No more empty productivity calories for me! — I’ve just noticed an interesting phenomenon about content consumption. When all I’m doing is allowing the content to flow over my brain, I can take in an awful lot of it, but remember very little afterwards. Even when I highlight passages that stand out, and even when I pay Readwise…

On boundaries, friction, using Siri to get text directly into Obsidian, converting Paprika recipes to plain text — Welcome to the fifth in a series of posts documenting my plain text, paper-less, Obsidian-flavoured journey. Each post is a 5-minute or less summary of what I’ve read, learned, and implemented since the last edition. Links to earlier episodes are at the end. Today I’ll be talking about —

Beat the chaos and turn your phone into the visual filing cabinet of your dreams — iPhone cameras are a mixed blessing. They’re capable and convenient at the same time as being memory-crushing black holes for images you no longer need, but don’t have time to process. My camera roll had nearly 16K photos on it before I started to take action. Gasp! Apple’s facial recognition…

Free digital garden challenges, the importance of identifying your productivity philosophy, and where analog fits into a digital notes system — Welcome to the fourth in a series of posts documenting my plain text, paper-less journey. Each post is a 5-minute or less summary of what I’ve read, learned, and implemented since the last edition. Links to earlier episodes are at the end. Today I’ll be talking about —

You need to know why you want what you want — Do you know why you are drawn to information and apps about productivity, and the technology that drives much of it? Have you plumbed the depths beneath the impulse that just pushed you to click on yet another article about the topic? Are you trying to close a gap? …

There’s a lot more to us than our speech — I came across a list of Australian slang words yesterday, presumably written as a guide to those who’ve come across the seas to share — or visit — our boundless plains. Since the Aussie dialect is my mother tongue, I thought I’d take a gander at how our southern vernacular…

Will anyone bother looking at your second brain when the first one’s gone? — It’s the year 2050. A hard drive connected to a screen and a hand-written piece of letter-size paper share adjacent display cases in the Museum of Eclectic Human Experience and Knowledge. One night, after closing time, the drive turns to the paper and says, “You know, I can’t figure it…

Being organised without to do applications, read-it-later services, and easy Markdown quotes from the web — Welcome to the third in a series of posts documenting my plain text, paper-less journey. You can expect each post to be a 5-minute or less summary of what I’ve read, learned, and implemented since the last edition. Links to earlier episodes are at the end. Today I’ll be talking…

Simplify your planning system, focus on the essentials — My daily note in Obsidian has a lot of happy-making goal and planner information packed into it. This is a good thing, right? Yes, when dates and destinations are foremost on my mind, but it’s an almighty distraction when all I want to focus on is the daily log —…