Showing all posts tagged #tools-for-thought:
September 19th, 2022
Whenever I think about physical places, I find myself coming back to a few types of numbers again and again.
I've collected these into spreadsheets so that I can reference them more easily, and I figured they might be useful to others too:
Urban densities – Population density in various cities around the world
Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index 2018 – How restrictive is land use policy in nearly 3,000 municipalities across the USA?...
December 30th, 2021
I've long wanted a notes app with an optional chat style interface for append-only notes. The idea is that I'll use the simpler append-only interface while on the go, and then use full-featured interface to review, edit, and organize those notes when I'm back at my computer.
I realized recently that a combination of Telegram + Logseq will do exactly what I want! I jot down notes in a Telegram channel, and when I return to my computer, I find ...
July 10th, 2019
My friends say that my calendaring practice is atypical (and mock me incessantly for it). They're not wrong, but I'll contend that most people underutilize this ubiquitous tool. A calendar is not just a reminder device for keeping track of external events. Used right, a calendar can be a full-fledged tool for thought. For me, it's a dynamic journal with a wide range of useful, meaningful, and surprising perks.
Here are some of the more idiosy...
May 12th, 2019
For ages, I've wondered why Google Docs still clings to the sheet-of-paper metaphor when lots of its users never print out most of their documents.
Of course it does make sense for "Print layout" to be an option. Many people do print docs, and students make up a huge portion of the users. What I find strange is that Google Docs imposes this UI—you cannot escape the sheet of paper with its edges and isomorphic physicality even if you're just c...
December 30th, 2018
By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Let’s imagine how you would use Evernote if you had a brain.
I previously explained how the standard tag-based approach basically contradicts everything we know about creativity and how the human brain works.
After a few months of tinkering, I’m ready to attempt an answer to the reverse question:What would it look like to use Evernote as the basis for a creative workflow, in line with known neuroscience principle...
December 29th, 2018
January 28, 2016 By Tiago Forte
We’ve been told for years now that what our parents and kindergarten teachers told us is not, in fact, true — we are not each and every one of us special unique snowflakes destined for greatness. In this essay I want to offer a new theory of productivity for those of us who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still believe there is something valuable about our particular point of view. I will argue that...
November 13th, 2018
by
Ken LiuAuthor spotlight
Published in Aug. 2012 (Issue 27) | 2735 words
© 2012 Ken Liu
There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die.
Time devours all.
Yet every species has its unique way of passing on its wisdom through the ages, its way...
September 12th, 2018
In a recent conversation, Sebastián pointed out that there is a dearth of words to talk about cities. I gestured to a building while walking around the Fillmore and said "That's some nice urbanism!", and he grumbled that that's equivalent to pointing to a shop and saying "That's some nice economics!".
His point was that the word "urbanism" is overloaded, and he's right. We use it to describe everything in the lexical space: concrete physical...
September 1st, 2018
Given how much time I spend producing text, I've spent shockingly little of it considering the tradeoffs of various modes to input it.
I had a vague sense that typing is faster than handwriting and that, despite this fact, I still prefer writing drafts by hand in my notebook. Recording audio notes while walking and using Otter's automatic voice-to-text transcription is fantastic for getting thoughts down in a steady flow, but the result is ne...
August 28th, 2018
When I started learning about thermodynamics, I was shocked to learn that the typical engine converts only about 35% of its energy into useful work. Just the theoretical maximum efficiency for a typical car is ~73%*—converting all of its input heat into work would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time. And in practice engines operate at an actual efficie...
August 22nd, 2018
I gave in to my paranoid tendencies today and wrote a little backup script for Twitter, which I figured I'd share here.
Two requirements: github.com/sferik/t: A command-line power tool for Twittergithub.com/wireservice/csvkit: A suite of utilities for converting to and working with CSV, the king of tabular file formats
To install these from the terminal:
Here's the script to do the backup itself (which I plan to run ~1/mo):
For some rea...
August 5th, 2018
Sergey Zavadski emailed me today asking for advice on how to start writing, and I figured I'd share my response here and open an invitation for suggestions from others!
The biggest advice I'll give is to find ways to hold back from self-censoring. There are three key tools I use to do this myself, though there are probably other clever ways I haven't considered.
One is called The Most Dangerous Writing App, which deletes your writing if you ...
July 24th, 2018
A common argument against spaced repetition goes something like this:
If an idea or fact is useful enough to memorize, your brain will retain it anyway. If it's important, it'll just stick, because you'll use it enough times.There's some validity to this. If you find it is really difficult to remember something, you may want to examine whether it's really worth expending that memorization effort. Maybe you just don't need to know it that badly...
June 3rd, 2018
Epistemic status: High confidence about the pros/cons discussed regarding my own experience, fairly low confidence about the parts I heard secondhand.
Epistemic effort: Low-to-medium effort. I realized these things were connected while I was in the shower last night, then I spent two hours stream-of-consciousness writing to get them onto the page. I then read it over once for minor editing and shared it with a friend to sanity check.
1.
"Bik...
May 16th, 2018
Epistemic status: This is a quick write up of my personal experience using Evernote as a PKB. The ideas/processes mentioned in here might work for others too, but I'm not prescribing them! There may be something that would work even better for you, and perhaps for me for that matter. (If you have suggestions please do tell me 🙂)
Epistemic effort: I wrote up an email response to Nick quickly, and then I went back through it once to make sure n...
April 1st, 2018
Effective software developers know how to manage their ignorance. Studying the inner workings of each dependency and every layer of your stack is a luxury you often can't afford, so it's important to know how and when to make leaps of faith.
More than any explicit technical knowledge, this intuition is perhaps the biggest thing that differentiates experienced programmers from inexperienced ones. When I first started coding, painful awareness ...
March 17th, 2018
I love the feeling of building up a mental map of a once-unfamiliar place. Last week I traveled to several cities that I’d never visited before (Beijing, Saigon, Singapore, Jakarta, and Bangalore), so March has been full of this sensation.
I joked with friends that I was "training my neural net". I’d read a lot about two of the cities (Beijing, Singapore), knew a bit about one (Saigon), and knew close to nothing about the others (Jakarta, ...
February 9th, 2018
I’m proud to be a beginner! But when it comes to the concrete steps of learning something new, I often feel undue shame about my approach.
At first, I thought it was a fear of not knowing things or, more likely, a fear of other people seeing of me as a beginner. This doesn’t add up though. I don’t hesitate to ask questions when I’m stuck, and I pride myself on my love of picking up new skills and learning new things. In fact, going from zero ...
February 6th, 2018
I often use a thesaurus while coding, and I mentioned this fact to a non-programmer friend today. He was shocked, and he said that he thought that programming was mathematical, not lexical. But it’s not so easy to separate out—naming is one of the most important parts of programming (and math!), because it’s how you reduce complexity down to something that you can understand, explain, and maneuver.
The conversation reminded me of a post I rea...
February 5th, 2018
My favorite aphorism might be "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". It's a useful idea to incorporate into your life philosophy, both for yourself and others. It's nice to offer help to someone with a problem that you can solve, but far better to teach them how to do it.* On the flip side, when there's something you don't know how to do, I encourage you to find someone who will bot...
June 19th, 2017
You can write your Webpack config in Typescript, and it’ll save you a huge amount of pain. Webpack’s docs would lead you to believe that using Typescript requires a hacky customized set up, but in fact it’s as simple as installing a single module and changing your extensions from .js to .ts!
You can find the rest of the post at the Webpack blog.
August 25th, 2016
I love doing chores. The more time-consuming they are, the better. I jump at opportunities to empty the dishwasher, and grocery shopping is a highlight of my week. I don’t even mind sorting the trash, as long as I have my phone and some earbuds handy.
I used to dread housework as much as the next person. But that all changed when John introduced me to podcasts and audiobooks two years ago. Mundane tasks have become opportunities to learn, to r...
August 24th, 2016
In my previous post, I compiled a list of reasons why on-demand audio is great. Evangelism works best when you make it easy to hit the ground running, so here are a few tips and recommendations. Hopefully this will lower the activation energy for getting started.
Podcasts
You can download my complete list of subscriptions as an opml file or as more readable json.You should be able to load the opml into most podcast apps by going into Settings ...
June 30th, 2016
I am always a little embarrassed when people find out that I had a car in college. I'm a transit geek after all, and I always encourage friends to take public and on-demand transit rather than generate congestion and consume parking spots. Despite all this, I drove multiple times each week last year, because I felt like it was my only real option to get to places I needed to go around the Bay Area.
Now, I rarely drive anymore, and I've become ...
February 25th, 2016
Technology enables us to see the world in ways that are inaccessible to our natural senses. In opening these new worlds to us, it encourages introspection and discovery, inflates our cosmic egos, and then puts us back in our place.
Discovery of perspective
Visual technology plays a key role in human cognition and our sense of self. One primitive example is the mirror, which literally enables self reflection. Mirrors are so deeply ingrained in...
November 26th, 2015
When my daughter Nicole was an infant, I read an essay suggesting that it might no longer be necessary to teach children how to read or write, because speech recognition and synthesis would soon render those abilities superfluous. My wife and I were horrified by the idea, and we resolved that, no matter how sophisticated technology became, our daughter’s skills would always rest on the bedrock of traditional literacy.
It turned out that we an...
August 3rd, 2015
I love the feeling of flow, when I settle into my work and make steady, ruthless progress without distraction. Unfortunately, getting myself into this state is difficult. It usually happens when I am wearing my noise-cancelling headphones and I am at just at that point where my work is challenging but manageable and my mind is fully engaged but not overwhelmed. It also helps to have a bit of time pressure or a due date on the horizon.
These c...