand, sums it up nicely:

Would you propose on a first date? Of course not, but that’s how many businesses approach marketing.

The stages of a business relationship somewhat mirror those of a romantic relationship, with three basic steps:

1.    Curiosity
2.    Enlightenment
3.    Commitment

As Donald says, “people do not want to be enlightened about you (get to know you more) unless they are curious about you (you have something that can help them survive), and until they are enlightened about how you can help them survive, they will never commit.“

In business, there are a lot of ways to do this. A great message will help draw people in, ongoing information and “enlightenment” via email and social media will help grow the relationship, and hopefully at some point it will end with a commitment.

Businesses need sales, no doubt, but pushing for it too early can leave a bad impression on the other party and ruin any future chances you might have.

If you want to learn more about this, check out Donald’s book Business Made Simple, or reach out to us at GreenMellen and we can help you take the first steps.

Blogging beats journaling

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

A recent episode of the Focus On This podcast talked about the benefits of writing a daily journal and they were spot on. The three benefits they highlighted were to:

  1. Learn from your own life.
  2. Train your mind.
  3. Cultivate your self-awareness.

You can listen to their full episode to dig more deeply into each of those, but I agree with them. And honestly, if you journal and you’re able to reap those benefits from it, that’s good enough! I don’t mean to slight journaling at all, as it’s a wonderful practice with many benefits.

However, I see blogging as a somewhat more refined form of journaling. I don’t mean refined in the “more elegant” sense of the word, but in the “removing unwanted elements” sense, which is an important thing to do.

Progressive Summarization

Tiago Forte has laid out a system he called “progressive summarization”. His system largely relates to taking notes from books that you read, and repeatedly refining those notes into smaller and smaller bits until you’re left with the perfect summary of what you learned from the book.

This is how I see blogging. My blog posts tend to start with a bunch of disparate notes and ideas, not unlike a journal. If I left it there, I still would have made some neat connections and insights. However, by forcing myself to summarize my thoughts in a more coherent way, I tend to accomplish both forms of refinement: more elegant thoughts (at least compared to my initial random bundle of ideas) with unwanted elements removed.

If anything, my posts are still typically too long. I believe a blog post should be as long as it needs to be, but no longer. As I mentioned in my post about brevity, a better post is often a shorter one. I’ll continue to work to progressively summarize my ideas, largely for the benefit of you the reader, but also to help me gain increased internal clarity.

If you’re wanting to start blogging but you aren’t sure where to start, I’ve published a course on blogging as a “technical course for non-technical people”, to help you get things set up and rolling. Check it out if you’re interested.

Take back your content

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Reading Time: 3 minutes

As of the time of this writing, many people (primarily conservatives) are looking to leave Facebook and move their account over to Parler, the “free speech social network”. I’ve seen quite a few friends “leave” Facebook for Parler, but then they keep posting new stuff on Facebook. Interpret that how you will.

Parler may or may not turn out to be a worthwhile site in the long run, but I think for most people it’s the wrong decision. There are two main reasons why:

1. “no censorship”

Parler billed itself as having no censorship, but they had to change that pretty quickly. There are legal issues to avoid (nudity, etc) but also other things they’ve had to fight back against (photos of fecal matter, death threats, etc) — things worth banning, but starting down the road to increased censorship.

Even worse, moderators that block content aren’t just “the man” blocking your speech — it’s a truly awful job to have, as shown in this story from The Verge last year. Parler may have a different angle on how they censor certain political posts, but censorship is a necessary thing that they’ll need to learn how to handle.

2. $$$

Longer term, money will be a problem. Parler has some rough monetization plans, but it gets tricky very quickly. It costs a typical social media site roughly $10-17 per user, per year to cover their costs. If Parler were to grow to say 27 million users (just 1% the size of Facebook) their costs would be somewhere around $350 million dollars per year. They could find ways to cover that with ads, in theory, but it’d almost certainly come at the cost of your personal data. Perhaps a fair trade-off, but really no different than Facebook and others.

So what to do?

The above aside, this post isn’t about Parler. Some people are upset with how Facebook treats their content, and issues like that will come up on Parler or any other third-party site you choose to use because it’s not your decision. You’re on their playground, so it’s their rules. The solution? Build your own playground.

It takes some work, but tools these days make it quite easy and affordable.

First, set up your own blog. Ideally you’d set up hosting and run things yourself, but that can be tricky when you’re starting out. An easier solution is to just start using WordPress.com. For $4/mo, you can set up your site and have your own address and be off and running. You’re still on their server and potentially subject to their whims, but you have three big things going for you:

  1. No algorithm. What you post gets shown on your page immediately and isn’t filtered.
  2. Backups. You can quickly back up all of your content anytime you want and put it elsewhere.
  3. Your domain. Even if somehow you got kicked off there, you still have your address and all of your content and you can set up shop elsewhere. If you move from Facebook to Parler (or anywhere else), your content doesn’t come with you. I’ve moved this site around a few times in the past 16 years, and every post has come with me.

Second, use an RSS reader to follow others. An RSS reader is essentially just a way to subscribe to any site you want (typically blogs and news sites) and get everything they post. No algorithms to hide things, no weird sorting, just a feed of the stuff you ask for.

For that, you can use a site like Feedly. It works on any device, it’s simple, and the free plan is sufficient for most (with the premium plan just costing $6/mo).

You can still use social media

All of this isn’t to say you should give up social media. Most of your friends are there, and if you just leave it all and start a blog, most of them won’t see it. Use your platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Parler or something else, to help people see your new stuff. There’s a good chance that’s how you found this post.

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If Facebook hides the link to your new post because they don’t like it, that’s a shame but it doesn’t matter — your content still exists on your site and is 100% available to anyone that wants to see it.

It’s easy, but not simple

The steps I described above aren’t difficult, but if you’re new to this stuff you’ll be investing a few hours into setting up a WordPress account, finding a domain name, choosing a theme, etc, and then getting Feedly in place, finding things to follow and going down that road.

By contrast, setting up a new account on Parler takes just a minute or two.

If you’re upset with Facebook for hiding things that you don’t like to be hidden, you need to decide if you really want to fight for your voice, or if you want to just take the easy route and go to Parler instead. It’s your choice.

If you need help getting started, I’ve set up a course on starting your blog from the ground up, intended as a “technical course for non-technical people”. Check it out.