Goals
- 📺 I WAS WRONG - How I Set Goals for the New Year • 11 minute video by Ali Abdaal about what convinced him that goals are actually useful and not detrimental
Habits
- Habits vs. Tasks • The Sweet Setup explains why habits are generally more useful than goals 📖
- Book Review: Atomic Habits • Miguel Crespo 📖
- Change habits by changing friction • “If you’re trying to do less or something, increase friction. Make it as annoying as possible. If you’re trying to do more of something, decrease friction. Make it as easy as possible.” • Mike Crittenden 📖
- Atomic habit building with ChatGPT • Mike Crittenden 📖
- Set SIX Alarms. It’ll Change Your Life. • Identifying your domino habit (the habit that sets you up to follow through on your other habits) and setting reminders that set you up to complete it • Rian Doris 📺
- Less-than-one-minute habits • Mike Crittenden 📖
Journaling
- The Journaling System that changed my life • Great overview of how and why to journal • struthless 📺
- 📖 Squarknote • Article by Susan Fowler Rigetti explaining how she uses monthly todo notebooks to achieve her goals
Learning
- Learn In Public • Shawn Wang explains the personal and career benefits of learning in the open 📖
- How to teach yourself hard things • Julia Evans 📖
- So you want to be a wizard • Julia Evans 📺
- Learning at work • Julia Evans 📖
- Get better at programming by learning how things work • Julia Evans 📖
- How to ask good questions • Julia Evans 📖
- Asking good questions is hard (but worth it) • Julia Evans 📖
- How to get useful answers to your questions • Julia Evans 📖
- “The single most powerful “skill” you can develop: Learning quickly…use this simple 3-part framework to rapidly learn anything…” • Dickie Bush 🐦
- Knowledge Transfer • Being told what to do isn’t as effective as learning from painful experience • The Primeagen 📺
- The Secret To Become A Great Engineer • Climb mount stupid • The Primeagen 📺
- How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education | Sal Khan | TED • How to leverage AI as a tutor (that helps you think through problems yourself) or teaching assistant • Sal Khan 📺
Prioritizing
- 📺 Scaling Yourself • 56 minute video by Scott Hanselman about the necessity of letting go of most things and focusing on the few that matter most
- The Ownership Matrix (What to Do When You’re Overwhelmed) – The Sweet Setup • Have you ever looked up the dictionary definition of “overwhelm”? It’s actually pretty intense: bury or drown beneath a huge mass defeat completely give too much of a thing to someone. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, then perhaps you feel as though you have been given too much. In fact, you’ve been given so much that […]
- How I think about solving problems - Human Who Codes • The five questions I used to help me decide, prioritize, and solve problems.
- Do Less | Hidden Brain Media
- Addition vs Subtraction - by Molly Graham - Lessons
- Impact effort matrix: Prioritization made simple - LogRocket Blog
- Low Priority Issues + Time = Relationship Killer • Low priority asks should be treated as high priority once enough time has passed • Stay SaaSy 📖
Speed
- 📺 The magic of Textexpander • 9 minute video by Marie Poulin showing how she uses Textexpander to quickly output text she repeatedly needs
- Vimium/Vimari • navigate the web much more quickly via keyboard
- f/F = open a link in same/new tab
- b = search all bookmarks + bookmarklets (e.g. quick way to “Save to Feedbin”)
- o = search bookmarkets, bookmarklets + history (or just type a url to open)
- T = search open tabs
- ge = edit url
- x/X = close/reopen tab
- ? = show all shortcuts
- yy = copy current URL to clipboard
- yf = copy the URL of a link on the page to the clipboard
- customizable shortcuts for navigating open tabs, current tab’s history, etc
- Rectangle:
- ctrl-opt left/right/up/down = resize a window (and cycle through options)
- ctrl-opt-cmd left/right = move a window to the next display
- Slack:
cmd-shift-a
= go to all unreadscmd-shift-t
= go to threadscmd-shift-y
= set a status
- How To Get Started: The Cult of Done • An explanation of the Cult of Done Manifesto, which emphasizes learning by doing and moving on • No Boilerplate 📺
- The Cult of Done Manifesto. The Cult of Done Manifesto is a special… | by Bre Pettis | Medium • Bre Pettis 📖
- Done Manifesto | After Bre Pettis’ Cult of Done Manifesto. P… | Flickr • Infographic representing the principles of the Cult of Done Manifesto • James Provost 🖼️
Tracking
- 🧰 git-standup • Command line tool by kamranahmedse that reminds you what you did on the last working day
Notes
- Take simpler notes!
- For years, I used a sophisticated combination of three Notion databases to track all my research and writing. It was highly successful at collecting links to things I’d read. But had a negative impact on actually writing. I spent far more time organizing my notes and the relationships between them than actually new content, let alone publishing it.
- I switched to an old school single folder of markdown files and my writing and publishing took off.
- Post drafts and notes side-by-side in the same folder
- Posts distinguished from notes by having a date property in their frontmatter
- File names prefixed by topic (and any subtopics)
- Copilot super helpful with inserting repeated patterns (e.g. inserting author names, emoji format indicators, etc)
- Apple Notes vs Obsidian:
- Pros:
- can easily share a note with someone
- device sync is built in
- never any merge conflicts since not syncing via git
- includes iOS widgets
- Cons:
- no vim, which makes typing experience on desktop pretty painful compared to what I’m used to in vs code + obsidian
- no markdown, so locked into limited formatting options
- e.g. no inline or block syntax highlighting
- more limited organization options
- can’t publish notes
- Pros:
- How I refactor notes in Obsidian • Nicole van der Hoeven 📺
- The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Plain Text • Makes a strong case for using nothing but Markdown files in GitHub repos (helped by GitHub features like Projects, PRs and Actions) for all documentation, project and task management • No Boilerplate 📺
Reading
- Use an RSS reader to consume all blog and YouTube content in one place in the order and with the UI you prefer
- Feedbin:
- use tags to organize feeds by their general category (e.g. “news”, “fitness”, “coding”)
- Use saved searches to curate more specific topics you’ll be interested in for a little while
- Use manual searches to research topics you’re interested in one time
- Star items it makes more sense to consume later (need more time, need to be able to play sound, want to take notes, currently busy, etc)
- Use app email address to sign up for newsletters so they’ll go to your rss reader instead of your inbox
- Alternative: Newsletter subscriptions via RSS | Harry Cresswell • How to get newsletters out of your inbox and into your RSS reader.
- Saving current browser tab to Feedbin:
- Add “Send to Feedbin” bookmarklet to browser
- The bookmark doesn’t show up in Alfred’s browser bookmarks index, so…
- Option 1: Shortcut to open specific bookmark / URL in Chrome - Super User • using Vimium, while focused on page, press “b” to search all bookmarks (and bookmarklets), then search for “Send to Feedbin” and press enter to save the page
- Option 2: Assigning Keyboard Shortcuts to Bookmarklets in Chrome - adamstahr.com
- Since the “Send to Feedbin” bookmarklet appears in the “Bookmarks” menu, create a macOS keyboard shortcut via System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts… > Application Shortcuts
- Downside = this opens a new tab (booooooo)
- Searching in Feedbin
- prefer
title.exact
overtitle
for more predictable searches - Search Syntax • Feedbin 📚
- prefer
- Reading with Reeder
Time Management
Problem Solving
Focusing
- FOCUS – How to Achieve the Superpower of Laser Focus • August Bradley 📺
- fantastic; rewatch and take better notes
- Decide what matters most
- Decide when I’ll do what matters most each day (and protect that time block)
- Squeeze all other stuff around it in the remaining time (none of it is as urgent as it seems)
- Decide what matters most ahead of time (the night before, before the week begins, etc)
- Remove distractions (take an inventory of them and remove them)
Notion
- Notion and Vimium • How to navigate Notion via the keyboard by using Vimium in Chrome • AJ Burt 📺
- Formulas 2.0 • Notion 📺
Tasks
- Things 3
- Useful Things views you won’t see in the sidebar but can find by searching:
- Deadlines
- All Projects
- Logged Projects
- Repeating
- Useful Things views you won’t see in the sidebar but can find by searching:
Inbox
-
Quick fixes: how to download an image from a Google Doc - The Verge
-
reading: feedbin/feedbin-api: Feedbin API Documentation
- pull into obsidian?
-
Quick fixes: how to download an image from a Google Doc - The Verge
-
Hookmark – Links beat searching - add deep links to apps to any app in macos
-
PARA:
- how to balance PARA notes in Obsidian + tasks in things? How should Things be organized? (I far prefer Things on mobile for quick task capture and sorting compared to Obsidian, which is slower to capture in, uglier to look at, and lacks a clear way to sort and calendar-block a day)
- in things, how should work project + area tasks be represented? As separate projects that are separate in Today view? Separate projects that are mixable in Today view? One flat “Projects” area task list + “Areas” area task list?
- I prefer capturing in Things on mobile but in Obsidian (via Alfred) on desktop; problem = if I’m capturing a note about something I just learned in Obsidian, which makes me think of something I want to do, should I be capturing the todo in Things? I don’t love the duplication and disorganization of the same idea recorded in two places… But if I just tag the idea as a todo in Obsidian, I don’t love the mobile “what should I work on right now” workflow Obsidian offers compared to Things…hmm
-
Things/Obsidian: list of possible quests, ranked by impact?
- e.g. blogging workflow (both writing + publishing)
- e.g. better vs code/vim/tmux/kitty configs
- e.g. better aliases/terminal tool replacements
- e.g. better git tools/workflows (like worktrees for easier pr reviewing while working on a feature branch)
- e.g. playgrounds for trying new tech (e.g. new css features)
-
Search Syntax - When saving a search in feedbin, terms with special characters like punctuation need to go in an
.exact
search - Feedbin -
Slack: How do I get slack to remind me every fortnight from next Saturday - Stack Overflow - Slack
/remind
format for custom repetition windows starting at a custom future date - StackOverflow