3 Notion Templates For Writers: Outline And Organize Drafts — Red Gregory
I’ve found that writing inside Notion is quite pleasing due to the clean interface. The ability to organize narrative elements inside a database is one of many advantages for writers. In this template bundle I created a jumping off point for bloggers, freelancers, and book writers to start drafting
Any time you’re planning, spend some time working backwards. Ask “what’s the key state I’m aiming for?”, then ask “what unlocks or enables that?”. And repeat.
On Pace and Productivity - Study Hacks - Cal Newport
One of the books I’m reading on vacation at the moment is John Gribbin’s magisterial tome, The Scientists. I’m only up to page 190 (which is to say, only up to Isaac Newton), but even early on I’ve become intrigued by a repeated observation: though the scientists profiled in Gribbin’s book are highly “productive” by any […]
Getting Stuff Done By Not Being Mean to Yourself - The Open Heart Project
I’ve spent a lot of time in my life trying to force myself to do things. Really good things. Things that are important to me. Things like meditating, journaling, going to the gym, and so on. I set schedules over and over. (I will rise at 5. Meditate, 530-630. Journal 630-730. Breakfast 8-9, and so... READ MORE
A Close Look at the New Quick Notes Feature in iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey – The Sweet Setup
Color me geeky, but the feature I’ve been most excited for after Apple’s 2021 WWDC keynote has been Quick Notes. I’m not even a Notes user (or at least I wasn’t). Nor has the Notes feature-set ever been one that feels fulfilling to me.
On Twitter Addiction and its Discontents - Study Hacks - Cal Newport
Earlier this week, Caitlin Flanagan published a provocative essay in the Atlantic titled: “You Really Need to Quit Twitter.” In this instance, the label of “provocative” seems obligatory, even though an objective read of the piece reveals mainly common sense. Which serves to underline the whole point Flanagan is attempting to make. The article reports […]
The Productivity Ninja Manifesto: Change Your Life One Task at a Time
That’s why some of this stuff is not a joke. We’re talking months of work—useful work—not busy work, not garbage work, but useful work done in days. At the beginning we asked the question, ‘Can you be productive to build the life you want?’ Imagine if you could move this quickly toward the thing you …
Automating Drafts to Create Custom Documents in Seconds
You can technically write an entire novel inside of Apple Notes or compose your blog posts in Notepad on your Windows computer. The basic concept of letting users type text into an app is not special, and yet writing apps are one of those things that everyone is very particular about. It’s all about the little things, and what feels right for each person.
Time has a monetary value to you. That is, money and time can be traded for one another in lots of circumstances, and there are prices that you are willing to take and prices you are not. Hopefully…
How do you ask good questions? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Ryan writes to me: Consuming the different variety of media in which you publish ideas, I’ve noticed that you pose very high quality questions. For me, high quality questions have a Heideggerian quality insofar as they open a space for exploration, i.e. a concept, category, path of thought has specific affordances that were merely dormant […]
My new book Four Thousand Weeks, about making the most of our absurdly brief time on the planet, is now available for pre-order in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, NZ & elsewhere. Pre-orders are hugely important for authors, these days – they count towards the first week's sales, giving a crucial signal to booksellers that a title has momentum – so if you value my writing, by far the most effective way to support my work is to pre-order the book! If you do: thank you. And hold on to your receipt, pending details of a forthcoming giveaway I'll be announcing exclusively for pre-orderers. For more about the book, and to pre-order, click here. • I'll admit that when I first encountered the Pomodoro Technique, years ago, I couldn't see what the fuss was about. Divide your work into 25-minute portions with five-minute breaks, measured with a timer (canonically, a tomato-shaped one, hence the name)? I mean, sure. If you like. Or don't. What's the big deal? It took writing a whole book about the power of embracing your finitude for me to appreciate that there's something deep and potentially transformative here, embodying the limitation-embracing outlook I explore in Four Thousand Weeks. For the uninitiated, the basic technique goes like this: figure out the time you have available for work (or housework, or life admin – it's useful there too). Then divide it into 25-minute chunks of focus, or Pomodoros. After each one, take five minutes off; after four Pomodoros, stop for a longer period. In the full version of this approach, you figure out, at the start of each work session, what progress you plan to make in each Pomodoro. There are rules for what to do if you get distracted, or mis-estimate how long a task will take. I'm not especially suggesting you adopt the technique (though I've recently returned to it, combining it with the "three or four hours" approach I outlined the other week). The real point is that it's just one way of making a key step on the path of embracing limitation: giving up the fight against time. The core trouble in our modern relationship with time, I think – made worse by most productivity advice – is that we've come to see it as something we need to try to master or conquer. First, we think of time as a separate "thing" (unlike, say, medieval peasants, who'd have had no such abstract notion). Then, we feel we've got to make the most of it, or squeeze the most work from it, or use it to get on top of things, or do enough with it to feel a sense of self-worth. And our economic system makes things worse, making many feel as though they need to achieve this mastery simply to stay afloat. Sadly, though, no finite human being has ever won a fight against time. We just get the limited time we get, and the limited control over it that we get. And if you spend your life fighting the truth of this situation, all that happens is that you feel more rushed and overwhelmed and impatient – until one day time decisively wins the fight, as it was always destined to do. (In other words: you die.) To make the same point a different way: you're not actually separate from time to begin with. You just are the sum of the moments of your days. So trying to gain a sense of control over them is like Baron Munchausen, pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair. Enter the Pomodoro Technique, which its creator Francesco Cirillo describes as a way to turn time from a "predator" into an "ally". It's not about conquering time by imposing Pomodoros on it. It's about seeing – like Molière's M. Jourdain, astonished to find he'd been speaking in prose his whole life – that in a certain sense your day already consists of Pomodoros. You have a certain number of slabs of time available for work, unfolding one after the other, whether you like it or not, until it's time to pick up the kid from preschool or make dinner or go to bed. So the Pomodoro Technique is just a way of becoming more conscious of what's already true – that your time is fixed, finite, given, un-pausable – and a tool for making slightly wiser decisions about what you do with it, in the full knowledge that by the end of the day, there'll still be a million things theoretically left to do. All you need do, because it's all you ever could do, is to use the next 25 minutes in the most worthwhile way that seems feasible, then repeat. This explains a crucial but lesser-known rule of the technique: if you assign a Pomodoro to a given task but finish early – because your goal of, say, making notes on a book chapter took less time than you predicted – you shouldn't move on to the next task, or end the Pomodoro early. That way lies a resumption of the fight against time, and the secret deluded hope of one day getting on top of it all. Instead, use the remaining minutes to review your work, and to get comfortable with the impatience you'll inevitably feel about not hurrying onwards. Because on the other side of the discomfort of accepting your limitations comes liberation, and for that matter a lot more productivity. Stepping into finitude is a relief. You get to drop the futile quest to do something no human could ever do – to attain a position of mastery and dominance over time, to feel fully in control at last – and get stuck in to what's actually possible instead. • I plan to mildly increase the frequency of messages to this list in the coming weeks as my book's publication approaches; if you want no part of that, see below. Anyway, I'd love to hear from you – just hit reply. (I read all messages, and try to respond, but not always in a timely fashion: sorry!) If you enjoyed this email, you'd be doing me a big favour by forwarding or sharing it; the "View in a browser" tab will take you to a web version. And if you got this from a friend and would like to subscribe, please go here. 540 President St, Brooklyn, New York 11215
GUEST POST: WOOP Your Way Forward - A Self-Regulation Strategy That Could Help You Get Ahead and Stay Ahead — The Learning Scientists
You’ve got a big project due at the end of the term. You’ve got a cumulative exam in two weeks. You’ve got an oral presentation in three days. You know you should space your study/work sessions (because you’ve been reading posts such as this one on this blog)...
A few months ago, I went on a tear about my OmniGraffle-based Kanban status board. I had many people telling me I was doing it wrong and that I should have used one of the dedicated Kanban online tools, like Trello. However, since this board was just for me, I didn’t see the poin