Blogging beats journaling

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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.

Priorities? Priority.

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When building websites, we help our clients determine what the main purpose of each page of the site is for. At times, it can be difficult to narrow down to a single goal. At rare times, it gets a out of control and “everything on the page is important”.

If everything on a page is important, then nothing stands out and it’s just hard to read. All bold, all large fonts, and all a huge mess.

Greg McKeown said it well in his book Essentialism:

The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things.

For a page on a website, you need to find the goal for the page and have the content on the page work toward that goal.

Personally, though, I don’t follow that exactly and I tend to subscribe to the idea of the the “big three”:

  • Three big things you want to tackle this quarter, working toward your yearly goals.
  • Three big things you want to tackle this week, ideally with one or two of them working toward your quarterly big three.
  • Three big things you want to tackle today, ideally with one or two of them working toward your weekly big three.

However you sort it out, you can’t have unlimited priorities or nothing will get done. Figure out what’s important to you and make sure to intentionally devote time to taking care of those things.

Blend It All

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There’s a thought that everyone should have a clear “work/life balance” — one part of your life is work, one is personal, and never the two shall cross. While that may be necessary for some of us, for most I think it can be a nice blending of the two.

I see three areas where a blending can be good: Your schedule, your contacts, and your notes.

Scheduled Variety

I read some about this in the great book Off Balance, but my business partner Ali exemplifies it best by following what she calls “scheduled variety” — intentionally letting work and personal schedules blend together a bit to get the best of both.

Rather than saying that “work is 9-5”, you might catch up on a few emails at 8, work may “start” at 9, then you have lunch with your spouse, work for three more hours, catch a 4:00 yoga class, and polish up a proposal before bed. Your company may or may not allow this, but it’s a great way to stay energized if you’re allowed to.

All of your contacts

For a while, I tried to keep a separate list of “personal” and “business” contacts. It’s easy enough to do, because most people have separate email accounts and contacts tend to go with those. However, I found that I was duplicating a lot of people on both lists, which made it harder to keep things accurate. Ultimately, I blended them into a single contacts list (that syncs to both accounts) and things are much easier.

Not only do I no longer have to figure out if someone is a “personal” or “business” contact, removing the duplicates made it much easier to keep their info accurate.

If your contacts are all in Google, something like Contacts+ can take care of it for you. If you have Outlook or other areas to connect, try PieSync.

One set of notes

While all of us have official internal work notes for company-wide things like client info, we also tend to have our own work notes — ideas we have, short to-do lists, and many other things. I find that people often try to separate those away from their “personal” notes, but I again vote for blending them.

I follow a lot of productivity groups online, and often see questions about how best to split up personal and business notes. This could be using Evernote, Notion, Roam Research or anything; the tool doesn’t really matter. People try to split them up and find that it’s messy, but they’re often missing the bigger point — those notes should be in one bucket.

In my case, I keep my notes in Roam Research and they’re my notes — the personal me, the business me, the spiritual me, etc. Anything about me goes in one place. There are a couple of clear advantages:

  • Less meta work. You don’t have to think about which area something is for, you can just put it in your notes and move on.
  • With many systems (like Roam), you may find things tie together in interesting ways. One of my favorite examples relates to some notes I took about the book Essentialism; I heard some great tips for improving my life, while at a business event at my church. I have no idea which bucket it would go into if I had tried to split that out. As a consequence, I’ve been able to use ideas from that talk (and book) in all three aspects of my life.

Blending might not work for everyone, and a big part of that will depend on your company and your role. If you can, though, try to blend it all and reap the benefits.

Always Treat Next Week Like Vacation

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You know the feeling. It’s Friday afternoon, the big vacation starts in a few hours, and you’re flying around the office getting things done. At the end of the day, you feel great, and you know it’s because vacation is starting.

And you’re right — but that’s not the only reason. You also probably feel great about your work, because you’re likely on top of your game right now. David Allen said it well in his popular book Getting Things Done:

Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly.

This is easier said than done, but it’s 100% true. If you can regularly keep your inbox cleaned up, your to-do list organized, and have a solid feel for where all of your projects stand, you’ll feel great about your work and what you’re accomplishing.

If you’re not sure how to make that happen, start with his book and go from there.

Calendar containers instead of calendar blocks

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

For years I’ve mostly understood the value of building “calendar blocks”, but I’ve always resisted. I know some people that use them and use them well, but something just didn’t work for me. However, a few weeks ago Jason Blumer presented them as calendar containers instead instead of calendar blocks, and it all suddenly clicked for me.

I’ve never been one to put my to-do items on a calendar, and that’s kind of what calendar blocking felt like to me. However, instead of putting items on your calendar for things to do, you put items on the calendar for the type of work you want to do (“containers”), and then slowly fill it with the actual work (“blocks”).

Ali and I have been plotting out our blocks for a few weeks, and Monday it starts for real. Here’s how my containers look with very few actual items in them; the gray boxes are the containers and the blue boxes are actual appointments. (Note: this screenshot is from a few months into the future so it’s pretty clean):

9 to 5

When building these out we decided to fill every minute between 9-5, Monday-Friday, as you can see above. The main reason for this was to avoid leaving any gaps for our scheduling apps to mistakenly consume. By blocking the full day, we can control exactly when our time can be taken by others.

Some of the containers will likely never get filled with blocks. For example, my “pipeline outreach” time on Monday will just be me working through our sales pipeline, so no need for anything else. The same with all of the “lunch and email” containers.

Other areas will get filled manually by me, such as the “networking”, “team care”, “marketing / growth” and a few others. Those are marked as “busy” in my calendar so that they can’t easily be filled by others, but I can add pieces to them as needed by my team, our goals, etc.

Call windows

The items I mentioned above are all marked as “busy” in Google Calendar, but the various “call window” containers four days per week are tagged as “free”. This allows us to still send out calendar links (explained in the “software” section below) so people can book a time slot to chat with us without all of the back-and-forth that often goes into that.

In our case, the Monday and Friday call windows are intended for 1:1 calls that I personally might have, and the Tuesday and Thursday call windows are for Ali and I together (and perhaps other teammates) with someone. If we send a booking link to someone that wants a call with us, those “call window” blocks are free and can be picked from (assuming no other meetings are already in there for that time slot).

Here’s a look at a week that is starting to fill up:

The time is still yours

Despite how things are set up, you can still allow yourself the freedom to change as needed. If someone reaches out and wants to chat at 10:00 on Monday, I can make that decision — is that call more important than the “billing” block already on there? Maybe so, maybe not. The power is in your hands.

Prior to implementing this, if someone wanted my time three weeks from now, it was almost certainly free on the calendar and an easy “yes”. This led to an often overwhelming calendar. Now I have a better grasp on what I need to really be focusing on, even three weeks out, and can answer their request through that lens.

Your ideal week

While I no longer use the Full Focus Planner, I still am practicing many of the concepts that it taught me. One of those is the “ideal week”, where you lay out how things should go if you were in full control of your calendar. Sort of by accident, that’s exactly what this is! I can define my perfectly laid out week, and then follow it to the extent possible.

For a bit more about that, this episode from the “Focus on This” podcast gets into the concept of the ideal week a bit.

Recurring containers

These containers are set up as recurring events so that we don’t have to manually create them each week, but how far out should they recur? I’ve seen some folks that build them a year at a time, but in our case we set them to recur infinitely. We can always adjust or delete them going forward, but this helps make sure that someone booking time on our calendar in the future is forced to work within these constraints.

To that point, I’ve been finessing these a lot already, and I’ll continue to do so. Just because they recur way into the future doesn’t mean you can’t adjust them as time goes on. Once I really start working with them day-to-day, I suspect I’ll be adjusting quite a bit more.

Software

This is the best part — there is no extra software needed to do this. I simply set up those events in Google Calendar, choose the free/busy status for each, and then I paint them in that gray color so that they stand out from my “real” events.

We have our separate booking software for scheduling as I mentioned above, but we’ve had that for years and it doesn’t really affect things here. For reference, as of today we use a tool called Meetingbird, but this page has my updated list of tools if you’re reading this in the future.

For containers, your existing calendar software (or even a paper planner) should do the job nicely.

How about you?

This is new to me, but I’m excited to give it a shot. Do you do any kind of calendar containers or calendar blocking? Leave a comment and tell us your tips and tricks.

Handwriting isn’t necessarily better

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As I’ve experimented with tools like the Full Focus Planner and the reMarkable tablet, I’ve seen a number of reasons for why “handwriting is better then digital”. The reasons are fairly solid, but I’ve found ways to bring most of the benefits of handwriting to digital.

From what I’ve seen, it’s not the act of handwriting that really makes a difference, but the slowness of handwriting forces you to think about what you’re writing instead of copying everything verbatim.

In general, I hear three main reasons why handwriting is better, and for each I’ll show you how to incorporate those ideas into your digital system so you can get most of the benefits of handwriting without having to leave the digital world.

1 – Handwriting forces you to slow down

It’s absolutely accurate that if one person is handwriting key topics and ideas of a talk, and the other is just transcribing everything through their keyboard, the handwriting will likely lead to better retention.

The solution there is easy, at least in theory. Write about the topic at hand, rather than transcribing it verbatim. Using a tool like Roam Research, you can capture bullets and ideas, rather than just typing everything up.

Further, it’s wise to do a quick recap after any sort of learning session. Whether it’s an article you read, a video you watched, a class you attended or a meeting you were a part of, just take 30 seconds afterward and put together your thoughts. It’ll make a huge difference for your retention, and it’ll force you think about what you just heard (in your own words) instead of just making a copy of it.

2 – Digital shows too much information

When I was setting up trying to duplicate the Full Focus Planner in Notion, I made a serious error at the beginning. I really love the “weekly preview” in the Planner, so I set up a big robust page in Notion to see everything for the week at once. That was a mistake.

I’ve since gone back and split the weekly preview into daily pieces. There is still a weekly overview, but you also have to click into each day, separately, and think through it. Being able to focus on a day at a time is a huge piece of making this work.

This is true for anything you’re working on. If you can dig deeper and just look at the item at hand, eliminating the other distractions will be hugely beneficial. Using Roam Research as an example, you can take any bulleted item on your page and view it as a page by itself, with only those related sub-bullets visible. It’s a great feature.

3 – Digital shows too many tasks

This is related to the previous idea, but I’ve heard it a few times as well. The basic thought I heard was:

With the Full Focus Planner, you see the tasks you need to accomplish that day, and that’s it. With a digital tool, the tasks never end.

That can be completely true, so you just need to not let it happen. With most digital task tools (including things like Asana, Teamwork, Todoist and others), you can easily make it so that you only see your “today” tasks. Work through those, defer some as needed, and celebrate when the page is empty. Even if you’re using a digital task management system and have hundreds of tasks in there, make sure you can filter to what’s important just for today and have a way to make that page complete.

For example, the dashboard I’ve set up for myself in Notion includes two main things:

A – Tasks for today: This is a list of tasks due today, but nothing from the future. I can certainly go into the full task area if I want, but in my day-to-day working I only see the tasks I need to focus on for the day.

B – Clients to reach out today: We have a rather robust CRM built out in Notion, but my dashboard only shows me the clients I need to reach out today. The rest are available if I need them, but I’m not distracted by the full list.

Handwriting isn’t bad

I say all of this with the caveat that handwriting your notes and plans certainly isn’t a bad thing. If you find it works better for you, great! I simply struggled with it because my handwriting is pretty bad, and I missed having access to everything on a variety of devices. Keeping things digital solved my issues, and the ideas above helped me keep most of the advantage of handwriting.

What do you think? Is handwriting a better way to learn and retain information?

Getting started with Roam Research

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Reading Time: 9 minutes

You may have heard about Roam Research as the hot new note-taking app, which it certainly is right now. I’m using it and I love it — but why? Let’s dive in.

Structured organization vs fluid information

At its core, Roam is yet another note taking app. You type stuff in and it saves it. However, the core organizational structure of Roam is one of the big things that sets it apart.

In Evernote, you have Stacks, with Notebooks, with notes. Notion is a bit more fluid, but you still have to put things in a specific place. This is good for a lot of data, but not everything.

Suppose you have lunch with your friend Steve, he shows you a couple of great new apps on his phone, tells you about a book he’s reading, and gives you some advice on the next bike you should buy. If you want to put that in Evernote, where does it go?

In theory, you’d put the app info in a phone-related notebook, the book info in your “stuff to read” note, and the bike tips in your “outdoors” notebook. Right? Or maybe just put it in a note called “lunch with Steve”, list the items, and try to get back to them later. Either way, no single location is perfect, and any of them run the risk of getting buried under newer items.

Roam solves this by not making you put the info in any pre-built slot, but just adding it organically. We’ll talk more about this example in a bit.

Daily notes

One thing that Roam does that is a bit unorthodox, but brilliant, is automatically create a new “daily note” for you each day. When you start Roam up each day, there is a blank canvas waiting for you to fill (unless you pre-loaded reminders for today, which we’ll hit in a bit).

Using our example of the lunch with Steve, you could just jot down some notes on your daily note about what happened.

Sample of a daily note from May 4th, 2020

So that’s good, but it’s really no different than just putting that info into Evernote or Notion or whatever. Here’s where it gets interesting…

It’s easy to make new pages or links

With Roam, you can turn any text into a link by just putting brackets (like [[this]]) around the text. Let’s do that with our note about Steve:

That’s better, but still not super useful. Most apps can do links. The next piece is Roam’s main magic.

Bidirectional links

When we added those brackets to that text, one of two things happened:

  • If there was already a page for any of those words, it linked to that existing page.
  • If there was not yet a page for them, it created one.

That’s pretty handy, but what it also did was create a link on that new page back to this conversation. Suppose we go into the Redline Monocog page to add more info, we’ll see the link back to this conversation. The bike info lives on this page now, and can be connected to other bike stuff if you want, but we’ll always be able to see that it came from this conversation with Steve.

This can get super helpful at times. I recently started reading Essentialism, and came across a part that was really familiar to me, to the point where I thought perhaps I had read the book years ago and forgot about it. However, by pulling up my Roam notes on the book (which I didn’t even remember that I had), I scrolled down to the linked references section and I saw this line:

There it is! I’m not crazy after all. I knew that one line because of a luncheon I went to back in February where the speaker mentioned that line, I jotted it into my notepad, and put it into Roam later that day. Perfect.

Bidirectional links are fully automatic, and crazy useful, and you’ll see them weaved throughout the rest of this article.

Slash commands

Before we get too much further, we should talk a bit about slash commands. Anywhere in Roam you can type a slash and you’ll have the option to insert a lot of neat things. I find a few of them to be very useful, but all have their purpose:

  • /Current Time is one I’m using a lot lately. As I’m working through my date, I’ll add a quick /Current Time to a new line and then type what I wanted to save.
  • For things that tie to a future or past date, the /Date Picker command is quite helpful too. When I said early on that a daily page might already have some content on it, this is what I was referring to. You can mention a future date in your notes, and when that day arrives you’ll see the linked reference to today sitting on it. When we get into tasks shortly you’ll see how this can be very powerful.
  • /Today and /Tomorrow can be pretty helpful too.

There are many more slash options in there, so go check them out for yourself.

Block references and embeds

While bidirectional links make it seem like everything is about pages, Roam is actually structured down to the block level. Every bullet you write can be referenced on another page.

In general, with any system, it’s wise to not save the same info in two places. If you can put it one place and reference it from others, this avoids the chance of you having one of them become inaccurate.

To add a block reference to a page, you can just CTRL-drag it from the sidebar (which we’ll talk about shortly), or type a double parenthesis and start typing the next of that block.

For example, suppose I finally download Brain.fm and want to note that in my daily notes. I might just mention that Steve suggested it to me, but I could actually just pull that text over. If I pull that block into the daily notes (or any page), it will look like this; you’ll see that the text is fully underlined so that you know it’s a reference.

When you pull in a block, it also puts a small number to the side of the block in the original note so you can see where it was used. This can be useful for many types of study. For example, I use it when I reference a particular line of scripture, so when I pull up that chapter later I can see the places where I mentioned that verse before.

Here you can see a faint “1” to the right of Romans 1:4. When I click it, it opens the reference in the sidebar so I can see where I mentioned it in the past.

(more about the sidebar to come)

Tasks

Roam isn’t the perfect place to put your tasks, but it can be quite powerful. I use it for my personal tasks, simply because Roam is where I spend my time. Why set up my tasks elsewhere if I can just have everything in one place?

There are two main ways you can carve this out, and I do some of each.

You can create a “projects” page, and then a page for each of your projects in there. On each project, write out a list of tasks. When writing text, just type /TODO or press CTRL-Enter to turn the text into a task. If you add a future date to the task, it will show up in the linked references for that future date so you’ll remember that the task needs to be done.

One of those project pages might look something like this:

I’ve set up a bunch of project-based tasks, but lately I’m finding more value from quick tasks inline. When I need to remember to do something later, I just drop it in where I am, date it for the future, and it’ll show up then. Back to the example with Steve, I might want to remember to visit the bike shop on Saturday, so I’ll drop in a quick task for that.

With either of these systems, given how Roam is set up, there is a chance that some tasks may slip through the cracks. I have a few solutions for that, which I’ve outlined in this video:

Filters

As you saw in that tasks video, if you watched it, filters can be a great way to sort through linked references on a page. If you reference a particular page over and over, the list of linked references on that page can become long enough to be overwhelming and useless.

However, by clicking the filter icon near the top right of the linked references, you can filter things in and out of your view. For a bit more on this, go back and watch the tasks video above if you haven’t already and you’ll see what I mean.

Sidebar

I’ve mentioned the sidebar a few times in this post, as it’s a crazy useful (yet very simple) feature of Roam. In short, it allows you to essentially open two pages at once; one in the main view and one in the sidebar, like this:

The pages in the sidebar are fully interactive, but with a few small differences.

  • You can’t filter anything on them.
  • You can have a bunch open over there, stacked on top of one another.

When you’re working on info that involves more than one page, opening one of them in the sidebar is amazing. Simply shift-click to open a Roam page in the sidebar.

Quick Tips

A couple of other quick tips:

Keyboard shortcuts: There are a ton of great keyboard shortcuts available to use. Click the help icon in the lower right corner to see many of them.

Favorites: If you’re working on a page that you’ll be accessing frequently, click the star icon in the top right corner. That will add the page to the list of pages in the left sidebar. To un-favorite an item, just open it and click the star again.

Use cases to try

The beauty of Roam is that it’s wide open. You can put anything you want in there, and you could organize the info many different ways. I know of other great Roam users that would have taken my Steve example and handled it quite differently — and that’s great! Use it how your brain wants to use it, and you’ll get a lot out of it.

Here’s a couple of other things to consider doing in Roam:

Daily log: I’ve been trying to add timestamps and keep track of things as they come up, so I can answer the “what did I do about x?” when it invariably comes up a few days later. Here’s a semi-redacted screenshot from today; the bullets with the gray outline are collapsed and have a bunch of sub-bullets inside of them with more info:

Book and article notes: Here’s a bit about how I keep track of books to read, and then process the information when I’m done:

CRM: While I’m not using Roam as a true CRM quite yet, I tag people throughout my daily notes quite a bit, and suspect I’ll keep adding more info to their pages over time, eventually moving fully to this system.

Spaced Repetition: I use Anki for my daily spaced repetition learning, but there are some solid ways to use Roam for it instead. Here is a good video from Anonym.s on how he does it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmv5Yrnmlgg

Next Steps

So now what? Dig in!

If you want to learn more, you can check out all of the great videos on YouTube from folks like Anonym.s, Shu Omi, Nat Eliason, myself, and even the founder of Roam, Conor White-Sullivan.

If you really want to dig deep, you can check out the course that I’ve set up. It’ll walk you through everything you need to get started in a bit under an hour, and you’ll be off and running. Check it out here.

What about you?

How are you using Roam? Leave a comment below and let us know!

Some tweaks to my daily learning

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Reading Time: 3 minutes

This is an interesting time we’re in right now. While I certainly miss much of the weekly chaos of dance practice and soccer games, a bit of a break is kind of nice too. While I’ve been using the time to do a lot of reading (in the past month I’ve read Marketing Made Simple, Man’s Search for Meaning, The Checklist Manifesto, Friend of Friend, The Art of War and One Second After, which is probably more than all of 2019 combined), I’m also trying to tidy up some of my personal processes and setups.

The last few nights I’ve gotten back into the depths of spaced repetition. There are a lot of great articles on the subject, but this one from Gary Wolf from 2008 is still among my favorites. I first mentioned my daily use of Anki, a great app to help with spaced repetition, back in 2016, and since then I’ve reviewed somewhere over 300,000 cards — all in about 10 minutes per day.

Michael Nielson wrote a great article about his use of Anki, and had a few useful quotes I wanted to share.

The single biggest change that Anki brings about is that it means memory is no longer a haphazard event, to be left to chance. Rather, it guarantees I will remember something, with minimal effort. That is, Anki makes memory a choice.

This is a big one for me. I no longer have to hope that I remember something. If I want to remember a fact or a quote or a phone number or a face, it goes in Anki. Done.

Here is a bit more about how Michael uses Anki:

What can Anki be used for? I use Anki in all parts of my life. Professionally, I use it to learn from papers and books; to learn from talks and conferences; to help recall interesting things learned in conversation; and to remember key observations made while doing my everyday work. Personally, I use it to remember all kinds of facts relevant to my family and social life; about my city and travel; and about my hobbies.

I also read a great (and very long) article from Gwern Branwen that gets more into the science behind it. Some of her uses of Anki include memorizing:

  • Geography
  • The Periodic table
  • Words from Word A Day
  • Memorable Quotes
  • Personal information like birthdays and license plate numbers

As a results of those two articles, I made a few changes to my setup.

First, I added in a couple dozen more items into mine, such as the birthdays of my GreenMellen teammates. I know roughly when they are, and I can look them up if needed, but why not take just a few minutes to memorize them? Branwan’s rule of thumb is that it will take you about five minutes to learn a new card in Anki over the lifetime that you use it (in various chunks of 5-10 seconds each). Is it worth five minutes to remember when their exact birthdays are? I think so.

Second, a recommendation that both authors mentioned was that keeping cards in categorized decks was not a great idea. It’s not a big deal, but causes a few hinderances. I had a bunch of neatly categorized decks, but I’ve just squashed them together. Here’s why.

First, having cards jumbled up a bit (a birthday, followed by a book title, followed by asking for the date of DDay) has two benefits:

  1. There is some science that shows better memorization when you have to recall the cards out of context, because it better mimics the real world.
  2. It can cause some interesting (random) correlations to develop at times, when two unrelated cards appear after one another but you can make a new connection between them. This is similar to the reason I’m using Roam Research for most of my note-taking these days.

As a result, I took a handful of separate decks that I have (book info, Bible trivia, enneagram numbers, and others) and put them into a single deck called “stuff”. Everything is in there and I can just go through it each day. This will save me a bit of time, too, as I can simply work through the cards in one pass instead of having to go in and out of a handful of decks each day.

I’ll admit that tools like Anki are probably most appealing to folks like us Enneagram 5’s (the “investigator”), but I think most people could find some value from it. If nothing else, check out that great article from Gary Wolf that I mentioned and see what you think.

Highlights from “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Checklist Manifesto is a book that I’ve been meaning to read for quite a long time. Many have suggested it, and I’ve finally read it.

It wasn’t really what I expected, but it was excellent. The focus of the book was on surgery and airplanes, and how checklists are critical to both.

In building GreenMellen over the past decade, we attribute much of our success to our early (and lucky) decision to put a big focus on processes. It started with our core web development process, which was been refined over the years, but now we have dozens of processes in place to help with all aspects of digital marketing.

We’ve been challenged by some clients over the years to break out of the process “so we’re not confined”, but we’ve been able to show how a solid process allows for 100% creative flexibility, while still making sure that we get the basics right.

Here are some of the highlights I pulled from the book:

To start, regarding the two types of failure…

The first is ignorance—we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works. There are skyscrapers we do not yet know how to build, snowstorms we cannot predict, heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to stop. The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude—because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. This is the skyscraper that is built wrong and collapses, the snowstorm whose signs the meteorologist just plain missed, the stab wound from a weapon the doctors forgot to ask about.

the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.

Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all.

Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.

The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility.

That routine requires balancing a number of virtues: freedom and discipline, craft and protocol, specialized ability and group collaboration. And for checklists to help achieve that balance, they have to take two almost opposing forms. They supply a set of checks to ensure the stupid but critical stuff is not overlooked, and they supply another set of checks to ensure people talk and coordinate and accept responsibility while nonetheless being left the power to manage the nuances and unpredictabilities the best they know how.

Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.

You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off—it’s more like a recipe. So for any new checklist created from scratch, you have to pick the type that makes the most sense for the situation.

The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory.

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And by remaining swift and usable and resolutely modest, they are saving thousands upon thousands of lives.

The fear people have about the idea of adherence to protocol is rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real world in front of them. But what you find, when a checklist is well made, is exactly the opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself with.

That last one is what really brings it home for me and ties in to what I said at the top. A good checklist will help make sure you don’t miss any important steps, but won’t get in your way of making wise and creative decisions as needed.

Highlights from “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sonke Ahrens

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

I just finished reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens. It interested me because over the past month or so I’ve really begun to focus better on my note-taking. This applies to books I’ve read, sermons at church, meetings with clients, videos I watch — any situation where I want to gain knowledge, I’m trying to take better notes.

It’s to the point now where I feel I’ve really missed out on previous experiences, as the knowledge I gained from books I read years ago is simply gone. In the book, Ahrens says:

And more often than not, reading is not accompanied by taking notes, which is, in terms of writing, almost as valuable as not having read at all.

Oops.

As I’ve read about various ways to keep notes, the concept of a “Zettelkasten” kept coming up.

Zettelkasten

I first heard about the idea of a Zettelkasten years ago, but it wasn’t until I was introduced to Roam Research last month that I felt inspired to dig back in.

The basic idea of a Zettelkasten is a system where every idea/note is a separate card in a slip-box, and all of those cards are linked to one another. It was popularized by German sociologist Nicklas Luhmann, who had roughly 90,000 cards in his system when he passed away in 1998.

For a quick read that goes a bit deeper into the Zettelkasten, I encourage you to check out this article by David B. Clear.

Roam Research

As I mentioned above, I’ve been using Roam Research pretty heavily for about a month now, as it’s a pretty solid digital tool to create a Zettelkasten. Here is a quick video overview of how I’m using it:

As I mention in the video, this blog post from Nat Eliason is an excellent overview of Roam Research.

How to Take Smart Notes

So onto Sonke’s book. As a general rule, the book walks very deeply through the concepts behind the Zettelkasten while remaining platform agnostic — he talks a lot about physical cards, but also how they could be used in a digital tool. Here are some of my highlights from his book:

When talking about why most note-taking is so bad, he said:

There is another reason that note-taking flies mostly under the radar: We don’t experience any immediate negative feedback if we do it badly.

Part of the beauty of the Zettelkasten is letting notes find one another, rather than determining some pre-set categories or tags. Here’s why:

They sort their notes by topics and sub-topics, which makes it look less complex, but quickly becomes very complicated. Plus, it reduces the likelihood of building and finding surprising connections between the notes themselves, which means a trade-off between its usability and usefulness.

To the extent possible, you shouldn’t fill your notes with copies of what you hear. You should translate what you hear into your own words, and then save that (with a reference back to the original source, when possible).

Here’s a quick video from Dr. Jordan Peterson that explains that further:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_d7DdNzkLw

In the book, Ahrens breaks the idea of notes into a few types, including “fleeting” notes (quick thoughts on something to do) and “permanent” notes, that should ultimately live in your Zettelkasten. Here’s his key to how to write permanent notes:

Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.

This next thought of his kind of points back to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and only thinking about cat food once.

We also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That’s right: The brain doesn’t distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads.

Another thought on why simply writing down quotes won’t help much:

As well, the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them out of context, even though the words aren’t changed. This is a common beginner mistake, which can only lead to a patchwork of ideas, but never a coherent thought.

A few years back, I wanted to learn more about how the GDPR might affect our clients. To force myself to learn, I posted a Meetup about it that I’d have to prepare for, and it worked well. In creating slides and content for the Meetup, I learned quite a lot about the GDPR. It turns out Richard Feynman had a similar theory:

Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman once said that he could only determine whether he understood something if he could give an introductory lecture on it.

In the end, Ahrens summarized the idea like this:

And that is the very good news at the end. The slip-box is as simple as it gets. Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there. There is no need to start from scratch. Keep doing what you would do anyway: Read, think, write. Just take smart notes along the way.

Read the book, or watch this video

I encourage you to read the book for yourself, but Ahrens has given us a nice shortcut. He often speaks about the book, and those talks are a pretty good overview of what’s in there.

Here’s a talk he gave in 2018 that was a solid look at the concept:

https://vimeo.com/275530205

For me, I’m pouring as much as I can into Roam to help build up my collection of notes, and I’ll likely revisit old books I’ve read with this new mindset to help fill out that collection.

Do you have a system for taking notes?