Don’t forget about the medium ties

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

Many books talk about the difference between “strong ties” and “weak ties” in your network, and understanding the difference can be very beneficial.

Strong ties are the roughly 150 people that you can stay in regular contact with, known as “Dunbar’s Number“. These are your friends and colleagues that you see regularly, and it’s difficult to hold many more than that at a reasonable level.

On the other side are your weak ties, who are more tenuous relationships that you perhaps send a Christmas card to, and they’re generally a little surprised if you reach out. Even with the minimal contact, however, studies show that they’re essential to a solid network.

That said, I think there is a group in the middle as well, and that’s one that I’ve been working to build over the past few years. Let’s just call them medium ties. This group takes effort to maintain, as you’re already involved with your 150 strong ties, and stretching beyond that is difficult. There is technology that can help, though, and you can expand the size of your network that is somewhere in this “medium” area.

Medium ties?

By using a tool like Nat or Dex , you can help keep those medium ties more top of mind. Those tools will likely pull in some of your strong and weak ties, but I think their strength lies in the middle. Looking at my current list on Nat, it shows a total of 287 people for me to stay in touch with, and my list in Obsidian is at a slightly higher 322 people (and likely dozens differ between the two lists).

I think it would be difficult to maintain any semblance of medium ties without the use of some technology, whether it’s Nat, Dex, Obsidian or even just an Excel document on your desktop. Your top priority should always be to keep your strong ties strong, and enjoy connecting with those folks regularly, but I think many of us have room for more medium ties in our life, and those people can be a fantastic way to help keep life enjoyable.

Do you use any tool to help make sure you don’t lose touch with people?

Sync vs SaaS

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With my recent decision to stick with Obsidian, it got me thinking about the two types of products that I use:

  • Those that sync files to and from my computer.
  • Those that live entirely in the cloud as a SaaS (“Software as a Service”)

Sync

The two main sync tools that I use are Obsidian and Anki. Both sync to the cloud for access from multiple computers, but all of the data that you use lives directly on your device. When you open either product, it can go out to their servers to make sure you have the latest files on your device, but then you work from those local files.

The downside is that it can sometimes take a little while to sync. I have over 8,000 notes in Obsidian and many thousands of cards in Anki. Day-to-day, they each only need to sync a few files and I’m good to go in a few seconds, but if I get a new device that initial sync can take a few minutes.

The great thing is that if you don’t have an internet connect, they still work perfectly. In addition, if something were to happen to either provider, you’d still have a copy of your content.

SaaS

The other side are SaaS products where everything lives in the cloud, such as Gmail. As of right now, I have a total of 538,492 emails in my Gmail account (though zero in my inbox). Having to sync that down to every device would be a nightmare. Instead, I can log into Gmail and get a window into my email instantly. None of it is actually on my computer, but it works fantastic having it in the cloud.

The ease of access from any device is amazing, but you also are at the mercy of your provider. I don’t suspect Gmail will go anywhere, but if somehow I lost access to that account, I’d literally have nothing to restore from a backup.

I’ve long considered myself more of a SaaS guy, and I generally keep minimal software loaded on my computer and access everything through the web, but as data ownership is getting trickier for everyone having more “sync” products that give you stronger control is likely a good direction to go.

What to read next?

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When I finish a book, I often have a small struggle to determine what to read next. I largely addressed it last summer when I set up more meta data around my book library, but I’ve recently taken it a bit further.

Thanks to tips from folks like Adam Walker, I now have a good bit more info that goes along with every book on my list. It takes a few minutes to collect this info, but reading a book takes hours so the investment of time in improving my list is well worthwhile.

No matter where you keep your “books I want to read” list, hopefully these ideas can help you make the list more valuable for yourself. Here are the 10 things I store with every book now:

Title: Kind of important to have the title in the note.

Author: Same deal. In my case, I tag them so that I can view the author page and see all of their books in one place, which can be handy.

Reading Status: I have “Not Read”, “To Read”, “Currently Reading” and “Done Reading”. The “Not Read” is new, and is for books that end up in my notes somehow (usually mentioned in another book) that I don’t necessarily plan to read soon. I want to track them, but “To Read” is the tag that goes on books that I’d like to get to soon. The advantage is that my “To Read” list is now much shorter and easier to flip through without all of those “Not Read” books getting in the way.

Tagline: I like to keep the “title” simple, but most books have a longer tagline that goes with them, so I store it here.

Blinkist: Is it on Blinkist, yes or not?

Audible Length: While I don’t use Audible, seeing the length in here can help give me a general sense of the size of the book.

Why?: This is my favorite field, as I always try to jot a quick note about why it’s on my list, and tag the person that suggested it. It’s much easier to read a book because “xxx said it was excellent” than just seeing a book on the list and wondering how it got there in the first place.

Date Finished: Simple date tag when I’m done with a book.

Finish Type: This is new as well. I used to assume that if there was a date in “date finished”, and the status tag was “done reading”, that was good enough. However, I added this so I could differentiate between books I read (whether print or Kindle), books I Blinked, and books I bailed on.

My Summary: Below all of this meta data is where I paste in highlights and other notes from the book, but I often fail to take the time to summarize the book in my own words for the benefit of my future self. Having this field staring at me makes me less likely to skip it.

Not every field is full

I have around 500 books in my system (some read, some not), and I don’t think a single one has every field filled out, and that’s ok. The main goal for this update was to make it easier for me to find the next book to read, and it’s really helped. It’s still a lot to flip through, but all of the context makes it much easier. Here is a snapshot of what that overview of “books to read” looks like for me in Obsidian:

Now I can see the reasons all in one place, and track over to the Audible Length to see how long it might take to read. If I want to just Blink it instead, I can see that column to know if it’s available on Blinkist or not. I’ll continue to refine this over time, but I love where I’ve gotten it to recently.

Do you have other data you track on the books you hope to read?

Obsidian wins for now

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A few months ago I started playing with the idea of migrating my notes from Obsidian over to Tana. Tana is a fantastic system and a great tool, but I’ve ultimately decided to keep things in Obsidian for a few reasons.

Ownership

While I have faith that Tana will be around for a while, using their system ultimately means they control everything. If they go out of business, or suspend my account, or have a big system failure, all of my notes could be gone in an instant. I kept backups of them, but their only export is a big messy JSON file that’s of relatively little value.

I talk a lot on this blog about taking ownership of your content; I do that very well with this blog, but I was doing the exact opposite with my notes and it just didn’t feel right. With Obsidian, all of my notes are literally text files on my computer (that sync and create text files on other devices). If somehow all of Obsidian imploded one day, I’d still have the tool on my computer and I’d still have all of my notes. I’d likely need to migrate to another system, but migrating from plain text is much easier than any other solution.

AI

To a lesser degree, my thoughts about AI-assisted notes played a small role in this. 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.

Community

The Obsidian community played a role as well. Tana has a bright community, but the Obsidian community is magnitudes larger. As of today there are 813 plugins and 72 themes for Obsidian, and their Discord community and their forum are both incredibly active.

I’ll miss some things from Tana

That’s not to say it’s perfect, and there are absolutely some things that Tana does better. If nothing else, their Supertags are literally amazing, and due to how the two systems are built, they’re not something that can really be done in Obsidian.

There’s a lot to like with Tana, and I think that platform has a great future ahead of it. For me, though, Obsidian lines up more closely with how we should control our data and I’ll be using it for the foreseeable future.

Personal note-taking is going to change dramatically

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

My history of using different note-taking tools over the years is well-documented in this blog, including my recent move from Obsidian to Tana. While Tana has some great features and I really enjoy using it, it’s ultimately just a slightly better version of the tools that came before it and I may end up moving back to Obsidian. Those kinds of changes may become irrelevant in the future, as we’re on the verge of some huge changes in the world of notes.

I’ve talked about ChatGPT before, and I encourage you to play around with it when you have some time. It’s a mind-blowing tool, but it’s just a tiny scrap of what’s coming. Using tools like that to reference general data is great, but what if I could have it index all of my notes and provide answers from there?

Dan Shipper recently wrote a fantastic post about this, and I’ll share some of his thoughts:

A better way to unlock the value in your old notes is to use intelligence to surface the right note, at the right time, and in the right format for you to use it most effectively. When you have intelligence at your disposal, you don’t need to organize.

That’s something I try to do with my notes, but it’s a whole different world. With mine, I need to manually create references and the follow the paths. With AI, I could simply have it bring up the information that I need immediately.

Think about starting a project—maybe you’re writing an article about a new topic—and having an LLM automatically write and present to you a report outlining key quotes and ideas from books you’ve read that are relevant to the article you’re writing.

Again, this is something I’m trying to do by hand, and it works fairly well, but doing what Dan describes there is on a whole different level.

At the conclusion, Dan simply says: “In the future, notes won’t be organized by us—they’ll be organized for us.“

Heyday

The closest example I can find today is heyday.xyz. It can pull your data from a ton of sources, including email, Slack, Dropbox, Notion, etc and help make sense of it all. In theory, they could continue to expand their sources and slowly integrate AI and start to become this kind of solution.

Really, that’s the main problem for now. Tools like ChatGPT are amazing, but their content comes from the internet at large, and not even anything from the past few years. I think the next step we’ll see is a real-time ChatGPT (“what’s happened in the Lions game right now?”), and eventually we’ll be able to pile our own content into our own system.

For now, I’m going to keep manicuring my notes to make them as helpful as possible, and hopefully one day I’ll be able to plug an AI into it to help me make even more sense of everything.

Use paper to assist thinking, but store everything digitally

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For about three years now, I’ve been loosely following the Zettelkasten method of taking notes (here’s what that is) and I’m quite pleased with how it’s going. I’m finding that having everything in one system (daily notes, book notes, meeting notes, church notes, other ideas, etc) is amazingly valuable. I’m currently using Tana for that, but there’s likely a dozen different solutions that could do the job for you.

Two things came up in the past week that tie together in interesting ways.

Book notes

I’ve heard from a few people that they prefer to take notes literally inside of the books they read. That’s great! The act of doing that can help you remember the content better, and is a good way to go. I’ve even written before about how I work through physical books.

The problem, at least in the cases of these few people, is that the notes stay in the book. They can always grab the book off the shelf and find the old notes, but they’re never put into a system that might surface them again in the future to tie into other ideas.

Paper to assist thinking

In a recent post on the Zettelkasten.de blog, they covered this concept. For the author, she previously had some notes on paper and some digitally, but found it helpful to make them all digital. Here is what she said:

I did end up migrating away from doing paper and digital Zettels, because who has the time to sustain that? Apparently, not me. I’ve been operating 100% digital for a long time now and have zero regrets. It’s so much easier to find what I’m looking for by using the search function in Archive.

A user named Sascha followed up with a concise response to her:

This is a recurring experience. My personal recommendation is to use paper to assist thinking and store everything digital.

Granted, this takes a good bit of effort. I wrote earlier this year about post-processing and how valuable it is, but it certainly takes some time. I still enjoy writing by hand, whether on paper or like on tools such as the Kindle Scribe, but all of that content needs to end up in my digital note system or it’s of little long-term value to me.

Using paper to assist with your thinking is excellent, but migrating it into a digital system is where you’ll really find the long-term gains.

Duplicate your calendar

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As time goes on, I’m finding more and more value in duplicating my calendar. I don’t mean duplicating in terms of having a backup (though that’s certainly wise), but in literally copying all of your appointments by hand to a different system.

I started this about three years ago with the Full Focus Planner. Each Friday I’d hand write all of my events for the next week, and then update them each morning for last-minute changes. It’s super inefficient, I know, but I consider work like that to be intentionally inefficient and very beneficial.

I’ve since done it a few different places, such as the reMarkable tablet, Roam Research, and others. I’m now doing it in Tana, but the tool really doesn’t matter here. Really, it doesn’t matter if you just write it all down and throw it away, because the key is the process itself. There are some advantages to keeping it, but if you’ve gone through the process than you’ve already extracted much of the value.

The benefit I get from this is simply taking the time to look closely at my calendar for the coming week, make changes as needed, confirm meetings, and really just make sure everything is tight and ready to go. It forces me to address every event, even for just a few seconds, and not be able to just skim over everything.

Do you keep a second copy of your calendar anywhere? I’d be curious to hear about your workflow.

The Bible at my fingertips

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A few years ago, I started loading the Bible into my note-taking system. I did it a little bit at a time, adding chapters as needed along the way. Here is a video I created a couple of years ago to show how I was approaching it:

I may have eventually built it all out by doing it that way, but I spent this year focusing on really building it and just finished this morning. Big thanks to my friend Tim for inviting me to the “49-Week Challenge” this year, which walked through the entire Bible in a year.

Each morning when I’d read the 4-6 chapters for the day, I’d manually paste and format them in my system (currently Tana) as well. It added more work each day, but breaking it into just an extra 5-10 minutes each day was manageable and let to great results.

The 49-Week Challenge was excellent, but didn’t really add much context to the reading for each day. I’m looking forward to getting back into a more traditional daily devotional that focuses on less scripture but goes a bit deeper. I’ll likely dig back into Tony Dungy’s daily devotional, which I had started briefly but set aside for the year-long challenge.

This is where the payoff will come in. As I’m working through Dungy’s devotional, I’ll already have the entire Bible in Tana. It’ll be quite easy to reference scripture and slowly build up a network of linked thoughts, ideas, and scripture over time.

Everything together

There’s also the consideration of putting everything in one place: work stuff, books I’m reading, Bible references, blog posts, etc. Some people split those into separate systems, but I love keeping them in one place because I tend to find a lot of overlap between them.

A good example of this is from a few years ago. I was at a business luncheon where Kevin Paul Scott was speaking. In the course of his talk, he referenced some books, some quotes, and some scripture. Here’s a peek at my notes from it:

In this one talk we had:

  • Business (the purpose of the luncheon)
  • Books (him mentioning the quote from Essentialism)
  • Quotes (like John Maxwell and Zig Ziglar)
  • Scripture (from Proverbs 14:4)

I could certainly tuck those into separate systems, but the magic comes from having them together. Because the note system references links in both directions, when I view any of those items in the future (the book, the scripture, the quotes, etc), I’ll see the reference back to this talk to help give additional framing around that text.

It’s been a long 49 weeks getting things built out, but I think the benefits will be fantastic over the coming years.

The Kindle Scribe versus the reMarkable 2

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I’ve been a big fan of the reMarkable tablet over the past few years, as I find it an excellent way to take notes in various settings.

Similarly, I’ve been a big fan of the Amazon Kindle for quite a few years now. I still read a good number of printed books, but most of my reading is on the Kindle.

With the Kindle Scribe, Amazon tried to merge the reMarkable with a Kindle. Did it work?

The Kindle Scribe

In a word, yes. In looking at the two main functions of the Scribe:

  • It’s an amazing Kindle. Super crisp, responsive, and it awesome for reading on.
  • As a writing tablet, it’s good. It’s not as great as the reMarkable yet (particularly when it comes to sharing and exporting your notes), but it does a fine job.

The beauty is in the combination of the two. I can take notes on books while I read them, I can write on it in dimly lit rooms (the reMarkable has no backlight and is tough to read in the evening without great lights), and it’s a fantastic way to combine those two features.

Plus, it comes in a bit cheaper than the reMarkable:

  • Kindle Scribe with pen = $339
  • reMarkable ($299) + pen ($79) = $378

To understand more about the Kindle Scribe, this review (with a video) is a great overview of it.

Good luck, reMarkable

I wish the folks behind the reMarkable well, as I worry that this may kill their business. The reMarkable is an incredibly well-built product, and I’ve enjoyed using it, so I hope they’re able to keep a solid chunk of market share. That said, the convenience of the Kindle Scribe wins easily for many folks.

If you are big into writing tablets and you notice all of the nuances they have, and you don’t need your Kindle library of books on the device, you’ll likely be happier with the reMarkable.

For me, and likely for most of you, the Kindle Scribe is the way to go.

Interstitial journaling is just so powerful

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It was just about two years ago that I first shared the concept of interstitial journaling, and I’ve been at it ever since. If it’s new to you, that old post (which includes a short video) helps explain it.

In short, it’s just taking quick notes (often time-stamped) as you go through your day. If you’re using a linked note system like Roam Research, Obsidian, or Tana, those notes become wildly more powerful. As you take those notes, you begin to build a network of notes about various people, topics, and activities in your life.

While I’ve done it to some degree every day over the past few years, I’m finding that I’d benefit greatly from doing even more. Instead of quick notes as things come to mind, an intentional 30-second recap makes the notes wildly more useful.

These notes are useful to me in two ways:

First, they help me with this blog. By connecting ideas together, I can often find some new insights in there.

Second, they help with future meetings. If I end a call by jotting down a quick recap, it’s easier to get back into that mindspace for the next call with that person.

Looking forward

I’m also trying to build better notes into my outline for the day. I have a day coming next week with calls at the top of each hour for five straight hours — that was poor planning on my part, but now I need to execute. By building better notes into my daily plan (and then simply adding to them after the call), I should be able to jump from call to call more easily. Even better, having those notes to get me in the proper mindset for each one will allow me to be more present, rather than scrambling to remember why this particular call was scheduled in the first place.

As I’ve said before, if you do any kind of daily journaling then you’re doing a great thing. If you can keep up pieces of it throughout the day, I think you’ll find additional value in that, and if you can do it with a system that helps tie pieces together semi-automatically, your own words will become more valuable than you thought they could.