An exploration of how Darwin kept track of his various notes, enabling him to produce a huge body of work.

In my last dispatch, I reported on how the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson writes in a “supervillain lair” built twenty feet underground near his otherwise unremarkable home in suburban Utah. According to an article published last weekend in The Guardian, Sanderson is not, as it turns out, the first author to use extreme measures to

​ ​ ​ How to get out of a rut It strikes me that a lot of advice on how to get things done is borderline useless, at least for me personally, because I'm so rarely in the right ...

I've a confession… I've been seeing other todo lists. I don't have great reasons. It started because I wanted to have the option of freedom from Apple despite having invested a ridiculous amount of time and automation capital into the ecosystem. ...

We've got the wrong theory about how minds work and it's ruining our lives

The complete & free 35-page Hybrid Work Guide (With Hybrid Meeting Guide). Covering how to: win, leadership principles, your tech stack & delivering in the hybrid workplace. Free PDF Download available

Following a suggestion by Clive Thompson.

Among those who find pleasure in cataloging the habits and rituals of prodigious creatives, the poet Mary Oliver is a familiar companion. Her commitment to long walks outdoors, scribbling notes in a cloth-bound notebook, is both archetypical and approachable. This vision of Oliver finding inspiration in her close observations of nature, made as she wanders

If you’re not getting something actionable out of it, you’re probably wasting your time

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Nothing to prove I think a bit too often, if I’m being honest, about the closing scene of episode two of Aaron Sorkin’s TV-show-about-a-TV-show, Studio 60 on t...

It's in here I promise

Tiago shares 10 favorite quotes from The Bullet Journal Method and how each one shaped his thinking about notes, journaling, and productivity.

​ ​ ​ ​ Do you value The Imperfectionist, and also like getting books for free? I've got three sets of signed copies of all three of my books to give away to three people who co...

​ ​ ​ No escape One of my favourite books on writing is How To Write A Lot, by Paul Silvia, despite the fact that it's not really aimed at people like me (it's for academic soci...

Napoleon Hill is the most famous conman you’ve probably never heard of. Born into poverty in rural Virginia at the end of the 19th century, Hill went on to write one of the most successful self-help books of the 20th century: Think and Grow Rich. In fact, he helped invent the genre. But it’s the untold story of Hill’s…

In my book Digital Minimalism, I emphasized the danger of a newly-emerged condition that I called "solitude deprivation." As I wrote, the introduction of the smartphone caused our relationship with distraction to mutate into something new: "At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites

Everything you need to know about the science of motivation. Unravel the mystery of what makes you driven to act (or slack).

A while back I wrote about What 80% Comprehension Feels Like, and I quoted the English examples used in Marcos Benevides’ excellent presentation which simulate 80% comprehension in English by including made-up English-like vocabulary words. I’ve been thinking about that presentation a lot, both about the impact of such a demonstration, as well as about how it could be accomplished in Chinese. I ended up... Read More

You may have noticed it's practically impossible to contact me. I did that on purpose so I can spend my time how I want to spend it. I don't really use email and I have my private message inboxes on every platform closed. And they have been like that for

Brittle systems are weak. Short-term wins feel like a demonstration of will by those that seek to be strong. But the only run is the long run. When we embrace flexible, renewable and diverse approa…

Earlier this week, the writer John McPhee turned 91. One of the nice things about McPhee's birthday, in addition to it providing an occasion to celebrate his incomparable output, is that it usually leads to one of my favorite writerly quotes spreading around the internet. By any reasonable standard, McPhee is productive. He's published 29

When I first started managing, I expected that I’d magically have more time since I could delegate important problems to people on my team. But team support takes more time than I had anticipated, with recruiting, weekly 1:1s, debugging team issues, performance reviews — and that's before even talking about the product.

How often should you succeed at a task, to maximize learning? I review research suggesting the answer is close to 85%.

Earlier today, June Huh, a 39-year-old Princeton professor, was awarded the 2022 Fields Medal, one of the highest possible honors in mathematics, for his breakthrough work on geometric combinatorics. As described in a recent profile of Huh, published in Quanta Magazine (and sent to me by several alert readers), Huh's path to academic mathematics was

Taking note of everything that you care about

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In my previous essay, I wrote about how novelist Jack Carr rented a rustic cabin to help focus his attention on completing his latest James Reece thriller. This talk of writing retreats got me thinking again about what's arguably my favorite example from this particular genre of aspirational day dreaming: Wendell Berry's "camp" on the