Inspiration is found in work

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It’s easy to sit back and wait for inspiration to strike. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I’d venture to say that most times it won’t.

If you want inspiration to show up, then get to work and you may find that it randomly appears. As I’m writing this, my queue of blog posts was getting very low. I could choose to sit around and hope for inspiration, or I could get to work reading new content and sifting through my notes. I chose the latter and quickly found a handful of new ideas for posts.

Pablo Picasso said it this way:

“Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.

And Isabel Allende said this:

” Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too”

There are great times when ideas just pop into my head, and I love when that happens! If I relied on that, though, there is no way I’d be able to publish as often as I do. I choose to work, and that usually causes inspiration to start to work as well.

What are you not doing today?

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Having a well manicured to-do list is a fantastic thing. Keeping tasks front of mind will help you to not miss anything as your day goes by.

Taking it further, though, some people have “not to-do” lists as well. It could be to not turn on the television, or to not eat any snacks between meals. There are a lot of things you could put on that list.

You can take it even further. In the book “The Coaching Habit“, author Michael Stanier pulls in a great quote from Michael Porter:

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

Porter’s quote isn’t really about “don’t turn on the TV”, though. Porter is viewing it through the lens of being a great company.

He has used the example of Southwest Airlines before. They can turn a gate around very quickly and they can offer great pricing, but it’s because of what they choose not to do: no seat assignments, no meals, etc. Those are things that are generally a good idea to include, but leaving them out was the best way for Southwest to achieve their goals.

We have similar discussions at our agency. While it’d be great to be the “one-stop shop” for everything, it would lead to a degradation of our main service offerings. By staying focused on our core strengths and intentionally avoiding some types of work (media placements, for example), we’re able to keep our main services incredibly strong.

What are you not doing?

Outliner versus plain text note-taking systems

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As I’ve been digging more into the Tana note-taking app and talking to people about the pros and cons of it, a common dividing line seems to be coming up; is the app focused on outline-style notes, or plain text?

I never really thought it mattered to me (and I didn’t even really see the distinction), but I’m coming around and I think I’m falling on the outline type system as my favorite.

Plain text

Most of us began taking notes on text-based systems. This could go way back to simple note-taking apps from decades ago, but even more recent apps like Evernote (and even Obsidian) are text-based at their core. This simply means that you can put blocks of text into the app and format it however you’d like. You can optionally add bulleted lists, but they’re not required.

Outlines

More recent apps, such as Roam Research and Tana, are built around an outline. Everything is a bullet, and a sub-bullet, and a sub-bullet. This keeps you a bit more locked in on how you can work, but also generally makes it much faster to lay out idea, collapse older sections, and build things out more quickly.

Even inside of outline-based systems, things are often handled differently. In Roam, you create pages and build outlines on those, and things are a bit ephemeral. You don’t really know where they live, but that’s ok in their system. In Tana, every single bullet is a “node”, which is essentially a note. You don’t need to specify “this is a new note”; if it’s a bullet, it’s a note that you can reference from elsewhere later. It’s taken me a while to get my head around it, but it works very well.

The problem with outline-based systems is that they’re not great for long-form writing. Writing a long article where everything is a bullet is kind of weird. That works ok for me, since I use my notes for notes about my blog posts, but I do the full writing inside of WordPress. For others, though, that’s a more substantial problem and they’re better off with a system like Obsidian.

Which is better?

The answer, of course, is that it depends. My idea with this post is merely to point out the two different structures, so that you can be aware of them as you’re looking for the next great note-taking tool for yourself. As you explore them, you’ll likely lean more toward text or outlines, and that can help shape your decision.

Do you have a style that you prefer?

Moving from Obsidian to Tana?

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When I moved my notes database from Roam Research to Obsidian earlier this year, I expected I’d stay there for quite a while. Obsidian is a great tool, and I spoke about the reasons for my move in that earlier post.

Now, more quickly than I expected, I’m moving everything over to Tana. What is Tana, and why would I do that?

At its core, Tana is another note-taking app, but it does it in a way that hasn’t really been seen before. Until Tana came around, there were really three types of note-taking apps:

  1. Simple note apps, like Google Keep and Apple Notes.
  2. Graph-style apps like Roam Research and Obsidian, that helped to interconnect your notes.
  3. Data-focused apps like Notion and Airtable that let you build powerful tables and charts.

While Google Keep will likely be my “quick notes” app of choice for years to come, Tana is the first great app I’ve seen that tries to combine the graph and data types of notes. There are a lot of videos out there that show how it works, but this one from Shu Omi is a solid overview:

Ultimately, Tana can handle everything that I was doing in Obsidian with books, people and blog posts, and then allows me to do a lot more. It’s easier for me to research quotes from books, track daily workouts, and just have an easier way to connect my thoughts. Ultimately, it should help me have a slightly easier time putting together my notes for posts on this blog, so we’ll see what happens.

Tana is invite-only for now, but if it interests you at all I encourage you to visit their site and put your name on the waiting list. As Shu mentioned in the video above, the product hasn’t been officially released yet but already feels incredibly polished.

Whether or not I stick with Tana in the long run, I’m very excited to see the direction these apps are taking and the benefits they can bring to all of us.

It’s like vacation starts tomorrow

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One of the best tips for getting things done is to always pretend like you’re leaving for vacation tomorrow and it’s your last day in the office for the next week. When people are preparing to leave the office for vacation, they tend to do a few things:

  • Write out a plan for what needs to get done before they leave and create a daily to-do list.
  • Get their email inbox cleaned out.
  • Make sure all meetings for the next few weeks are squared away.
  • Return any lingering phone messages.

It’s fantastic! By the end of the day, they’ve accomplished more than they often do in a week, and hopefully can enjoy some time away.

For many people, their day-to-day doesn’t look like the list above. They don’t plan their day; they let their day plan them. Emails can linger for days in their inbox. Things get messy.

The idea of truly pretending that you’re going on vacation tomorrow likely won’t work; it’s hard to fake enthusiasm like that. However, grabbing a few of those practices every day can be a fantastic way to make every day smoother and more productive.

Some early thoughts on the Kindle Scribe

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Amazon recently announced the Kindle Scribe, a new 10″ Kindle that comes with a pen. It’s very much like a Kindle meets a reMarkable, and I’m very excited about what that could mean.

If you’ve not seen it, here is the official announcement video from Amazon:

The video doesn’t show a lot of how it works, but you get a pretty good idea. It’s a big Kindle that includes a pen to write on the screen. If the software is solid, this will become one of my favorite devices.

I love my Kindle and I love my reMarkable, but they both have shortcomings that the other could fix.

  • The Kindle allows me to highlight text, but not easily leave any commentary in my notes.
  • The reMarkable is great for note-taking and marking up documents, but the lack of books and the lack of a backlight are rough.

In theory, the Kindle Scribe will be the perfect combination to solve those woes.

Pricing

At first glance, the price seems pretty high at $339. The Kindle Paperwhite is a great reading device and it starts at just $99. That’s a big jump!

However, I think you also need to compare this device to the reMarkable and others in that genre. The reMarkable starts at $279, but that doesn’t include a pen, which is essential to the product. The pen is another $79 (or $129 for the “marker plus), making the total $358, or about $20 more than the Kindle Scribe. Plus, reMarkable essentially requires their “connect” service for some of the features you need, which is another $3/mo. It’s not much, but it’s more than the $0/mo service for the Kindle Scribe.

So, the Kindle Scribe isn’t cheap by any means, but it’s priced very well compared to the writing tablet competition.

Features

I mentioned some of the features above, and those are really the two that I’m excited about.

I’ve been taking more and more notes as I read, but it’s difficult to do on the Kindle Paperwhite. I create a lot of highlights, but can’t easily add further thoughts to them. With the Kindle Scribe, I presumably can.

With the reMarkable, the screen is not lit at all and requires a bright room or sunlight to read. This is by design, as it allows the tip of the pen to be a tiny bit closer to the surface to help further mimic the feeling of writing on paper. It does an amazing job with that, but I think I’d be ok with a small gap there in order to get some light. I frequently find myself in my office trying to read a document on the reMarkable and struggling due to low light. With the Kindle Paperwhite (and therefore the Kindle Scribe), that is never a problem. The E ink screen works great in bright sunlight or in a dark room.

Why not an iPad?

The main pushback against the reMarkable (and will be against the Kindle Scribe) is “why not just use an iPad?”. It’s a reasonable question, and for many people I’d agree that they just should. The iPad is an amazing device and can serve many of these needs. I find benefit in the reMarkable/Scribe in four ways:

  • Read it outside. E ink is fantastic outside, whereas an iPad is often unusable. It’s a world of difference.
  • Related, E ink is far easier on your eyes for reading, even in ideal lighting conditions. If you’ve ever tried to read a book from an iPad and from a Kindle, you know that the Kindle is a much better experience.
  • The lack of notifications. This is kind of a bogus answer, using a shortcoming as a benefit, but it’s true. As I shared a few years ago about the reMarkable, it’s great to use in church and meetings and places where an iPad might be a little less acceptable.
  • Battery life. The reMarkable can last for weeks, while the iPad can last for hours. The Kindle Scribe should be close to the reMarkable in terms of battery life, which is excellent. It may be a smidge less due to the lit screen, but it’ll still be a device that doesn’t need to be plugged in every night.

Should I get it?

I can’t begin to answer that for you, but hopefully the info about gave you some solid ideas. If you’re a Kindle fan and you were intrigued by the reMarkable, this could be a great device. There are two caveats, though:

  1. As of now, I’ve not seen a real review of the device. I hope Amazon starts pushing a few out to reviewers soon, but nothing yet.
  2. This is a first-generation device. The first reMarkable was good, but the second was far better. Any first-generation device will have some odd shortcomings, and the Kindle Scribe won’t be perfect. Amazon’s history and experience with Kindle should help, but no doubt the “Kindle Scribe 2” that comes out in a few years will be much better.

The Kindle Scribe will be released on November 30, 2022. You can pre-order now if you’re interested.

I’ll share more once I get my hands on it, which I’m quite excited to do!

Exploring versus exploiting

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When it comes to tools and systems, there are two areas you can lean on: exploring and exploiting. To put it another way, are you spending time exploring new tools and playing with the shiny toys, or are you actually exploiting (in a good way) the tools at your disposal?

Admittedly, I fall a bit too far into the exploring side of things, as I love to test out new tools and make changes to my workflow. I talk about many of them on this blog, and you can see my current toolset on my always changing page for “The tools I use“.

I justify that by considering it a form of entertainment, which isn’t untrue, but it also can be very unproductive. Grey and Myke talked about this quite a bit in Episode 132 of their excellent Cortex podcast, so that might be worth giving a listen to.

I’ll likely continue to be an over-explorer, but I like having this framework to wrap around it so I can perhaps limit things a bit and spend more time exploiting the systems that I already have. I use some very powerful tools already, so spending more time learning to make the best use of what I have will likely be the most efficient way forward. There’s a balance in there somewhere, I’m sure, any maybe one day I’ll find it.

Until then, I’ll spend a lot of time exploring but hopefully can be a bit more focused in exploiting some of the great things that I find.

Readwise is breathing new life into RSS

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I’ve been using the Readwise Reader app for a few months now, and it’s quickly becoming an indispensable tool for me.

You can learn about it on their site here, but for me it really just combines two things — the “read it later” functionality from tools like Pocket, and then the traditional RSS reading from tools like Feedly. However, the way they combine those two features is very helpful, and some of the new ideas they’re bringing to RSS are simply fantastic.

RSS like TikTok

So an RSS feed is essentially just a list of articles from sites that you’ve added to your list, like I have discussed here in the past. You can subscribe and unsubscribe from sites, and you get all of the content from those that you’re subscribed to. Most RSS readers do a fine job of letting you browse your list and mark things off as you go, but Readwise is using some inspiration from TikTok to help you get through them more quickly.

With RSS, most software has to juggle the ability to “show more content” with “let people get through it quickly” and this new solution does it well, particularly on your phone. It shows each new article as a full-page on your phone (image, headline, and a few sentence of text), but then you treat it like TikTok — tap on it to read more, or flick your finger to scroll to the next article. As you scroll though, they’re marked as read and you can get through your list rather quickly.

Unlike TikTok, there is no algorithm at play here, which is the core of why RSS is great. It shows you every article from every site that you subscribe to — nothing more, nothing less. I’ve used RSS for a few decades now for that reason, but this new interface makes it even better.

Always get full feeds

The other neat thing that Readwise is doing is that is essentially forces sites to supply “full feeds”. When you look at the settings for RSS on your site (which you likely have whether you know it or not), you can choose to publish a “full feed” or a “partial feed”. The full feed will publish the entirety of your posts, while the partial feed will publish a paragraph and then a “click to read the full post”. I always encourage people to publish full posts, but not everyone pays attention to that setting

Backing up a bit, the other part of Readwise Reader is their “read it later” functionality. This gives you a small button in your web browser, and every time you see something you want to read later, you tap the button and it saves it for you in Reader. It doesn’t just save a bookmark to it (though it does that as well), but they crawl the page, pull the text from the article, and then format it nicely for you to read later.

That’s essentially what their RSS reader does for partial feeds. If it pulls in a post that is only a partial feed, they then run out and crawl the full version of the post and bring that in instead, so when you’re reading your RSS feeds, you get the full content of every post. It’s a relatively simple concept, but I’ve never seen it done before and it’s brilliant!

RSS –> Read It Later

At the end of the day, the real power of Readwise Reader is the combination of RSS and the read-it-later functionality. If I’m reading something in my feed that is particularly noteworthy, I can tap an icon and it saves it in my long list of things to read later.

Even in that part of their app, they’ve done a little something that makes it more useful. With tools like Pocket, you have your list of things to read, and then you can “archive” them when you’re done. It works well, but Readwise adds another step — an inbox.

Ultimately, Readwise has three categories for read-it-later items: Inbox | Later | Archive

Whenever you add something to read later, whether from the browser tool or from their RSS reader, it drops it in the inbox. I work to keep that pretty clean, so I can read important items quickly or share them or whatever, and then move on. For most items, though, I take them from the inbox to the later and then dig into them when I have time to read and process. Archive is less important to me, but solid articles move there just for safe keeping. The extra step is nice, and allows me to keep a heavy list of things to read “later”, while letting me keep that inbox clean.

Readwise Reader is still in beta, and still has some bugs, but they’re doing the big things right and are doing an excellent job of bringing new features to an old technology. Check out their website to learn more, and if you’d like an invite to try it out, just reach out and I’ll get you connected.

Make your operating system irrelevant

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It’s often easier said than done, but the more you can make your operating system irrelevant, the better.

This came up while I was listening to a recent episode of the Cortex podcast, and the hosts were lamenting a problem in getting something to work between a Mac and a Windows machine. Their system relied heavily on iCloud, so they just couldn’t get it to work. While iCloud can be great, this is why I suggest you avoid it (to the extent possible) in lieu of something like Google Drive or Dropbox.

On any given day, I’ll do some work for GreenMellen on my Windows desktop, a Chromebook, and perhaps my iPad or my Android phone, and it all works smoothly. Granted, I can usually be much more productive on a desktop computer rather than my phone, but there is no proprietary software that is limiting me.

If you look at my updated list of tools that I use, they’re all cross-platform. Even those that are desktop programs instead of web apps (like Obsidian) are ones that have great syncing tools so that I can use them from anywhere.

Windows has some decent native tools, and Apple devices have even more, but I encourage you to be forward-thinking with the tools that you use so that if you need to work with someone on a different system there aren’t strange issues to be dealt with.

Pareto Principle

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This is another mental model that you’ve likely heard of before — the Pareto Principle, often known as the “80/20 rule”, where 20% of the effort can produce 80% of the results.

A great example in my life is my big reading shortcut using Blinkist. I can “finish” a book in 20% of the time, but still get roughly 80% of the benefit from it.

As we dig in, though, know that the Pareto Principle doesn’t always need to be exactly 80/20; perhaps it’s 50/15 or 95/10. Whatever the exact number, the idea is that a subset of effort can often lead to large achievements.

Website Traffic

Another great example is when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on your website. While it’s generally wise to optimize as much as you can, you’ll often find that 80% of the traffic arriving to your site from Google only land on 20% of your pages.

I just looked at the GreenMellen stats for July, and it matches up almost perfectly. 2,373 people landed on 281 different pages of our site. However, the top 45 pages (16% of pages) where were roughly 80% of users (1896) landed. The other 236 pages were certainly valuable, but just a fraction of our traffic came through those.

Keep some, lose some

As you identify 80/20 areas in your life, you’ll find some are worth keep and some are worth losing. Your town may discover that 80% of the traffic is on 20% of the roads, but the rest of the roads are likely worth keeping… On the other hand, if your company derives 80% of their revenue from 20% of their clients, a consolidation might make sense.

To chew on it a bit more, here is a great list of 100 potential 80/20 situations you might see. Some may be valid, others not, but it’s a good list to get you started thinking about this.