Don’t start tomorrow

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If you’re thinking of starting a blog, or writing a book, or exercising, or anything else, a good time to start would be tomorrow. A better time to start would be today.

In his book The War of Art, author Steven Pressfield says:

We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead we say, “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”

Starting “tomorrow” can be a way to push things off forever, as tomorrow will never come.

You don’t have to finish today — just start. Even if you don’t have time, you can still get started right now.

Buy the domain name for your blog.

Start a Google Doc with some notes on the first chapter of your book.

Go walk for 10 minutes on the treadmill.

Getting the first step out of the way makes the second step much, much easier to take.

Highlighting a physical book

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When I’m reading, probably about 99% of the books I read are on Kindle. It’s simple, efficient, and makes highlighting super easy. Not only can I highlight on Kindle with a few taps, but I can easily grab them all from the Kindle website to pull into Roam Research (kind of like I describe here).

However, with my pile of books that I’m reading for the altMBA, I needed to find a way to easy highlight them. I figured I had three options.

  1. Readwise has a great mobile app that lets you snap pictures of a page of text, and it’ll covert it to digital text and let you highlight and save it. Pretty slick!
  2. I could grab a marker and literally highlight the book.
  3. I could use little “page marker” arrows to track highlights.

I discounted #1 because it seemed a bit of a disruption to reading. It may leave me in better shape at the end, but kind of a pain during to pull out the phone, take a picture, and then highlight each relevant passage.

With #2, I’d have to flip through every page of the book again to find and collect my highlights.

So, I went with #3 and it’s worked great! I bought a pack of super cheap arrows from Amazon (I got these, but there are literally hundreds of options that would work).

The result?

A messy looking book, but relatively quick to go to each tab, copy the text into Roam Research (ideally along with some of my own commentary on why I saved it), and then remove the tab to leave the book undamaged.

I’m curious about you. If you mark up one-time books for later learning (I’m not talking about things like the Bible, where permanent highlights and notes could be helpful), how do you choose to go about it?

Faster typing is always to your benefit

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I mentioned a few weeks ago that continually improving your typing speed is something you should be working on, but I thought I’d add a bit more about that. First, here is that great video from Ali Abdaal again with his tips on typing:

There are really two things you need to do in order to type more quickly. There are lots of little tips that Ali shows off above, but these two are the main ones:

Practice

It seems obvious, but practice makes perfect. I type quite a lot in my normal daily work (like blogging…), but I rarely made a specific effort to improve my speed. I now try to spend a few minutes each day working on it, and it’s making a big difference. I’m not as fast as Ali is in the video above, but I’ve gone from around 80 words per minute to around 110 in the past few weeks. When writing frequently, it makes a big difference! My practice, when time allows, is these three sites:

  1. I start with keybr. It uses mostly fake words, but works through various specific exercises (with fancy algorithms) to help improve your skills where it detects you are struggling the most.
  2. After that, I play a few rounds of Nitro Type. It’s a fun little game where you compete against other players around the world and it’s a good way to put in some work.
  3. Lastly, I’ll do a test on 10 Fast Fingers to see where things stand. They have good training pieces as well, but at this point I’ve already been at it for 10-15 minutes, which is plenty, so I’ll do a test, save my score, and move on with my day.

Get a quality keyboard

There are many disagreements about the “best” kind of keyboard, but a quality keyboard can make a big difference. I’m a big fan of mechanical keyboards (the “clicky” kind), but different folks like different keyboards.

Generally speaking, the keyboard that comes with your computer (whether it’s a laptop or a desktop) isn’t ideal, and spending a few dollars can help quite a bit.

Increased typing speed, combined with a text expander and some keyboard shortcuts can make you incredibly more productive and is worth spending some time developing.

Some things are worse in order to get better

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Some things come along that just don’t make sense at first. A good example is the digital camera — the first ones took nearly unrecognizable pictures, and even early consumer models took very poor quality pictures compared to traditional cameras.

You could look at it one of two ways:

  1. My normal camera is way better than this.
  2. Yes, but these will be better than my old camera as the technology grows up.

These days, most of us carry a camera in our pocket that is far superior to any camera that the generation before us could get their hands on.

You can follow this line of thinking to other technology-focused items, like electric cars, but it applies to learning too.

Keyboard shortcuts

A mentioned a few days ago how I used the web for an hour without a mouse. It was largely to appreciate how impaired users are forced to browse, but also to improve my own use of keyboard shortcuts.

When you first start learning keyboard shortcuts, they’re mostly silly. It’s way faster to just use the mouse to accomplish the same thing. And you’re right — until you’re wrong. Over time, learning a healthy number of keyboard shortcuts will almost certainly save you a great deal of time.

As you saw in my “no mouse” post, some things are just hard to do without a mouse, so I’m not suggesting you rid yourself of it entirely. Just be sure to things like keyboard shortcuts a fair chance, and you might be surprised at how helpful they can become.

Why Seth Godin doesn’t tweet

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Seth Godin doesn’t use Twitter. He has a Twitter account for his blog, but it’s just for his team to share his latest posts.

He’s made it clear before that he doesn’t have a problem with Twitter, and thinks some people make great use of it. In terms of his time and his focus, it’s just not where he wants to. As I’ve said before, it’s not that he’s necessarily “too busy”, but just that it likely is not a priority for him.

I’ve long been kinda bummed about that, simply because I think he’d have some great things to share on Twitter. It hit me today that he indeed does have great things to share on Twitter, but instead of quickly tweeting them he takes the time to develop those thoughts into more robust ideas and publish them on his blog.

Three kinds of Twitter users

In taking this further, I think Twitter users can be loosely grouped into three categories.

First, you have the Twitter-heavy folks. These are people that tweet fairly often, and tend to have great things to say. They’re good to follow on Twitter for their insights, as that’s their primary place to go.

Next, you have the Twitter-assisted people. These are folks that share ideas on Twitter for the use of crowd-sourcing responses and fully fleshing out their idea. Once they’ve gotten feedback and shaped their view a bit more, it becomes a full blog post.

Lastly, you have the Twitter-lite users, and I’d put myself in this group. I share my blog-produced thoughts on Twitter, follow and interact with other folks from time to time, but don’t produce a ton of unique content on there.

I’ve felt that I “should” be publishing more frequently on sites like Twitter, and maybe that’s accurate, but I’m finding the the work to publish full blog posts every day consumes much of the time that I would otherwise spend on there.

The Mona Lisa

Cal Newport wrote a post about why the Mona Lisa is famous despite not tweeting, and I think summarizes my thoughts pretty well with this quote:

…you’re almost certainly better off taking the 135 minutes per day the average social media user spends on these services and instead dedicate them to deliberately improving your ability to do valuable things.

Tweet if you want. I’ll likely follow you, enjoy your insights, and think more highly of you. However, also consider easing off on traditional social media a bit and put your time into content that will last.

Stand up and work

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I’ve long thought that having a standing desk at home would be helpful, but couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work in our house. I have a pretty hefty desk with three screens (old photo here) and none of the solutions I could find seemed right.

Then I realized, with the help of my wife, that I could just put a second desk right behind where I set — literally swivel my chair 180 degrees and stand up. It works!

I already had the laptop, a Google Pixelbook Go (sort of a high-end Chromebook), so I picked up a few things to help make it work a little better. Really the laptop alone would have been sufficient, but I figured if I could make a more productive place to work, I might use it more often. To go with the laptop, I picked up a cheap HP monitor and a separate keyboard and mouse. The full list of items is at the end of this post.

With just those, I now have a lot better space to work.

Software and syncing

Because my life is essentially 100% in the cloud, going from sitting at the main desk to standing at the Chromebook is fairly seamless. I keep my main tabs open on both (email, calendar, Slack, Notion, etc) so they both stay in sync.

The challenge is with open documents; I generally have 5-10 tabs open with various projects that I’m working on. I can easily open them on the laptop as well, as they’re all in Google Drive, but keeping “matching tabs” open is not really feasible.

For what I’m doing for now, though, that’s ok. I can stand up, open up the document or two that I need to work on, and then go sit back down a bit later.

When I post about new ideas and plans in this blog, some stick and some don’t. Here’s to hoping this one sticks.

Full list of items I used for this:

A better use of text expanders

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I’ve loved the idea of text expanders for a long time, tools that allow you to type a short snippet like “;addr” and it instantly converts into a full string (such as your full mailing address).

Over time though, I’m finding it more helpful to use it for specific quick keys rather than expanding larger blocks of text for a few reasons.

Learn to type quickly

If you spend much time at a computer each day, it’s worth taking some time to learn to type more quickly, as the results will save you many hours in the future. Ali Abdaal has a great video about that, which you can see here:

He encourages the use of the 10 Fast Fingers site, which I agree with. Spend some time working on your typing, no matter how fast or slow you are right now.

Tricky product keys

By typing quickly, I have less need for some of the common uses of text expanders. However, I am finding some great benefit to putting license keys and similar items in there.

For example, with virtually every website that we build we include the Akismet (anti-spam) and SEOPress (search engine optimization) plugins. We have developer licenses for each, which requires us to enter a long product key each time (like “a7we3bvn1plqb”). Rather than looking it up, I can just type “k.akismet” or “k.seo” and it autocompletes into the keys for those products.

Calendar Links

The other useful one is for my calendar links. We have a booking system that we use that allows us to share a link with people and it let’s them book a free time based on our calendar. It’s a fairly long link, though, so I can just type “c.30” for a 30 minute link or “c.60” for a 60 minute link. I use those a lot, so this is a great time saver.

Prepended Letter

The key with a text expander is that you don’t have to “fire” it with a special key; it just looks for a precise text snippet and auto-replaces it. This is why I can’t just have “akismet” as my key, as I often type that and don’t want it to be replaced. I prepend it with “k” (for “key”) to make it unique, while keeping it short. Same with the “c” for “calendar” on the other links.

Tools

I’m currently using Text Blaze for my expansion, as it’s a Chrome app so it follows me around to my different computers (including Chromebooks).

If you’re on a Mac, I’ve heard wonderful things about Alfred and it’s likely worth giving a shot.

If you already use a text expander, leave a comment below with some of your best use cases for it.

How does interstitial journaling work?

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A few months ago I said that I think blogging beats journaling, for a number of reasons. I still stand by that, but that’s certainly not to say that journaling is a bad thing.

I recently read an article from Anne-Laure Le Cuff about the idea of interstitial journaling, and it seems to work well with my daily flow.

The basic idea is that you combine your note-taking, tasks and time tracking in one workflow, and using Roam Research is perfect for that. In my case, I already have my daily calendar in Roam, along with note-taking and tasks, so I was somewhat doing this already.

Here’s a quick video to show you more of what I’m doing with this:

You’ll never be ready, so do it now

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I’m an Eagle Scout, so I know the motto “Be Prepared”. Going into something blind is often foolish.

However, many people have a tendency to overprepare and never quite get to the point of publishing. The difference between “bad” and “perfect” is pretty wide, but it will literally never be perfect. That is essentially the push in Seth Godin’s new book The Practice, and is summarized well in an older quote from Hugh Laurie.

It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.

I know you have a great idea bouncing around in your head, for a book you want to write, or a song you’re putting together, or something like that. Taking the time to do it right is important, but don’t wait too long.

Get it out there.

Share it.

If you’re not quite sure what you have yet, then perhaps share it via some learning in public to help pull out your thoughts. If you do start a new blog, digital garden, book, or anything else, leave a comment and share it with us.

If you don’t yet have a blog and you’re not sure how to get started, I’ve set up a “technical course for non-technical people” to help you get started. Check it out here if you’re interested.

Learning without memory is fruitless

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As I’m taking the time to read and write more often, I’m also trying to work on ways to better retain what I’m learning. For years, I’d read books and pick up new ideas, but those ideas would quickly fade in the months after reading the book.

Because of that, when I read books now I often wonder if maybe I’ve read that same book in the past and simply don’t remember it, as I explained about “Essentialism” in this post a while back.

That post about Roam Research is a big part helping me remember what I read, and I outlined it a bit more in the post about my big reading shortcut. In many cases, I’m literally putting more effort into remembering what I read than I actually put into the reading itself.

Anki and Memory Palaces

I’ve mentioned other memory tools that I’ve used, such as Anki, which gives me a handful of flashcards each day to help me recall things that I’ve chosen to remember. I get into more depth about Anki in my post about the Digital Efficiency Framework if you want to see how it fits into my day.

There are also techniques like The Memory Palace that I’ve read about and understand, but really haven’t make much use of. Joe Turner does an excellent job of teaching some of those kinds of techniques, so reach out to him if you need help with learning new memory hacks.

Daily Stuff

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More recently, though, I’m trying to work on the other daily ways to help improve memory. This includes:

It’s easier said than done, but hopefully as I get better in those four areas, it’ll help with clarity of my mind as well.

Do you do anything intentional to help with your memory? Let me know in the comments.