Visit your notes more often, not less

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There are a lot of tools out there to help automate your note-taking. For example, a recent episode of Tech Talk Y’all shared the Omnivore app, which can automatically move highlights from your Kindle into Obsidian. It’s really slick, but I think it takes things the wrong direction for me. My notes are intended to help me learn, so I need to visit them more often, not less.

Here are two examples.

First, you may have noticed my recent “Sunday Summary” posts. While I hope you gain some value from them, I make it clear in the posts that those summaries are largely for me. They force to revisit my posts again and hopefully make things stick a little longer in my brain.

I also have tools like the Readwise “Daily Review” that forces me to revisit past highlights. I want to see old notes come up again, and do the manual work to connect them to one another. Heck, this goes back to a post from a few years ago about why I’m blogging every day.

Why do you have notes?

Granted, your need for notes might be different. It’s very possible that you literally want to just have a database of thoughts that you can reference later. In that case, tools like Omnivore are probably amazing for you, because it can automate dumping more stuff in your notes for future use.

It all comes down to why you have a place for notes at all. Once you understand that, you can shape your activities to make sure you’re doing things to support your overall goals.

For me, I want my notes to be a place that is constantly evolving to grow more benefits, so visiting those notes more often is the best way to do that.

If you finish your to-do list, that’s problematic

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As a guy that prides himself on productivity, I’ll admit that the title of this post is really weird. As I dug in, though, the concept has slowly made more sense to me.

This comes from a recent episode of the Cortex podcast, where CGP got into this a good bit. It started as a discussion about prioritizing your to-do list, where he suggested you should simply consider:

“What is the order of the next 2-5 things that need to happen?”

Fair enough, sort your list. As he talked further, though, he explained that choosing those “next 2-5 things” means that some items will get pushed toward the bottom and may never get completed — and that’s ok too.

He explains further:

“You’re doing life wrong if you’re consistently getting to the bottom of your to-do list. If your to-do list is empty, you’re not reaching hard enough or you’re just not thinking about the scope of things that you can actually do.”

If your to-do list is longer than you can ever do, that means you can pick the most impactful items to work on and accomplish more than someone that finishes up a short, tidy list.

I see that somewhat like this blog, where my list of potential ideas is outpacing my ability to write about all of them. Right now I have 10 posts ready to go, but 35 more ideas (and growing!) on my list, with a few going back to last year.

This is a good thing! In the case of this blog, it allows me to choose items that I really want to unpack, versus picking something less meaningful because I’m running out of ideas.

A huge to-do list?

In terms of the to-do list, I should clarify that these shouldn’t all be on a single list that you need to sort through every day. If you have tons of items that you want to get done, and they’re all on one list in front of you, that would be overwhelming. Any decent to-do software will let you tuck items away using folders or tags, and you simply need to revisit them periodically to see which ones need to be moved up to the priority list.

I still argue that your inbox and other daily systems should be frequently worked to zero in order to properly set your goals for the day, but a to-do that extends beyond your lifetime isn’t a bad thing at all.

I encourage you to check out the full Cortex episode to hear more. It’s a very long episode, and this section starts around the 1:02:40 mark if you want to just jump in there.

Write notes for future you

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As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become quite good about not trusting myself to remember things. In the past I’ve said many times “I’ll remember that”, and then quickly forgot. These days, most of the time, when I want to remember something I make sure to make a note for it (usually in Google Keep, but use whatever works best for you).

Further, though, I need to continue to be careful about who I’m writing the note for. It’s not for me in that moment, but for me hours later when I’m completely removed from that event — additional context in the note is always a good thing! I’ve had plenty of times where I’ve written a note for myself but then been unable to understand what I was trying to remember because there wasn’t enough context in the note.

In his book “Outsmart Your Brain“, author Daniel Willingham offers this advice:

I’ve said that it often makes sense to “write what you’re thinking”, but you must bear in mind that future you will be reading the note. Write your notes for future you. Future you needs context and explanation, which are not easy to provide when you are rushed during a lecture.

Willingham is talking about lecture notes in this example, but it applies to almost any kind of note that you take for yourself. Jotting it down quickly is 100x better than nothing, but taking an extra five seconds to give a smidge more context will make your future self very happy.

Don’t just do something, sit there

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You’ve heard the phrase “don’t just sit there, do something”, but have you heard the opposite (and the title of this post)?

Some attribute the quote to Sylvia Boorstein and her book with the same title, while others say it’s been around longer, but the quote is worth considering either way. This really hits back to two things I’ve shared before:

  • First, along these very same lines, is the idea of not “doing something about that”. There are many examples where people felt like they had to “do something” and only made things worse.
  • Related is the meeting place of innovation and efficiency: innoficiency. To be truly innovative comes at the cost of efficiency, and it means less “doing something” and more thinking and planning to find the next path to take.

As Tom Fishburne says, when an issue shows up “it’s a reminder to respond, not to react.” There are many times when an issue arises and you absolutely need to go do something right away to help fix it. Before you react, though, think about your response.

Many times you should go do something, but be willing to accept that to just “sit there” might be the best possible response.

Responsiveness can be as important as price

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People value money but they also value time, and if your service can be faster and/or more responsive customers are willing to pay more. Disney’s “Lightning Lane” (formerly “FastPass”) is proof of this — millions of people pay billions of dollars every year just to get in the park, and a huge percentage of them are willing to pay more in order to save time in line. I know the times that we’ve gone we always purchased the pass, and the time saving were worth it to us.

Or look at the popularity of Chick-fil-A; even if it’s packed, you know that their drive-thru is generally the fastest in the industry. Other fast food restaurants are more hit-or-miss, so even if McDonald’s has a shorter line, you’re more confident that the line at Chick-fil-A will move quickly. It also helps that their food is fantastic!

Expectations matter

As Jay Baer shared in a recent conversation with Jason Falls, expectations are the key to this because raw speed matters a lot. At 59 seconds per car Chick-fil-A is considered fast, but so is someone that can remodel your entire kitchen in just one week. You’d still consider that a “fast” time for a remodel even though it takes more than 10,000 times longer than the drive-thru at Chick-fil-A. It’s all relative.

In our case, we share expectations as early as we can. We take the time to do things right, and while we’re fast inside of that process, we’re still slower than other companies that take a different approach to web development (they might use templates, for example).

Too fast is still too fast

That said, things can happen too quickly. As Jay shared in the podcast with Jason, there are times when speed can be so good that it’s worrisome. If you sit down at a restaurant to order food and it shows up in 30 seconds, that’s not making you happy; it’s creating more questions.

Measure it

The other point I loved from Jay and Jason was the idea of measuring your results. If someone walks out of your restaurant because things were too slow, there’s no easy way to measure it because it won’t show up in their data at all. In our case, we measure things in three different areas, with different levels of precision.

  • Email: Our team all makes sure to hit inbox zero every day, so that every client or lead that reaches out to us will have some kind of response and won’t be left wondering what happened. I can’t get more precise data with this one at this point, but hitting zero once a day is far above the average.
  • Help Tickets: This is one that we measure a lot more, but we also wrap in proper expectations. We tell clients that all help tickets will be answered “within one business day”, and we always hit that, but our typical time is more like 30 minutes (32:52 in the past week right now). Knowing that they’ll get a fast response when trouble comes helps to give people much better peace of mind.
  • Web development: Our typical web project takes 4-6 months — that’s not “fast” compared to some, but it depends on expectations and need. If clients absolutely need something more quickly, I can find other agencies that can do it differently and finish more quickly. For those that do choose us and are responsive as well, we almost always finish in a shorter period of time than promised.

Speed and responsiveness are a great way to show you care, which is an advantage in virtually any business. If someone needs help and you can solve their problem quickly, you become a valuable asset to them. Check out Jason and Jay’s full discussion here.

The first bit of AI with my notes

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There are a lot of things coming with AI that I’m very excited about, and some that I’m dreading (like the deluge of AI-generated content we’re soon to face).

One that I’m excited about in particular is the ability to use AI to help sort through my notes. My dream setup, in the future, is to have an AI system that can read my notes, emails, and everything in Google Drive, and then I can just query against it. I’m not sure how that’ll actually work, but someone will invent a tool that does it, and we’ll all learn from that.

When I moved all of my notes back into Obsidian earlier this year, part of the reason was for the ease of AI to be able to process my notes when the time comes. Here is part of what I said:

While Tana or any other system could certainly integrate a degree of AI, it feels to me like being able to point an AI system at a folder on my computer that is full of plain text would be a much easier task than building a tool to index a complex system like Tana or Roam Research. Whether AI tools come to notes anytime soon, plain text is much more future-proofed than having notes buried in a proprietary system.

Well, that time is now.

Smart Connections for Obsidian

The “Smart Connections” plugin for Obsidian has been around for a little while, and it’s been fine, but they recently added support for ChatGPT as a way for you to talk to a chatbot about your own notes! It’s very imperfect, but a fun little start.

It takes a bit of work to set up, but isn’t too bad. You also have to pay for access to use the OpenAI API to connect to your site, as it needs to feed all of your notes into your private chatbot, and OpenAI charges for that. It’s most expensive at the beginning when you load all of your notes, and then it’s just nominal charges for keeping things updated. For me, it loaded 12,740 notes (likely far more than you have in Obsidian) and cost a total of $1.44 for that. Ongoing costs will be even lower, so that’s excellent.

Examples

As neat as all of this is, the key is to get some value out of it. My notes are rather well-organized, so can a chatbot answer questions faster than I can just look them up? If I phrase things correctly, it certainly can. Here are a few examples:

Correct! That’s when I wrote the post, and I think it was the only one (until now).

This one was interesting. Those two are completely accurate, but it missed a few others and I don’t know why. All of them were formatted the same way, so I don’t know why it picked up some and missed others.

Perfect! That’s exactly right. Now, because this tool is conversational, I respond to that and it will keep up:

Those weren’t my personal notes on the book, just info about the book in general, but it’s neat that it was to interpret “the first one” to mean “The Business of Expertise” and then respond accordingly.

Perfect.

This gets super interesting when you realize that this tool can search your notes, of course, but also the ChatGPT database at large. According to the plugin author:

To trigger a search of your notes, you must use a self-referential pronoun
ex. I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours

This means I can search for similar things in different ways. For example, the way I worded this first one pulled top quotes from the internet:

However, if I say “in my notes” (thus including a self-referential pronoun), it only searches through my items:

That might be the best part of this. I can keep this window open all day and search for whatever I want, including the data from my notes.

Privacy

The main drawback to this is likely privacy. That’s not to say that this is insecure in any way, but a core tenant of Obsidian is privacy, in that (by default) your notes stay local on your computer and are very safe. In my case, I already use their “sync” app to copy my notes across devices, and now this is also sending a copy of them to OpenAI. The way they do it is quite secure (your notes go directly there and aren’t stored elsewhere in the interim), but it’s still creating a place for hackers to potentially get in.

For me, I’m ok with that risk. I do it all the time with things like Gmail and Google Docs, and this is a similar level of concern. My notes contain no private data, and someone would frankly be kind of bored to read about the meetings I’ve been in and the books I’m reading. It’s still a risk to consider, though.

If nothing else, I encourage you to read Brian’s full post about this to see how it works, and know that the future is full of things that will take this to heights that I can’t even imagine.

The power of inefficiency

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I strive to be very efficient with my work, and I share that on here quite a bit with nearly 200 posts in the “productivity” category. At times, though, being inefficient on purpose can be a good thing.

The first is one that I’ve shared a few times, and that’s the process of a weekly preview and duplicating your calendar. Keeping a secondary, manual copy of your calendar is not an efficient thing to do, but the benefits are fantastic. I’m happy with that inefficiency.

Innoficiency

The other has to do with how your company operates, and was a focus of the 2Bobs podcast a few months back.

Generally speaking, newer companies are more innovative than more established companies, and for one big reason — efficiency. As a company grows, they work on streamlining efficiency more and more, and hire people specifically for that task. It’s great on paper, but it’s missing one key point; innovation comes from inefficiency.

You’ve seen this happen. When someone is designing a logo, they’ll think about ideas, sketch various thoughts on paper (and throw most of them away), and really work through a lot of bad ideas to get to the good. This is wildly inefficient, but it’s the best way to allow for creativity. To make it more efficient, you need to reduce creativity, and larger companies are often willing to make that trade. For most of us, that’s a bad trade to make.

I’m not suggesting that you become inefficient with your entire business, but there are places where “making it more efficient” is also making it worse. Be efficient where you can, but don’t feel like you need to do it everywhere.

The Kindle Sidekick

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Not long ago, Grey and Myke from the excellent Cortex podcast released a new product called the “Sidekick Notepad“. It’s a paper notepad, intended to go between you and your keyboard, for quick notes throughout the day. Here’s a photo of it from their site:

In listening to how it came together, it seems like a great little tool. It’s meant for those quick notes at your computer, but also to accompany you to meetings. I was vaguely considering getting one to play with, but hadn’t made the decision yet.

I already have a better version

That’s when I stumbled across a post on the /r/Cortex subreddit from a user that showed how he’s using a much more expensive version of the Sidekick — his reMarkable tablet.

It’s a very simple, yet overlooked idea. While I liked the idea of the Sidekick, it simply never occurred to me to just use my Kindle Scribe there instead. This could work with the Scribe or reMarkable, but also just with an iPad if you want. The iPad is a little trickier (both writing and battery life aren’t made for this), but could do the job.

One of the neat things with the digital tablets like the reMarkable and Kindle Scribe is the number of high-quality templates that you can purchase for them. For example, I have this daily planner on my Scribe, which includes pages for each month, week and day, along with extra note pages for each day, all hyperlinked together. It’s ultimately just a PDF that you load on your device, but it’s built to the exact specs of the device. For $5.40, it’s a great little PDF!

So, with that PDF running it looks like this:

So far, I like it! I’m not convinced it will stick for me, but we’ll see. I already made solid use of Google Keep for my fleeting notes, and this is largely intended to replace that. We’ll see what happens.

If nothing else, perhaps this will inspire you to reconsider your workspace a bit, whether that’s purchasing a Sidekick, making better use of a tool you already have, or something else entirely.

If you make a change, please leave a comment below as it may inspire further change for others.

Use fleeting notes to avoid yak shaving

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Before I dig into this post too much, I should probably quickly explain the title.

Fleeting notes (or disposable notes) are those quick notes that you take during the day. This could be using Apple Notes or Google Keep, or even just a notepad on your desk.

Yak shaving is when you have one issue get interrupted by another, which is interrupted by another, and it continues on to the point where the initial problem never gets solved. When I shared this idea a few years ago, I used this great clip from “Malcolm in the Middle”:

Fleeting notes can save you

As summarized well by Sal Ferrarello, the key is to put the new issues aside and continue to focus on the problem at hand. In the case of the video above, the new light bulbs were right there; make a quick note to yourself (“fix the wobbly shelf”), but grab the light bulb and fix the problem at hand first.

It’s easier said than done, as these problems lined up rather nicely (in a scripted TV show, what are the odds?), but the same happens to us. Fleeting notes are one of my big keys to getting things done. I don’t want to forget about ideas and issues that pop up, but if I immediately jumped into them every time I’d never get anything done.

At the end of that short clip above, Hal still had a broken light bulb, a wobbly shelf, a squeaky drawer, no WD-40, and a rumbling engine — with none of them being fixed. Days like this are when you say “I was working all day and feel like I got nothing done“. You’re right!

As I say all of this, you should know that I’m an excellent yak shaver, as I get distracted a lot. The better I can use my fleeting notes to track new issues without diving into them right away, the better my day ends up being.

Do you want to garden your notes or not?

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As I’ve shared before, I’m all-in on using Obsidian for my note-taking right now. I’m very happy with how things are set up, and it’s working very well for me.

As I’ve used various note-taking platforms over the years, I’ve grouped them together in different ways. One way I recently shared was Sync vs Saas (essentially cloud-based vs local on your computer), but another way to split them is with systems that require tending and those that don’t.

At some level, this question doesn’t really matter. With any system you can choose to carefully garden it or not, and that will affect your level of results. However, I think certain tools simply need a higher level of care.

Evernote, for example, doesn’t. You can just dump notes in there, sort them into folders, and search when needed. Some care and feeding is helpful, but less important.

With Obsidian, though, that care and feeding is much more essential. It relies on those inter-note links, and without those the value drops quickly.

I enjoy tending my notes

In the last week I’ve had conversations with two different people regarding Obsidian in this manner, one on each side.

One person I had coffee with thought that tending your notes like that sounds tedious and boring, which I can respect. The other other thought it sounded like a great way to gain insight, and might be kind of fun. Both were right, as we’re all different.

Tending? Gardening?

At this point, some of you may be wondering what I’m even talking about. Notes are notes, right? Yes, but I take extra time with mine to make sure they’re well-organized so that they become more valuable in the future. I do this two ways:

First, I make sure to get them all in one place. For example, I use a Kindle Scribe (and previously a reMarkable) to take notes, but I process them out of there into Obsidian as soon as I’m able. For example, here is a video from a few years ago showing how I take notes from church and process them into my notes (the note tool at the time was Roam Research, which is similar to Obsidian).

Second, I mark them up as much as I can. After I had lunch with my friend Craig, I made note of some of the books he recommended, tagged a tool I suggested, and even where we ate:

I took it further, and went into each of those books and added some notes on them, like this example:

That’s the gardening I’m talking about. It only took another five minutes to add those notes, but it was a very intentional five minutes.

The next time I meet with him, I can reference these notes and see if he’s used Dex.

The next time I need a book to read, I’ll have these in my system with the reminder that he suggested them.

Some of the notes crossed into existing notes, such as other books by those authors, other times I’ve discussed Dex, and possibly other fun interactions that I’ll discover in the future, like this example from a few years ago.

Now that you know what I mean by gardening, you might think “that sounds awful!” and you might be right. If that doesn’t appeal to you, don’t do it. This is something you need to work on a little bit every day to get real value from it, and you can only force yourself for so long. If you don’t want to garden, then find a great tool like Evernote and just toss your notes in there. They won’t be quite as useful, but you’ll be much happier.

At the end of the day, the tool that is best for you is the tool that fits you best. I’ll continue to share how I use tools with my workflow, and always encourage you to leave comments on the tools that you prefer instead so we can all learn from one another.