Tools I still like to use:
E-mail, text/MMS, RSS, a blog/personal website, podcasts, forums. What did I miss?
These fundamental tools are still around because they are the best tools where you are in control of what you are interested in and what you can discover.
Greg Morris writing about notebooks:
You don’t need to start a second brain, or do some weird PKM stuff, you just need to have a place full of things that will help you out. Record things you find interesting, things you need to remember, things that might help you work later on, literally anything you might need later on. You don’t need to start a commonplace book or anything, you just require a notebook around, all the time.
I start to wonder if there is a more straightforward way to manage ideas other than keeping a full PKM or Zettelkasten.
This year is going to see my journal/log’s 10th anniversary and 100th notebook.
I read the whole article and took a lot of notes which inspired me to think about how I can consolidate my capture (logging) habit a bit more into one place, but still keep multiple capture tools.
After finishing this essay, it feels like Dave accidentally invented GTD for himself in a different form based on a stream of captured ideas that are moved up in the chain to have projects and next actions.
The part at the end where he writes about weekly, monthly, and yearly recaps feels very GTD-esque.
I actually tracked my time in a notebook like this before. I had a timestamp of when I started and when I ended a session of work. I have a long history of working in sessions, as I used to do a lot of freelance work, which requires time tracking (a session means that I focus on one task for a more extended period of time). My only question is how Dave transcribes his notebook entries into his digital system? I did it by hand, and it was awful.
Anyway, this is an excellent write-up of a fantastic system that I’m going to use as inspiration.
So one thing I consider a compelling use case for a big iPhone and a small iPad mini is using them as a mobile writing environment. I could easily publish an essay from my iPhone or iPad mini just by thumb-typing. I want to explore this use case in more detail in the future.
We have had people doing this for years now, watch and read the following stuff from Patrick Rhone or Yuvi Zalkow.
I have a MacBook Pro and iPad Pro to write, so why am I interested in this phenomenon? I like when people think outside the box regarding their device usage.
The iPhone and the iPad mini are considered content consumption devices by almost everyone, which I’m afraid I have to disagree with. I create all kinds of things using these devices. I take photos, write notes and blogposts, sometimes create/edit Shortcuts, and SSH into remote servers to fix issues. Heck, I even edited an entire podcast episode on my iPhone using Ferrite while I was sitting on the train. It was actually quite fun to do. Being an owner of a big phone like the iPhone 14 Pro Max, I’m even expecting myself to use it more to create rather than consume.
Thumb-typing lengthy notes and blog posts on these devices maybe seems to be an ineffective way to write. Still, there is a focused environment to be found here—especially if you set up iOS to send only essential notifications—so even a smartphone can be a device that makes you focused.
I’m not going into details on notifications here, but let me just tell you, it’s not your smartphone that makes you distracted. It’s your laziness to set up notifications properly that makes you distracted.
Continuing my idea of Drafts is a digital Hipster PDA, here’s a video of Patrick Rhone talking about the same idea but for Notes.