If you’re someone who crunches numbers, edits spreadsheets, or navigates creative software that loves a numeric keypad, you know the pain of using a default iOS keyboard that doesn’t allow you to open the Number Keyboard when you need it.

What Is Numpad?

Numpad is a slick little iPhone (and iPad) app that transforms your iOS device into a fully functional wireless numeric keypad.

The app doesn’t try to be flashy. It focuses on doing one thing exceptionally well—turning your phone into the number pad that Apple forgot to include.

How It Works

The setup is refreshingly simple. You install the app on your iPhone or iPad and give the necessary permissions, That’s it.

The layout mimics a standard physical numpad, which means muscle memory kicks in instantly. No re-learning. No fiddly settings.

Why It’s a Game-Changer (Especially for Mac Users)

• Excel & Numbers: Breeze through spreadsheet entries like you would on a full-sized keyboard.
• Filling Forms: Speed up form-filling tasks on websites, and apps, entering OTPs or data entry that require constant numeric inputs.
• Coding & Finance: For tasks that involve frequent number entries—this is a sanity saver.

Clean UI. No Distractions.

The design matches Apple’s minimalist ethos. It blends right in, with large, tap-friendly keys and zero clutter. Just open the app, and it’s ready to go.

Even better, no ads, no bloat, and no subscriptions. A one-time purchase. That’s rare these days.

Final Thoughts

If you’re on an iPhone and regularly wish you had a Number Keyboard, Numpad by Alpa is a no-brainer. It’s the kind of app that doesn’t need a learning curve. It just works—and works really well. There is no alternative or competitor to this app, not till I wrote this post.

Read More on Numpad App for iPhone – A Simple Fix for iOS Users Who Need a Numeric Keypad

So yeah—good luck setting recurring tasks in a system like this.

Why Typical Calendar Setups Fall Apart

Most productivity apps assume one thing: your weekly routine stays the same. But when a random holiday causes the whole structure to shift, recurring events quickly turn into a mess. I found myself constantly dragging and dropping events, rechecking class schedules, and second-guessing if I was even looking at the right “day.”

The result? Wasted time and unnecessary stress during planning sessions. Also a doubtful thought whenever I see my calendar. Is it up to date? Did I update the Day Order?

My Weekly Reality Check

That’s why every week, during my review and planning session, I pull up the official timetable and manually align my calendar with the correct day orders. It might sound tedious, but it takes me less than a minute now—thanks to a system I’ve built using NotePlan.

This setup lets me work with day templates and shift events quickly based on the actual flow of the week.

What Makes NotePlan a Game-Changer

Here’s why NotePlan works so well for my non-linear week:

• Templates: I’ve created ready-to-go templates for each day’s order. With one tap, I can populate the exact schedule I need—no more starting from scratch.
• Timeboxing: Each session gets a clear time slot, so I can visually block my day and know where my focus goes. Or Where I have to be at that time.
• Calendar Sync: Everything I create in NotePlan syncs instantly with my calendar, so I always have the right view across devices.

My Step-by-Step Workflow

Some house cleaning first.

Install NotePlan.

NotePlan costs you around $100. But NotePlan is available under Setapp. Get Setapp, and you can get this app along with 240+ awesome apps for the same price as this one app.

If you don’t own any Apple devices, you can use the web version for this.

Step 1: Create templates for each Day Order or each Day setting.

Step 2: Add events of the day in each Day Order template.

Did you notice? I used 24 hr time format. I also added a few tasks along.

Step 3: This I do every weekend. Sometimes I insert this template for two weeks ahead. It depends on how confident I am that the next week’s schedules are less prone to change.

Choose the date note (in NotePlan every date has a dedicated note page). The ‘Insert Template’ button will be available there.

When you click it, you can choose the template (a deck of events) to be inserted immediately on that page.

Step 4: wait for some time for the sync to happen. Now you can see all the events in your calendar you chose to sync your time-blocked events. (for demonstration I inserted the template on Sunday date)

Don’t forget to choose the calendar you want your timeblocks to sync with. Check the below screenshot to choose the calendar.

After this, I forget about NotePlan. I can see all these events in my Calendar app.

Why This Works

The beauty of this approach is in its flexibility. I’m no longer fighting with a rigid calendar setup. Instead, I’ve built a system that adapts to my reality—a changing day order, non-static week. I can still plan ahead, block time, and stay focused, without spending my entire Sunday dragging events around.

If your week doesn’t fit into a neat little Monday-to-Friday box, this kind of system might just be what you need too.

Hope it helps someone.

Read More on Calendar Scheduling for Irregular Recurring Events on Shifting Weekdays (in 10 Seconds)

Reward individuals, and you create competition. A system where personal achievements matter more than collective success. It drives high performers but also breeds rivalry and isolation.

Reward teams, and you build interdependence. A culture where collaboration thrives and success is shared. It fosters unity, not division.

Which one do you want? Competition or collaboration? Your reward system decides.

Read More on Why you should not reward individual performances.

But what if you focused on just one decisive reason?

Instead of juggling multiple considerations, identify the single most important factor that aligns with your goal. This simplifies the process and removes unnecessary doubts.

For example, when choosing between two jobs, ask yourself:

“Which one gets me closer to my long-term vision?”

That one question could outweigh salary, title, or location.

This method isn’t about ignoring details. It’s about prioritizing clarity over confusion.

Try it. Next time you’re stuck, pick one decisive reason—and move forward with confidence.

Read More on The Power of a Single Decisive Reason in Decision-Making

How it works?

You upload a set of files into it and can extract insight from that content by asking questions.

More or less, it works like chatGPT, except you set the limits of the source from which your question is to be answered. That means it will not respond from a general point of view but from the content of the source you have given to it.

When it responds, it comes up with a summary or insight with the citation to the source.

It is most suitable for learning, brainstorming, and doing research surveys.

Audio notes.

One good feature is that you can produce audio notes similar to a podcast. This feature is called Deep Dive. I have not used it, so I have no idea how good it is.

Comparison.

There’s no appropriate way to compare this with chatGPT. As chatGPT responds to each question from the uploaded content along with its pre-trained knowledge.

But NotebookLM utilizes data only from files you feed it. The file could be a pdf, image, or a set of files in a different format.

I am just getting my hands on this new tool.

One area where NotebookLM shines better than other AI is its ability to cite the source. I have seen a similar feature in SciSpace. In ChatGPT, it cites from everywhere.

NotebookLM supports multiple citations, which means it can cite multiple sources that discuss the same idea. Its contextual understanding is better than that of other AIs I tried.

I suggest you test on your own. I do not have any data or facts to judge the accuracy of this tool’s output.

Read More on NotebookLM – A research assistant for everyone

There’re plenties of frictions. I am not going to address each one by one. I am just gonna give you my workflow that eliminated most of the friction in my decades of online writing endeavor.

So here’s the most fearsome one. Staring at a blank page.

I have plenty of tips to avoid getting stuck on a blank page. Among the first ones is never to start from a blank page.

How do you not start from a blank page?

Have an idea pre-populated in your draft page. It may be a “line” or an outline for a specific topic or collection of random points.

How to do that? How do you never run out of ideas? Just record all of your ideas for later use —whenever inspiration strikes.

Have a way to draft an inspiring idea —quickly. It could be a pocket notebook or any app.

When you want to write, pick an idea from the collected list. You don’t have to choose the best idea to write on. Just choose whatever feels good to write at that point in time.

The whole idea is to train our writing muscles (habits) to write consistently. Not to produce the best article by force. (Even if you try, you can’t do that continuously).

Record ideas —quickly — without filters

I use an app called Drafts. Yeah, it is only available for iOS. I couldn’t find a similar one for Android. (If you know one, share it in the comments for our readers).

The point is not about which app is the best app. The point is you should have a go-to place to record your random thoughts that pass by and go away and never come back. You need to record those ideas without any filters.

The Drafts app, whenever I open it, opens with a fresh draft window for me to type anything there.

There’s only one click, one finger-punch to capture my idea.

I’ve never rejected an idea before it goes into my Drafts. The decision part comes later. Now, this is only the recording phase.

Just don’t have any filters. All ideas —even the stupid ones are qualified by default to get into your drafts collection.

Remember, this is not your draft; this is just a collection of ideas. (Sorry for confusing the app Drafts and drafts).

Whenever I write my idea in the Drafts app, I write it like a hint. A rough outline. Sometimes as a single line of inspiration. There are no rules here. The only rule is to record it as quickly as possible.

Write the idea from anywhere, in any form, with any tool. But it need to be as one storage point/one place.

Write, Don’t edit now.

Now, you have chosen your topic/idea. You started to develop the outline. Or you can write in a flow. Whatever. Just Write.

Just don’t edit while you write. Write everything, every point, as the thought flows.

Re-arrange them later. Don’t fix your grammar then and there.

You don’t have to finish your first line to its perfection to start the second. If you do that, you’re just killing your flow. You’re the worst enemy of your natural flowing creativity.

Don’t edit. Don’t correct. Don’t try to perfect it.

Sleep on your drafts.

If you don’t feel like continue writing, then just close the draft and open another (choose from your ideas list).

Let your subconscious part work on it, while you stay occupied with other things.

When you know you can make the content better, but you couldn’t now, then leave it on the top of editor list. I just pin them on top, if I repeatedly adding points or editing the draft as the idea flows in (especially when you’re away from writing).

When you give sufficient time between writing, you’ll get a chance to see the content with fresh eyes. Fresh eyes means new perspectives.

The yesterday’s most beautiful point might look stupid today. (That happens to me often).

I can add new ideas, or change my old ideas with new, or add better perspective to it.

Sleeping on my draft (not literally) is the wonderful hack I’ve learned after many years of experience in writing.

At any point of time, I at least have 3 to 5 articles in my draft list (I am using Ulysses app) for me to continue editing. One good thing about writing in Ulysses (for editing drafts) and having Drafts app (for collecting ideas) is I can access my idea and draft posts from anywhere (from my phone, Mac, and iPad).

Organize Less

I don’t organize my ideas into folders. I want them to be visible to me all the time when I start to scroll my ideas.

Whenever I find an idea worth writing next time, I just make some edits to it, so that it move to the up in the list (as my list is sorted to last modified date).

For relevancy, I tag them. But it is not the usual case. I use tags to connect ideas linked to each other. But to be frank, that happens very few times.

If I can’t find a note where I want to add a point, just I add it to a new note and tag it. Because I don’t want to forget the idea during my search for the particular note.

I can also use drafts bidirectional linking (Yes Drafts app supports linking, but it is not bidirectional) instead of tagging. But I got used to the simplicity.

My entire system is based on simplicity to avoid friction of writing as much as possible.

Outlining without friction

Once I am done with filling all my ideas. Now it’s the time to connect them and order them.

Can you see the outline on the right side of the editor. Check the below screenshot. This helps me to control the flow of the article. I write whatever point that comes to my mind. Once done, I move them to relevant titles/ sub title one by one.

Likewise, I move sentence up and down to reorganize my content. You could have seen that all of my articles has very few sentence per paragraph. I isolate the single point into one para. So that I can move them up and down without reediting them.

Rework on story telling

Once you done the above outlining and sentence arrangements, now you can see the missing links to the story that you want to tell.

A simple read through will show where you want to add some connecting sentences. Do them.

As long as the transitioning from one point to the next is not abrupt or odd, you’re good to go.

Work on your phrase

The final thing is don’t overthink.

In this step, focus only on phrasing your points told in the sentence which needs change.

Focus on the meaning that every sentence conveys.

Proof read

I use Grammarly and built-in Ulysses proof reader for this. I don’t focus on this step a lot.

And I ignore most of the Grammarly’s suggestions to preserve my writing style.

End of the day, I have to put the content out.

Never publish in a hurry. But publish quickly.

final notes

When I was start writing, I never had a luxury to use any paid app for writing. The apps that I mentioned are just to make my work easier. Regardless of the apps the system should be strong, simple and foolproof.

The more features you start to use or you start to add it to your system, you’re just adding one more layer of complication to the process.

The more complex it is, the more friction you will feel doing the process.

the moto is to create a frictionless system. Not a perfect system.

As long as it produces the result, I don’t want to change the system.

If you have one, as long as it works, don’t change it.

Read More on Removing all the frictions of writing — to become a successful and consistent writer

If you work better, you get appraised. You get promoted.

If you again prove yourself in your new position, then you’ll be promoted again.

You get promoted, because you aced in the current position.

What if someone stay in that position for a longer time — without getting promoted?

At some point the people are promoted until they find themselves in a position where their competency is not enough to do the justice to that position.

Different needs, same expertise

The new position needs new expertise. It may demand a new level of competency. Not the one you had before the recent promotion.

The lack of certain competence is found only when it is demanded.

Ultimately a person ends up in a position that he can’t manage with the expertise that he has now.

It’s not uncommon to find unfit bosses.

This theory is known as Peter’s principle.

The Peter Principle theorizes that employees in most organizational hierarchies automatically rise through promotion to higher positions. However, competent employees will be promoted, but will ultimately assume positions for which they are incompetent.

Sometimes promotions are a curse.

Read More on Peter Principle: Why most bosses are incompetent?

Whatever the work is, do it well — not for the boss — but for yourself.

You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

Words stolen from Tony Robbins.

Every time I revisit these highlights in Readwise, it will resonate with me for at least a week.

We often confuse our role in work with ourselves.

The respect and value you get from your peers is often not for you. Either it is for the role you play or the work you can do for them.

As a person. As a role.

Two different things. NOT the two sides of the same coin.

Your work doesn’t define you.

But almost all the time it contributes more than anything for others to evaluate you — and judge you.

You have a definition of yourself in your mind. But no one cares about it.

You want them to see it.

You want them to recognize it.

You want them to validate it.

Unfortunately, it is never going to happen.

Reason 1. They can’t read your mind.

Reason 2. You can’t show them what you think about yourself.

Reason 3. You’ll look stupid for asking that to happen. (You’ll look like a spoiled privileged snowflake).

Reason 4. You can’t define yourself in words. Even if you can, no one is bothered to read it.

Reason 5. It’s logically wrong to expect their validation.

There are plenty of reasons why people are not going to think about you exactly as you think about yourself.

It was very hard for me to differentiate between these.

What do you think about yourself? What do you think that others think about yourself?

I gave a disproportionate amount of importance to the opinions of other people than my very own. Ironically I am the only guy who knows me far — far — far better than anyone in this world.

We do this unknowingly.

If this story doesn’t get enough claps, I would think I am not good enough to be a writer.

But the other way of seeing that is,

I wrote a story. Few people liked it. Few did not.

The number of votes cast in favor of me or against me doesn’t count when I define myself.

It just defines what people like to read. (or doesn’t like to read).

I am not a person who can’t take criticism.

But the problem is how people give it.

They word it in such a way that the criticism is about me. But actually is about what I did or how I did.

90% of the time it is about how I didn’t do it their way — in their expected way.

They opinionate subjectively.

Each opinion differs from one another.

It looks easy to understand. — and feel wise for knowing this.

But when you’re in the ring, it’s hard to bypass your ego triggers.

Remembering the first 3 lines helps me — a lot.

This story is not about how to be successful at your work.

This is about how to separate yourself from your work — egoistically.

Read More on The words that helped me to have a better relationship with my work and with myself.

I had issues with Magical when I used it along with Google Docs. (I faced issues during printing, like getting extra empty pages printed). Later I found the culprit and searched for other options.

Check my post on Magical – Text Expander (for Chrome)

I found Text Blaze.

A super convenient text expander for Chrome. (It seems, it is also available for Mac and Windows.)

The usage is pretty simple. Check the below video.

An additional advantage is, that I can install Text Blaze on my work account and personal account at home and then share the snippets I created across the accounts.

Sharing in the free version is limited to 10 people it seems. But for me, it is only 2 accounts.

When compared to other solutions I tried before, it is much faster and better.

Read More on Type faster with Text Blaze (a text expander) and share snippets across your personal and work accounts.

• You forget that (after a few days)
• You rejected it because it looks stupid to you
• You didn’t complete it (in your thoughts)
• You didn’t proceed further to action
• You’re afraid that it is going to fail
• You’re not ready to invest yourself in that idea
• You delayed it (and found later that the same idea was implemented by someone — successfully)
• You ignored it. You thought it was just a random thought that crossed your mind and had no significance. You didn’t even recognize it.

The world’s greatest ideas were just killed brutally even before it was born.

What can you do?

Write it down. (Anywhere, by any means).

Write it down immediately. Never hesitate, never discriminate. If it looks like a sh*t, then you’ve done it right.

Writing completes thinking.

Writing helps you to retain it — for a long time.

Writing helps you to revisit it. Enhance it. Entangle with other ideas.

Writing makes your idea exist somewhere.

Writing your ideas has no bad consequences.

Writing streamlines your imagination. Blurs the line between crazy and genii.

Collect the seeds with(in) you in the form of writing

Will you write it down? NOW.

Remember, if you think twice (to write it down), your idea is already as good as dead.

Read More on How to make your ideas powerful? & The first actionable step.

Get the code for $0 -> https://www.buymeacoffee.com/alvistor/e/215736

Read More on Readwise to RoamResearch Export template

They won’t delegate — out of fear that the other person might perfect it.

They want to do everything by themselves. But if they invest their time spent on non-core tasks they will accomplish much greater outcomes.

Perfection is the enemy of progress.

For them, significant or insignificant, they want everything should be done their way.

They can’t compromise with the results.

Do you know the Pareto’s Principle?

80% of the outcome will be from the 20% work.

To achieve the remaining – final 20% outcome (perfecting) you may need to put 80% of your time and effort.

So they put a lot into reaping less.

For them, the ROI is always less. They suck at managing resources and marketing.

Most talented players are bad team players. And they have less emotional intelligence.

If you want to move fast — go alone

If you want to go a long way – take your team with you.

Continue reading the full article @ Medium.

Read More on Most Talented people are not successful. Here’s the reason why.

How to use the following single-word prompts.

Just use any one of the following prompts followed by your content.

The syntax to use,

<single-word-prompt> the below sentence <shift+enter> <your content here>

<prompt> the following sentence. <your-sentence-here>

<prompt> the following paragraph. <shift-enter> <your paragraph>

Example Usage:

Reframe the below sentence.
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light and other electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it.

That’s all.

Now pick the appropriate prompt from the below list as per your need.

Reframe

To restructure the words for better understanding.

Reinterpret

To modify the approach to explain something.

Rewrite

To use entirely different words but retain the meaning of the sentence.

Reiterate/Restate

Use it when you want to rewrite theories or scientific facts.

Paraphrase/Rephrase

An easy way to escape plagiarism checkers.

Expand

When you’re short of words

Summarize

When you want to convert TL: DR; contents to readable form.

Adapt

Remove the dents in your sentences.

Clarify

Clear Confusing — ambiguous statements.

Modernize

Don’t sound like a boomer to Gen-Zees

Simplify

When you try to be clear rather than clever.

Condense

Write elaborate. Trim later.

Enhance/Elaborate

Add some spice.

Emphasize/Empower/Strengthen

When the idea looks too shallow.

Emulate/Illustrate with example

When you write to a naive audience.

Amplify

When you’re soft-spoken but want to sound loud and compelling.

Formalize

When you don’t want to sound disrespectful.

Informalize

When your readers are your friends.

Neutralize

When you don’t want to take sides.

Streamline

Make jumbling words straight.

Enrich

When there are not enough supporting words on your side.

Sensationalize

If you want to tap the emotion.

Humanize/Personalize

Write (like) as you talk.

Energize

When you want to motivate your readers.

Synthesize

I use this to brainstorm with ChatGPT

Exaggerate

No lies. Not literally.

Soft-pedal

Tone down. Some readers may get agitated.

Downplay

Not in your arrogant opinion.

Glamorize

Sexy words are not a sin.

Refine

Spruce up the sentence for better understanding.

Tweak

In my use, it often gave me unexpected, unintended outputs.

Dumb-down

When your readers want you to explain like they’re 5.

Reconstruct

When you don’t like the way you written it.

Distill

Too many sentences? Get to the essence of it.

Revise

“Summary” + “Rewrite”

Enhance

Add some peppy words.

Strengthen

Make your opinions sound like well-researched statements.

Enrich

Add some.

Polish

Iron out the kinks.

Read More on 45+ single-word ChatGPT prompts to write like a pro

Unfortunately, images in WebP format won’t work outside Chrome.

Especially in Medium and in WordPress too.

Whenever I try to download an image using Chrome, if the image is in WebP format, chrome downloads it in WebP format only.

If that happens, you need to explicitly convert them by using converter software or online converters.

I recently found a Chrome Extension to solve this issue.

Here is the link → https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/save-image-as-type/gabfmnliflodkdafenbcpjdlppllnemd?hl=en

After installing this extension, right-click the image you want to download in a specific format (.jpg or in.png). Refer to the below screenshot.

If you’re someone who wants to download images for your story in Medium from Google image search, you’ll need this.

Read More on How to downlaod images in .jpg or .png format instead of WebP – in Chrome.

In Japanese, “Kaizen” translates to “improvement”, or “change for the better”.

Kaizen as a philosophy is all about improvement. No matter where you are now, how you perform, or where to reach.

Forget the perfection; Aim for progress.

You don’t have to build Rome in a day. Actually, you can’t.

Perfection is the outcome of continuous improvement. If you perfected something at the first attempt, then you are lucky or else your work is evaluated by fools.

Perfection is a perception.

You can’t perfect something. You can give your maximum. You can aim to produce something wonderful. But believe me, there will be always (plenty of) gaps to improve.

The “ideal” moves a step away from you when you reach it.

You can’t perfect things. You can only improve it. Day by Day. One by One.

Once vs Many

If it is a process, workflow, or method, then improve one aspect of it that can positively impact the outcome of it in a positive manner by 1%.

That’s all. You can pick your interval between a week to a year.

If it is a product, improve one thing out of its design in each revision (prototype).

You’ll always have one more iteration to improve one thing. That’s enough.

One improvement —for better. That’s it.

Do you really think you can perfect something on your first attempt?

Do you really mind perfecting it if you are going to create it once and the workflow of it has no iteration or practicing elements in it to improve the outcome? No.

Most things need to be done. Yes, just done. There’s no need to bother whether it is done perfectly or not unless you’re obsessed with it.

Improve what needs to be improved

Pick one thing from each area of your life. Attempt to improve it.

Not working?

Pick only one out of it. Try improving it.

Measure it. If possible make the progress visually.

Small wins give big confidence. Add one more thing to the list of improvements.

There’s no need for setting Goals

Goals = NO freedom to improve at your pace. Deadlines = Pressure.

I always find myself beating my formerly fixed goals when I flow with this “Kaizen” journey.

The issue is I accomplish them slightly later than the fixed deadline (if there’s one).

( But, Who cares? It is my life. )

Ultimately I have done that without stressing myself and losing my time in it rather than living it.

There are no steps for this method. But 1 rule.

Consistent Progress.

Slow, yet steady.

Don’t stress yourself to keep up with your (most of the) plans that (most of the time) don’t align with the reality of your life.

1 step ahead from yesterday is progress. Focus on the progress. Everything comes around it.

( Compounding effect is very much different from this ).

When you’re down, just look at your progress. When you’re down, just decrease your pace, but keep on trying to improve some aspects of your area (in consideration). Just a bit.

Juggling vs Switching

Trying to achieve multiple goals at once, you have to juggle between them.

With “Kaizen”, when you’re a little off-mood with one area, you can try improving another for some duration. With no pressure, no guilt, no stress.

You switch your flow. But You’re always in a steady flow of improvement.

I added a few more points related to this in the article -> How to always be progressive? A view beyond being productive.

I never advocate abolishing your goals. I want you to achieve them through progress; not by fixing deadlines and perfecting your outcomes.

What’s your opinion?

Read More on Kaizen: Sure-Shot Way to Absolute Self-Growth (no steps to follow, only mindset shift)

Feeling the pressure? Feeling like nothing moving in your life but you want to do a lot in your life?

Just deal with one crisis at a time.

1. Take one issue, and roughly plan how you are going to solve it.
2. Then work on it, for just an hour every day.
3. Repeat until it reaches its own flow (a fly-wheel effect), and embeds with your daily activities.
4. Either the problem will get solved soon or it will give you confidence that the problem is already taken care of by your process.
5. Then select your next issue. Repeat.

You definitely can’t solve all the problems at once. And focusing on multiple problems will make things complicated.

Differentiate needs from wants, then focus on solving needs first

I recommend choosing chaos from your life in the following priority.

1. Mental and Physical Health (You need this to conquer other areas of life)
2. Family, Friendship, and other relationships (You can’t win alone and without support from these people)
3. Finance (Plan to do anything with what you have instead of worrying about what you don’t have)
4. Your Career and Professional Growth (After attaining sufficiency, level up your game)
5. Lifestyle and other needs (make your life yours)

or follow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (from bottom to up)

Hope it gave you an idea or two to face your day.

Read -> Screw the Confusion in Decision-Making: Choosing Reasons Without Hassle

Read More on Feel like your life is “frozen”? Deal one crisis at a time…

The SDR decision-making framework ( Single Decisive Reason: A Simple and Fast Decision-making Method ) says that.

Single Reason, that’s all you want to make a decision. The question is which one is that (among all the reasons you have)? What could be that ‘one’ reason that outweighs all the other reasons? How to identify it?

The conundrum of ranking the reasons.

The SDR method is supposed to be easy, simple, and less confusing. Right? It is.

Don’t list your reasons. Then you don’t have to rank them based on their significance or impact.

I myself try to simplify the process of identifying the SDR (that single reason).

Just have two things in your mind.

1. Your Values
2. Your Needs (not “Wants”)

Your Values and Your Needs. If you can find a reason that rises from any of these and is not against both of these two parameters, then it is the best reason to consider as a “Single Decisive Reason”.

You’re your first priority.

The instinct of self-preservation is the strongest instinct of your nature

Joseph Murphy

You have to preserve yourself. You’re your values. Your sense of integrity guides you to choose the reason (the SDR).

Did you know Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

Let’s be frank and real.

You can’t take a moral lecture to a person starving to death.

You won’t choose a portion of food over a breath of air when you’re suffocating.

Your needs decide what you have to choose. And don’t try to go against nature.

So I usually skip all the reasons if my first reason falls under (satisfying my) ‘need’. Often times it goes hand in hand with my values. The values I stated for myself.

If you don’t have defined (well-written) personal values, write it now. If you have issues defining your values, this is the right time to break your head and squeeze your mind to finalize it.

It worked every time for me. Once you find your SDR, *snap*, decide, *snap* and move to the next action. Sticking a little more time in this state will be counter-productive.

On account of personal decision-making, I wrote about the good practice of deciding in solitary (when you’re friends with yourself) -> Self-acquaintance. A practice for effective personal decision-making. Well, read it.

Read More on Screw the Confusion in Decision-Making: Choosing Reasons Without Hassle

Your decision makes you. ‘You’ are the consequence of the entire decision you’ve made your whole life.

What makes the decision-making process efficient?

Speed.

Usually, there will be lots and lots of parameters to consider before deciding. Every parameter has a different weightage and impacts the outcome in a range of possibilities.

Evaluating all the options and deciding may take a lot of time and effort.

Lots of options = confusion. Confusion = stagnancy and delay.

Sometimes the loss due to not deciding is quite greater than the loss due to making a slightly less good solution.

To make it quick, you need to prune your options and parameters.

Most of the time one option gives an edge over the other. That minute difference is not a big deal when time passes. All that matters is that you progressed from solving the current one to the next.

SDR method.

SDR stands for – Single Decisive Reason.

A single reason is more than enough to make a decision.

If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it.

It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something.

Obvious decsions require not more than a single reason.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You don’t have to find that one reason. Because it is obvious and it is right in front of you.

That single reason rises from your values. (More on this later).

If there’s one decisive reason, just decide based on it. Adding up more reasons is actually useless and an overkill.

There needs to be one decisive reason.

If I go for a blended reason, I’ll almost surely comeback and feel like it was a waste of time.

Reid Hoffman

There are some inevitables in decision-making. Don’t try to perfect your decision. Read The inevitables of decision making. (and how to avoid some bad ones).

Simplicity.

Keep it simple. Both the process and outcome of the decision.

The process is simple. Indentify the SDR. Decide. Stick to it.

Ignoring the complexity isn’t an option. Strive to reduce the complexity. Don’t consider exceptional/edge cases when you devise your conclusions.

Make the decision simple. Easy to understand, so that everyone can follow it as you planned/expected.

Too many details lead to confusion and misunderstanding. Too less details can be ambiguous and could be misinterrupted.

The solution is to keep it simple. The magic number here is 3.

Conclude your decision in 3 simple points. 3 unique factors you’d consider or goals you’d expect. 3 steps you expect others to follow.

Contract the takeaway of your decision with 3 unique points. Write it.

I encourage everyone to maintain a decision journal. (more about this later).

Read More on Single Decisive Reason: A simple and fast decision-making method.

Anything that can go wrong, (if you give the chance) will go wrong.

The more you fear something, the more likely it will happen.

focus on the path; not the hurdles.

2. Kidlin’s Law

If you can write the problem down clearly, then the matter is half solved.

Externalize your problems to reduce the load on your mind.

complete your thinking with writing.

3. Gilbert’s Law

The biggest problem at work is, that no one tells you what to do.

Finding a way ways to solve a problem is part of the job.

ask and then do. else, do and then ask sorry —if it goes wrong.

4. Walson’s Law

If you keep putting information and intelligence at first all the time, money keeps coming in.

Many people do things better than you, not because they are more capable (than you), but because they have more information (than you).

IQ and then EQ and then ego.

5. Falkland’s Law

If you don’t have to make a decision; don’t make a decision.

You don’t have to answer every question asked. You don’t have to solve every problem that comes before you.

Inaction is also an action. Sometimes, the best move is not to choose to move.

6. Parkinson’s Law

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Set time (duration) for each task. Otherwise, the task will set its own. (Which is usually way more than it requires.)

Close the project or task as soon as it solves the purpose or objective. “Prefer Progress over Perfection”

7. Pareto’s Law —aka Pareto’s Principle.

aka 80-20 or 80/20 rule aka the law of vital few.

for many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes (the “vital few”).

(In almost all the cases) 20% of your work will yield 80% of the outcome.

Don’t confuse quality with perfection. Choose and do the vital few (most significant ones).

8. Backwards’s Law

The harder you try; the more you fail (or the more you move away from success).

Frequency and consistency is the important factor for long-term goals.

Learn to let go. Hard work and patience are a rare combo, but a sure-shot way to success.

Seeds grow at their own pace.

9. Law of Attraction

Positive thoughts brings postive things to your life.

What you seek is also seeking you.

You attract what you are (your thoughts), NOT what you want.

Read More on 9 Extremely Useful Laws for Work & Life (to remember always)

Pressure creates stress. Expectations, deadlines, or anything the task demands is the pressure.

The pressure makes you work faster, better and pushes you to cross your own limits.

Until a particular point.

Beyond that point, it starts to become bad.

Distress

The bad stress. The pressure pushes you to the limits and beyond. It breaks you. Leads to exhaustion, Anxiety — and diminishes your performance.

In fact, it won’t let you perform.

At this stage, your attention has fallen apart. Everything becomes hard and unmanageable.

But, that’s only distress.

Eustress

The stress can be good.

Actually essential to achieve your peak performance. If not, it triggers you to the ‘flow’ state of peak performance with ease.

The “good stress” is the result of “positive pressure”.

Eustress is a form of stress that brings about a sense of excitement, motivation, and fulfillment.

Ingredients of Eustress

1. Challenge. The one you can face. The one you can solve — not easily but solvable with a little higher effort of yours than your normal day-to-day puzzles in work.
2. Not Overwhelming.
3. Clear goals.
4. Interesting. New Experience. A feeling of anticipation, the excitement of what is to come. Adventurous — why not?
5. Rewarding — Sometimes the process itself feels more than rewarding.

In short, either you choose a task that you’re passionate about or make the task more interesting and rewarding.

Benefits of Eustress

• Heightened alertness — increased focus.
• Better performance.
• Extremely effective.
• No need to feel exhausted — even after saving the world on that day.

Stress is not always bad.

Remember, you can’t convert distress into eustress.

Just identify which is which. Pick and avoid based on your understanding of good and bad stress.

Stress is unavoidable. But you have two choices. Either you choose ‘eustress’ or let the ‘distress’ choose you.

Read More on Eustress – The power & benefits of “Good Stress”.

This ad revenue helps me to meet the expense of running this site.

Tried every method under the sun to battle adblockers to recover my lost revenue. Almost each of them has their demerits.

Recently I found a simple, elegant (with good user experience), 100% foolproof solution offered by Google itself. That too within AdSense.

This is an anti-adblocker solution. After implementing this, whenever a visitor visits your website with adblocker turned on, the script politely asks them to turn it off for your site.

The amazing thing is, it is a one-click solution. That means the script automatically turns off AdBlocker once they click the dialog box. (that means they don’t have to open their adblocker settings and then turn it off for your site.)

How to use it on your site.

Go to your AdSense account. Then to “Privacy & Messaging” and then to “Ad Blocking Recovery”.

Don’t forget to add the scripts to your website. The script is available on the same page (refer to the above screenshot) under the ‘tagging’ tab.

Read More on Anti Adblock Recovery Solution by Google.

I am following the PARA method for maintaining files everywhere. (Regardless of any method you follow, this “workflow” will help you to a great extent).

When files are no longer needed— I move them to the “Archive” folder.

Between ‘delete’ and ‘archive’.

The main purpose of archiving is — for future reference. But, half of the time I don’t want to hold on to the files forever.

The point is I don’t want to archive it. But I need it for some time (for a quick reference — just in case).

I move those files to the “Delete Later” folder that fits into the above use case. Especially the emails I receive.

Benefits of having a “delete later” folder.

• Escape the conundrum of whether to delete a file or move to an archive.
• Another benefit of using the “Delete Later” folder is, when I ran out of storage I don’t waste time selecting files to delete from the main “Archive” folder. Instead, I just delete all the files from the past years in the “Delete Later” folder.
• By moving files quickly to delete later, you don’t worry about maintaining a file structure for files that is less important in the future (i.e. important for the time being only). One less thing to worry about.
• Unlike deleting them, Your files are safe. Did you know? Files deleted from any service like Gmail, Google Drive, or iCloud may not maintain them roughly more than 30 days. There is no permanent recycle bin in any service.

In our case, No worries when moving them to the “Delete Later” folder when you are afraid of deleting them or losing them.

Researchers have found that our brains struggle to process and organize excessive digital possessions, leading to decreased focus, increased stress, and even feelings of guilt.

For me, a good file management system should be simple to follow (or organize) and easy to retrieve. Ironically adding one more folder (“delete later”) to my file system simplified my process (rather complicating it).

In e-mail management.

In E-Mail management, I use a ‘label’ called “Delete Later”. Moving emails to this folder gives me more peace rather than archiving them. Don’t get me wrong. I do archive emails. But not every email.

Tip: If you Gmail, Move emails (that you are not sure of deleting and archiving) to the “Delete Later” label instead of just labeling it.

“Delete Later” helps me to declutter better and faster without the mental anguish of losing them.

You should not think more than a second to decide the location to put the file in. Likewise, decide in less than a second when you’re no longer in need of certain files.

Now delete them without guilt. Delete = Moving to the “Delete Later” folder.

Read More on The “Delete Later” Folder

Regardless of how well modern technology improved, still writing on paper (or on a similar surface) helps to retain more than typing on a computer/tablet.

Why?

Writing something by hand forces your brain to actually process information in a more detailed way.

The interaction takes more time while using a pen on paper. But it also creates more connections with you. More time, more connections. The more you dwell on a concept with more focus, it creates a channel to your mind. This channel helps you to pass the information intact to your brain.

While typing you don’t dwell like when you do with paper. You move on faster and in a snap, you don’t open that channel to your mind.

That’s all. Do you have a better way to explain it? Please do. I like to hear .

Read More on Why writing on paper is the best way to retain for a long time?

I am using it for all my new projects. Just wanted to share this useful tools to the web designer community.

How to Use Coolors

To use Coolors, simply start by pressing the spacebar. This will generate a new color palette. You can then lock any colors you like by clicking on the lock icon in the column next to the color. You can also adjust the brightness and saturation of any color by dragging the sliders.

Once you’ve created a palette you like, you can save it to your library or export it as a PNG file. You can also share your palettes with others by clicking on the share button.

Coolors Features

In addition to its basic color palette generator, Coolors also offers a number of other features, including:

• Trending palettes: Coolors tracks the most popular color palettes on the web and displays them on its homepage. This is a great way to get inspiration for your own palettes.
• Image picker: Coolors can also generate color palettes from images. Simply upload an image or paste the URL of an image and Coolors will generate a palette based on the colors in the image.
• Contrast checker: Coolors includes a contrast checker that helps you ensure that your color palettes have enough contrast for readability.
• Color history: Coolors keeps a history of all the palettes you’ve generated. This is a great way to keep track of your ideas and find inspiration for future projects.

Check Coolors.co now.

Why Use Coolors?

There are many reasons why you should use Coolors. Here are just a few:

• It’s free: Coolors is a free online tool, so you can use it without having to pay anything.
• It’s easy to use: Coolors has a simple interface that makes it easy to generate and save color palettes.
• It’s powerful: Coolors offers a number of powerful features, such as trending palettes, image pickers, and contrast checkers.
• It’s versatile: Coolors can be used for a variety of projects, including web design, graphic design, and product design.

Conclusion

Coolors is a powerful and versatile color palette generator that is perfect for anyone who works with color. With its simple interface and powerful features, Coolors is a must-have for any designer’s toolkit.

Here are some additional tips for using Coolors:

• Experiment: Don’t be afraid to experiment with different colors and combinations. The best way to find the perfect palette for your project is to experiment until you find something that you love.
• Use the contrast checker: The contrast checker is a great way to ensure that your color palettes have enough contrast for readability. This is especially important for text-heavy designs.
• Save your palettes: Once you’ve created a palette you like, be sure to save it to your library. This way, you can easily access it for future projects. (Better generate a new one for every project).

Read More on Coolors.com – The Ultimate Color Palette Generator (for web desingers)

Completing things will keep you at the same level. Progress takes you to the next.

There are two types of productive people

One, who wants to feel productive.

Another who really wants to be productive.

Differentiate the feeling of being productive and actually productive —by outcomes.

The “feeling” is subjective. It satisfies you. The actual productivity satisfies the stakeholders. It fulfills the purpose.

Subjective Productivity vs Objective Productivity

Don’t fall into the trap of feeling productive when you’re busy, engaged, and full of work.

Many satiate themselves with the feeling of being productive —in most cases, the feeling itself is deceiving.

(I’ve talked about this earlier in the article sophisticated procrastination. Hint: add it to your read-later list.)

I know a huge set of people who feed their egos by acting/feeling busy and working hard —even though they don’t have to work that much hard to attain the same results that can be achieved with rather less effort.

Don’t be that kind of half-wit. Your subjective feeling of achievement is not what you want in the long run.

Produce outputs

If you want to be progressive in any project (including life) you need to produce outputs constantly.

Outcomes may be different. You may get lucky —and unlucky sometimes. You may get different responses and reactions toward the deliverables.

Control your outputs, not outcomes

Stop worrying about the outcomes. The same work can be seen as a success and failure at different situations. Worry about what you can control.

Control the controllable’s

Produce output. Once the deliverable is ready to be put to use, and solves the purpose of its requirement then that’s the output.

Polish it, and make some final touches. Release it. Don’t try to perfect it.

Perfection is the enemy of progress

Produce consistently

Repeat.

Create a pattern of producing outputs. Make it a habit.

Do it until it blends into life and work. Until you can do a major chunk of it without thinking much or with much effort.

You need to put a lot of effort to make it look like effortless.

Eventually, it becomes effortless.

Long-term goals vs short-term projects

You can be always productive if you have a lot of projects on your list.

You can be always progressive if you have a vision.

Break your vision into milestones, then into achievable goals.

Clear goals make you achieve them quicker. But clear vision makes you move farther.

Progress is about going far. Not quick. Always prefer to have a long-term consistency approach than the short-term intensity.

Flow

Once things you do become second nature try to get into the “flow”.

Then try to stay in the “flow” state for longer.

Then try to get into the “flow” quicker.

Become capable of doing your significant tasks (that contribute to major outputs) unconsciously (or semiconsciously) like driving, and walking.

Flow-state, Immersive work is not overrated. It may feel like one until you personally experience it.

So work on cultivating your “flow” states.

Sharpen your tools & mind

Tools. Any type of tool that can help you to do the job quicker and faster.

Choose one that can save time and effort. Avoid anything that requires more time and effort for maintenance than it saves.

A good tool should not feel that it is there. A good-fit (not loose, not tight) shoe or belt doesn’t feel that much on your body, right?

The best tool is your mind and your approach

Learn. Learn continuously. Learn to optimize your workflows.

Speaking of Workflows, I am running a successful newsletter (as an output of doing what I mentioned in this post) “Better Workflows”. I share at least 1 idea, 1 workflow or tip, and 1 set of resources to consume or utilize in every issue.

Subscribe for Free -> Better Workflows. I promise you’ll get more value than you expect.

Done? Okay coming back to the topic.

Your progress becomes still if you reach the limitations.

You need to get the most out of your time and effort. Because both are limited.

If you optimally use your time and effort (attention and energy) you’ll move forward further.

If you keep on optimizing and performing, then damn sure you’re going to hit the plateau. Probably sooner than you think.

Once you hit the plateau

You do. You do it repeatedly. You do it in a better way —and then in the best optimal way.

That’s all. You’re stuck.

To progress further, you need to choose two things.

Choose the thing, that can compound

Choose your vision and work that is backed and compounded by your previous day’s work.

Always aim for exponential growth

Scale. You can’t make more at one point. But you can reach more. There’s always a way to scale further.

Choose the thing, that can grow when you’re sleeping

Try to put all your insignificant tasks in automation and most of your work process in auto-pilot mode.

You need an auto-pilot mode. In other words, delegate.

Teach others. Share with others. If possible make a team.

It is the only possible way to scale you further.

It is the only possible way to duplicate yourself in multiple locations at the same time.

Never underestimate the power of teaching and sharing your skills. That’s the most precious and hard-learned lesson in my life.

Progressing further

Explore the plateau. Choose the next plateau.

Prepare to climb it —with far less effort and time than you used to climb the previous one.

All the best for your progressive endeavor.

Do you have any other ideas to add?

Bye til next time.

—

Read More on How to always be progressive? A view beyond being productive.

Echo Chamber is an environment (usually, a meeting room, friends group, or team you are working with) filled with people you rely on —especially in the process of decision-making.

In the echo chamber, you only hear what you like to hear. You hear happy, positive things about you and your ideas. You get all the reaffirmation that your idea is superb (even though it might not be). You get pleased by words. No one challenges your ideas and statements.

The room echos your voice, your views, your ideas —and your beliefs.

Often our ‘tribe mentality’ forces us to get along with a group and nod to the group’s decision. Saying anything against the mob’s decision is against the tribe. It is hard to live without (the support of) the tribe —in cave times. Holding our voice against the choice of the clan is the default decision you take and it is the easy one without repercussions.

Feeling associated with a tribe is a safe feeling —in cave times or stone age times. To feel safe, you don’t dare opinionate against your employers, leader, or anyone on the high ground. So does anyone.

This very reason people decide to build the echo chamber around their higher-ups/group. The sad part is, they build it around themselves too.

If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room.
— Confucius

Whether you are a brick of the “echo chamber” or not —make sure you don’t end up inside an echo chamber.

Philosophically and factually there are numerous disadvantages of being in an echo chamber.

Shutting everyone’s mouth around you doesn’t make you right. Closing the channels of feedback is not a path to good evaluation and decision-making.

Echo chambers boost your confidence as well as your ego. At the start, you grow. In the end, you fall from the top.

Echo chambers blind you. Makes you look brilliant now and dumb later.

How to avoid being in an echo chamber

Reward the members to break the bricks of the echo chamber.

Encourage opinions. Reward opinions that challenge your decision.

Rewarding is another way to assure the members of the room, that they won’t be punished for sharing the facts that the room misses or failed to consider.

Recognition is the reward. Recognize their effort even though they didn’t contribute to the current issue in discussion. So they may give better ideas later.

Shrink your ego

Understand, any point against your decision is against the idea not against you.

Don’t let anyone please you by prising your decisions and opinions. Don’t allow yourself and others to feed your ego.

Have a 10th man

The one person who always says things against every idea is your 10th man. No matter how good the idea is, he always manages to find a flaw in it. Often irritating. Often useless.

He doesn’t need to be correct all the time. But he always reminds you about the “echo chamber”.

He is the necessary evil in the best decision-making process.

Genii are people who steal ideas from fools, crazy, children, and everything.

You need help from people better than you

If your team is not giving better ideas than yours, consider changing your team.

Rely on experts. Rely on risk-takers.

Poker face

When you’re listening, don’t nod or shake your head. Don’t even raise your eyebrows. Don’t even blink. (Nah, kidding. You can blink ).

The point is don’t give any feedback when you’re listening. This tiny feedbacks influence the other person to change their words (& opinion) when they deliver their opinion.

Most people want to please you by giving opinions and advice that you like and align with your belief.

By logic — not by presumption

Logic and reality beat every other intangible.

Money, Status, Fame, Past history of success, and expertise. None comes before logic.

It is the idea that is important. Not the person it comes from.

Allow Anonymity

Allow people to post their opinion anonymously.

There are numerous fools out there waiting for the opportunity to curse illogically anything with the privilege of anonymity.

Use this, just in case.

Mindset Upgrade

Argue to find the truth —NOT to win.

Always feel happy to be proved wrong by someone. Feel grateful for learning something.

Don’t be afraid of your belief being challenged. Allowing yourself to be challenged makes you strong (and your beliefs).

You employed them to get ideas and to think in ways you could not. Let them do their job.

It is not a waste of time. If you constantly feel like it, you need to upgrade your team — or your mindset.

Escape “Echo Chamber”. Just two takeaways from this long post.

Keep your mouth closed and ears wide open.

Always be grateful to be proved wrong.

Read More on Echo Chamber Meeting Room. 8 Ways NOT to Become a Victim.

The tingling sensation, the motivating feeling, the hope of winning, and the urge to achieve something are what you get instantly by reading the success stories.

The success story describes one sample and concludes based on that one sample.

A fact should be backed by enough samples and a fact should be a fact. Not an emotional tale.

To come up with a fact you need large samples. As the sample cases increase, the accuracy of your conclusion increases. Success stories are based on one to a few samples.

Just take a fair look at the below picture, before continuing reading.

During World War II fighter aircraft were sent to attack the enemy beyond boundaries. Enemies were counter-firing the aircraft sent. Only a few aircraft returned. Based on analyzing the returned aircraft they mapped a chart to find the vulnerable spot of the aircraft.

The above chart’s red dots denote the places the bullets were hit. Statisticians found that the two zones of the aircraft (middle of the wing and area between cockpit and tail). Because based on the above chart, those are the places that were hit very few times.

So they decided to reinforce the aircraft in areas with high red dots. That is where they were targeted a lot.

But it is a very wrong approach that led to a wrong conclusion. Why?

They only considered aircraft that returned to the base safely. Those aircraft that took the hits, sustained and managed to reach base. That is, only data from survivors are considered. The aircraft that took a few hits in those two vulnerable zones were down and never returned to base. Those data were entirely ignored.

This is called “Survivorship Bias” ¹

We often ignore the data from people who lost or who didn’t reach the top despite their struggles. We often give disproportionately more importance or weightage to the data offered by the winners regardless of how they reached the top.

I just want to tell you I have huge respect for successful people who reached the top against all the adversities. Yet I am going to say what I want to.

Don’t follow the winners’

You never know their full story after all it is told by themselves.

Their stories are inspiring, and motivating. I hate the more emotional, less factual ones.

They tell how hard they worked. Vaguely. They only share the pseudo-actionable steps to reach success but never the real actionable steps.

The formula for their success may be true and efficient. Maybe only for them. Or for a few like them. They proved that it does work. Only for them. It is not proven to work for everyone. If so, then it is not a single person’s success story.

Not many share their true stories. They add spices to it to make it interesting and attractive.

The point is, their path is not for everyone. Different parameters are involved, not everything can’t be suitable measurement for everyone to become successful with a single success formula.

We want something promising. Emotionally motivating. We see what we want to see. We want to see success stories of us, if not, then others. We don’t want to choose our own path.

The success stories look promising and proven when it is not. While finding our own path to success is not so promising because we don’t know it yet.

I believe the harder people work, the luckier they get.

Yet, no one knows which tide comes when. I don’t believe hard work is everything. But I believe in staying in the game and not quitting.

Most winners make money out of teaching you how they won.

Just a fun story. One man earned $100000 by selling his secret of “making $100000 in a day”. He sold that secret to 1000 people for $100. The secret he sold is, asking them to sell the same secret to another 1000 people for $100 in the same way he did.

We often ignore the story of strugglers who weren’t succeeded., Yet.

We may have a huge portion of knowledge and wisdom to gain from someone who struggled more than the winner. Out of 100, if only one wins, then it is not fair to take that ‘one’ as a sample for your calculations.

It is only fair to consider the reasons why everyone couldn’t win. What are the parameters and factors involved? What are the factors that favored the winners and not the strugglers?

It is not about finding lame reasons or blaming something (Which is not in your control). I am just asking to do a reality check. Beware of your desire deceiving you from the facts.

Success stories tell the possibility. There is a seamless number of possibilities waiting to be found by each of you reading this.

Double down on what works for you

Do what works for you. Double down on what gives you results.

Keep yourself in the game until you find out how it works.

People in search of their own success stories don’t waste their time reading/watching others’ success stories.

All the best for your success story. Don’t copy write it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias ↩

Read More on Why You Should NOT Believe Success Stories?

I explored the apps individually and replaced my former apps with the best ones from Setapp. Especially the one I pay for. Subscribing to Setapp saved me from spending more than necessary for apps.

DayOne is one of the premium apps I use for a very long tie. (Right now It’s the second most costly one next to Superhuman)

My DayOne journey

I was using Evernote as my journaling app until 2015. Later I found it was a huge mistake to mingle your notes and personal/emotional content together. So I switched to 2 different apps in the middle and settled finally with Day One.

The app is great. Still, I want to check if something is better to replace it. The only reason I want to replace it is to reduce my spending on apps.

Found Diarly on Setapp.

Diarly

Diarly is one of the contenders when I was choosing my next journaling app around 4 years ago. It was different then. Now it is nicer than before. It went through a huge revamp and has huge upcoming features in its roadmap too.

Yet, can it replace DayOne?

Diarly almost had all the features DayOne has now. It is quickly catching up. I tried the app. So I imported everything from DayOne to Diarly and used it on my Mac and iPhone for a week.

At the end of the week, I switched back to DayOne. Reasons follow…

1. Diarly saves everything in iCloud. That’s a good thing. Secure, private, and faster. But the storage is limited. With DayOne I get unlimited storage space.
2. “On This Day” section is not cool in Diarly. It’s there, but not as functional and useful as in DayOne. The way DayOne populates the event of the past that happened on the same day is quite beautiful. Diarly lacks automatic reminders for this to remind me to visit the “On This Day” section every day. (I like revisiting my past to remember what I learned and how I improved myself).
3. Lacks templates and prompts
4. Limited attachment support.
5. Lacks proper metadata for an entry. In DayOne there’s plenty of metadata for each entry like location, time, date, tags, climate, altitude, step counts, etc, etc. Diarly has the ability to add location, temperature, and other relevant data for the entry but only as text inside the entry. This makes the search difficult when you accumulate thousands of entries in the future. And also the export format will not be perfect if you put everything inside an entry as content instead of properly formatted metadata.

Choosing Diarly vs DayOne

Right now DayOne is clearly winning in every aspect except the price point. So now I planned to stay with DayOne.

Diarly is a good app and sufficient for people who do serious journaling but don’t rely much on features.

Apple’s Journaling App

A paywalled article from WSJ revealed that Apple is developing a journaling app, extending its Health app. The rumor is that it will be released in a few months when introducing the next major version of iOS (17).

Apple as a platform provider has more opportunities and options to make the app better in terms of collecting user data. Apple could collect all data apart from what you could write (eg. your step count, your BP, your heart rate, and the locations you visited, maybe it can even access your call list, and calendar events and can theoretically predict your mood based on your phone activities) and use in-device calculations to make it better (also by protecting your privacy).

There’s a lot of potential if the rumored app becomes a reality. But no way to tell it now as DayOne is also equally competing (esp. after being acquired by WordPress/Automattic). DayOne is expanding its platform support, already launched an Android version of the app. Recently released the web access to your journal (which is in beta now).

Stay tuned, Join my mailing list “Better Workflows” to know if there’s any update on this topic.

Read More on Diarly vs DayOne vs Apple’s own Journaling app

I presume you wouldn’t be reading this if you’re unfamiliar with Ulysses.

Ulysses is a ‘markdown’ based editor app to write anything from a single essay to a multi-chapter book.

It is a premium Apple Eco-only app (i.e. for iOS, iPad, and Mac). Also available with Setapp Subscription (Congrats on being smart by saving money with Setapp).

Writing in Ulysses

Writing in Ulysses is like bliss. It is a snappier, elegant, and highly reliable writing app.

If you like writing in markdown, this is an app for you. If you want to export/publish your writing to many different platforms, then write in markdown. Ulysses is a markdown-only app.

Two apps handled markdown in the best way possible. One is Bear and the other is Ulysses.

Though Ulysses supports writers to write books, ebooks, essays, manuscripts, and anything related to writing and publishing, I will focus only on writing content for the internet in this post. In other words, writing for blogs.

Why you need a frictionless writing workflow

Because writing is a creative work. The outcome will be better if the process is in the flow.

You’re already battling with your thoughts, words, and keyboard. You shouldn’t be fighting with your workflow and the apps you use.

I am writing on the Internet for over 10 years. Learned many things and many more things through experience.

I’ve refined my writing process to the maximum.

If your writing workflow allows you to

• write your mind on the screen without worrying about the technicalities
• process/structure your lines like you process your thoughts in the mind
• bring the media content to the editor without much effort
• link content, highlight the relevance to the existing content

Then you’re using the best writing workflow. In short, nothing stands between your thoughts and your writing.

Ulysses made my writing and publishing workflow frictionless. Here I would like to share my workflow briefly.

Drafts, and published pieces in one place

Creating projects and maintaining them is irrelevant to the topic on hand.

I’ve created “areas” inside Ulysses for different fields of interest or different sites/blogs/platforms.

Usually, I capture ideas, inspirations, and thoughts in another app called ‘Drafts’ (again an Apply eco-only app), I’ve set up two different areas namely “ideas” and “Inbox”.

The ‘inbox’ area (you may call it a folder) contains anything I like to consider, but am not yet convinced to use. The ‘ideas’ contain anything qualified to be shared and worthy of my time writing it.

One additional way to differentiate or segregate/aggregate contents inside is Keywords (aka Tags). I rarely use this feature in my writing flow. For me adding additional layers of metadata will increase complexity and friction.

I was using Keywords to specify where the content is published to filter out content published on specific platforms. After automating the cross-publishing (explained iI stopped using Keywords altogether.

Editing – Structuring Ideas

There are two types of good writing modes in my opinion.

1. You know exactly what to write and its structure
2. You know exactly what to tell but frame the structure during the flow of writing.

For the first kind, you need a definite structure —An outline. Use outliner Apps like Effie to frame the structure of your content before writing.

I take the content outline from my Knowledge Base (in RoamResearch). Recently I started using Mindnode to outline my ideas. It has good support to export the outline to Ulysses.

Most of the time, for small to medium size content like this post, I frame the outline within Ulysses (not an elegant option though) to save time from switching between apps.

Below is the screenshot of this article at the time of writing. You can see the ‘overview’ section (the right panel) hosts the outline of the content. It is similar to a table of contents in documents.

Using Dashboard (often)

For writing very long-form articles, it comes in handy to jump between headings within the article.

There are a few more sections in the ‘Dashboard’ apart from displaying character, word count, and other metrics.

You can see the media attachments, annotations (your comments), footnotes, and links used in the article within this panel. All of this content is available a swipe away.

Annotations help me to reduce the friction a lot while writing. I don’t stop writing when a thought crosses while I write. I just type a hint on the thought as an ‘annotation’ and continue writing.

Annotation (comments) means, let me deal with that later, but note them so I don’t forget it and it won’t break my flow.

These annotations are more like instructions or reminders of items I want to write about or edit later.

Editor settings for distraction-free writing

When I am not using the dashboard panel (on the right side) I type in a distraction-free mode.

This hugely helps my flow and keeps my interests and thoughts within my writing realm or the current topic of writing.

I am not a big fan of typewriter mode. But still, I use it sometimes. Typewriter mode is helpful when you write something in flow and there is no restriction in the article structure.

The quick flicking, shifting lines, and highlighted sentences of typewriter mode act counterproductive for the writing flow. Yet I use it to write some genres of articles where the previous and next paragraphs should not influence my current one while writing.

Pre-publishing checklist

I have a simple pre-publishing checklist.

1. check the links (in the dashboard panel). Especially the affiliate links
2. check for the opportunity of linking other existing articles on my sites. (won’t do it if I feel lazy)
3. Grammarly / grammar & spelling check.
4. Possibly add footnotes.

To find the link to the already published post, I have to find the article within Ulysses, open it, and then find the published link from the article’s dashboard by opening it in the browser. I couldn’t find an easier way to do this. (If you know, please share it in the comments).

Publishing to WordPress

The publishing step is straightforward.

Click the ‘Publish’ icon, choose WordPress, fill up the post meta, and hit publish.

There are two things I care about before hitting publish.

1. Choose the category
2. Choose/add the tags (tags from my WordPress blog).

Automating Featured Image for the post

I don’t worry about choosing a featured image before publishing.

I have made a proper setting in my WordPress to choose the first image of the post as a featured image.

Handling posts without featured image

If the post doesn’t have any images inside, then the featured image is automatically generated from the post title.

For that, I am using the Auto Featured Image plugin. Install and set it once and forget about the featured image forever. (one less thing to worry about)

Publishing to Medium – Automation

Ulysses supports publishing directly to Medium. But technically you can only transfer the content to Medium as a draft. To publish, you need to go to Medium, then go to Drafts and then click publish to properly publish the content.

I have a workaround to automate this. Use this WordPress to Medium Zap. After creating this Zap I no longer worry about publishing my article in two places with two manual steps.

Publishing to SubStack

Unfortunately, Substack is a closed platform with No APIs.

The simplest and most reliable way to publish Substack from Ulysses is to

1. preview the content in HTML in Ulysses
2. Copy the content and paste it into the Substack editor.

Most of the time it works. Sometimes the media files are not picked up by the Substack editor (esp. if it is .gif files).

End Note

Any workflow or process that made your writing frictionless is the best workflow for you.

Anything that doesn’t work for you, despite its popularity and elegance then it is not for you.

I shared this workflow to inspire. Get more like this @ Better Workflows. Subscribe to join the Smarter community to become smarter than today.

Read More on Frictionless Writing & Publishing Workflow: Ulysses to the Internet.

Strategic Procrastination or “procrastination on purpose” is where procrastination is the actual plan of strategy. Not doing it out of laziness — but actively harnessing the benefit of it.

Caveat. Strategic procrastination as an entire strategy isn’t going to work. And I am not encouraging it. I am just arguing it is not altogether a bad thing.

What is Strategic Procrastination?

We put things off on our to-do list for later, believing that they will be done in a better way than now.

We tend to do more silly, unimportant things — while putting our tasks that can contribute to the significant outcome on pause.

Have you ever organized your folders on your computer while you had to work on an important presentation? Have you ever spent more time searching for a suitable app for a particular task when greater tasks are in due?

Spending more time on insignificant things (tell yourself that is nice to be done now) and not on the actual stuff that can move the needle.

You get the fake feeling of working, the fake feeling of accomplishment while you actually procrastinated on the actual work.

Why?

I’m not advocating the following reasons good, — or bad. These are just reasons why we procrastinate and think of it as a strategic plan.

Due to emotion: We put off things because we feel we’re not in the right mood to carry out the work now. Also, we believe the mood will change later. We wait until the right mood hits in.

Rewards: There’s no reward for completing things earlier. We are either motivated by fear (of punishment or losing) or reward. So why not procrastinate?

Self-esteem: We would rather be seen as lazy rather than incompetent. So we put tasks off until the last minute.

Research & Preparation: We want everything, every data to be in place to start. We don’t know where to stop researching and where to start the actual work. We don’t want to be wrong with our plan. We want things to be perfect in the end. So we put more time into preparation rather than doing.

Looking like an idiot: We don’t want to look like an idiot by putting your product out in the world before anyone. Wanting to be relative to your peers is a pressing concern for everyone. We all want to be seen as unique, yet we are afraid of being odd in the group. So we wait for others to proceed before us.

No idea: When you don’t know what you exactly want (as an outcome), you need time to figure it out.

When you know what outcome you needed, but you don’t the how to achieve it, then you need time to figure it out.

When you have multiple ways to do one thing, you need to weigh their options and benefits. You need time for figuring it out.

You can’t waste your time figuring it out when other tasks on your list are waiting. So you work on those tiny less important tasks while the thoughts about the big task in simmering back in your mind.

Getting the most — out of procrastination

Adam Grant, organizational psychologist, and professor at Wharton Business School wrote in his book Originals that procrastinators are actually more likely to be creative because they have the opportunity to participate in divergent thinking. ¹

The time given by procrastination is actually the opportunity to subconsciously think about a problem. This led to divergent thinking, — also creativity.

Here are simple steps that could give you some idea of how to purposely procrastinate for good.

1) Plan your procrastination.

Create two deadlines.

The first is for deciding on your task’s idea or vision.

The second for when you need to have the product or blog post or plan complete and finalized.

In other words, the first deadline is for creativity. The second is for productivity. The first deadline is the maximum time you can procrastinate.

2) Have a checklist or todo list

Put everything in your task list or to-do list app. Recording important tasks will free up mental bandwidth to optimize your divergent thinking.

Seeing your list helps you to choose the tasks you can procrastinate on and choose shallow tasks to do while procrastinating on big tasks.

3) Switch between unrelated tasks

Brainstorm, plan, draw, write an outline, write a draft, and do shallow research as long as you’re inspired to do it. These are all creative parts of planning. Now, instead of jumping directly to action, put the task off and work on other things on your list.

The more the tasks are unrelated, the better the creativity. Taking a break from the task is the best way to encourage divergent thinking.

This gives you the opportunity to look at your own work with fresh eyes when you come back to it after spending time on other unrelated tasks. (If you’re a designer or software engineer you would understand this better).

4) Break up the task into smaller pieces spaced out over time

The most efficient way to solve problems is to break them up into the smallest tasks.

Break each item in your checklist down into its component parts.

Set deadlines for each one. Now follow through and keep track of everything you’ve accomplished.

Remember the 3rd point. After finishing one piece from Task A, choose another small piece from Task B (the unrelated one). Don’t choose your consequent pieces from the same Task.

Remember, these are the ways to harness your procrastinating mind. I never endorse procrastination as a path to creativity.

Repeating. Strategic procrastination as an entire strategy isn’t going to work. And I am not encouraging it. I am just arguing it is not altogether a bad thing.

1. https://www.bassamzahid.com/2018/05/07/the-guide-to-strategic-procrastination/ ↩

Read More on Strategic Procrastination: Use it to your advantage.

”All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” – Blaise Pascal. (French philosopher)

Have you heard of Circadian Rhythms or Ultradian Rhythms?

Ultradian Cycle. There is an energy cycle for every human that goes up burning all the energy and comes down to heal and go again. It doesn’t strictly have to be a 90-20 minute wave. But something closer to it and it differs for every human.

In Circadian Rhythm, the cycle goes between 16:8 hours Wake Sleep cycle.

It is clear that our body needs rest to get back to the previous energy-full state. It needs that to recover the lost energy. If you’re going to perform at high intensity, you’re going to lose a lot of energy.

If you need to perform at high intensity every time — you need rest. Mental rest is more important than physical. The mind almost can’t turn off except while sleeping (dreaming is also a state where the mind is working).

Switch off your mind.

You can’t exactly control your mind and switch it off at your whims. At least not everyone can. But we can give a similar experience to your brain.

Meditation looks like a super-scam if you’re not trying it consistently for more than a month and at least for 15 minutes a day.

The point here is not to meditate. The point here to switch your mind away from whats currently concerning it. That is your current task on hand.

Giving the mind the feeling of rest, without shutting it.

Just try not to act or react to anything for a few minutes — even on your thoughts. Just watch them go in different directions. Watch your brain that thinks out of the box. Witness your brain mixing ideas with different areas.

You can now see the new energy barging in.

Distractions

Switching off devices to avoid distraction is just a step, not the actual act of meditating. Stay away from things that trigger your thoughts or lead them in undesired directions.

Switch off your mind. Offload your thoughts. Just stay away from the actual tasks that drained you.

If you can’t meditate, just walk for 5 minutes away from the environment of work. Meditate while you walk.

Another alternative is meditate actively by writing your thoughts. Just like Intermittent journaling, but writing things exactly irrelevant to the task.

Do it before switching to another task or project. A quick ’switch-off’ will cleanse your attention residue.

Do it before making decisions. You can’t pour your complete energy and mind into a decision that you don’t completely believe.

These are the reason why Pomodoro technique or 52-17 technique works efficiently.

A little bit of mentally-alone time every then and there is the secret for incredible performance boost.

Read More on Intermittent Brief Switch Off. A Secret to quick mental performance boost.

1. Use Mac’s Emoji selector

Keep the cursor at the point where you want to insert the emoji.

Now, press Ctrl + Cmd + SpaceBar at the same time to invoke the emoji selector.

Search for the emoji. Just press enter to insert the selected emoji.

2. Use “Rocket” – Type your emojis

Rocket is an app to insert emojis while typing (like Slack, Notion style).

Download Rocket. (Free)

Install it on your Mac.

Now just start typing your emoji with the prefix “:”.

I just typed :tada and pressed enter to insert the above emoji.

3. Use RayCast – A ‘Spotlight’ alternative

This step is only for those who using RayCast (in the place of Apple’s Spotlight search). If not try it.

Download RayCast. (Free)

Assuming RayCast is already installed on your Mac.

Go to its ‘Preference’

Go to ‘Extensions’

Search for ‘emoji’ and select it as shown in the above screenshot.

Now the setup is ready to use.

Wherever you want to insert the emoji, place the cursor there, then press the shortcut to invoke RayCast. In my case, it is Cmd + Space. (You can change the shortcut in RayCast Preference.)

Now type emoji in the RayCast search box. Select the option ‘search emoji’. And then search for your emoji by typing it.

But the easiest way is to search with the prefix :.

Just invoke RayCast, Start typing your emoji name with “:” as a prefix. Eg. :tada. Now press enter/return key to insert the selected emoji.

That’s easy and all. See you till next time.

Read More on 3 Quick Ways to Insert Emojis on Mac – without Distracting Your Writing Flow.

The brain after a long sleep is cleansed of all stress hormones and residues. It only needs an hour or two to boot up and reach its full potential.

You’ll have significant mental energy and cognitive power at your disposal during these morning hours. Your brain is fresh and highly ready to do the most difficult cognitive tasks.

The term morning hours stands for the time that starts at least half an hour after your wake-up time and extends up to an hour or two. I don’t have an exact time span, as it differs from person to person.

Why there’s high mental energy in the morning?

More scientific literature, books, and successful people discussed the philosophical and biological reasons for the presence of high cognitive energy during the morning. I like to point out other reasons here.

The morning hours are less distracting. At least, it is easy to choose to avoid distractions. You’re less likely to collaborate during this time with others. So the morning is a good time for your own focused work.

Your brain is a fresh slate. You can start any task of your choice. The failures and hiccups of the previous day are not going to pose a problem if you start fresh today.

No attention residues from the previous day’s tasks.

Why do you need to tap the morning energy?

Most people who use these super-charged morning hours for focused work are doing wonders than those who hustle hard during the day to find the same focus energy.

This energy is common and available to everyone on the earth — But only a few use it to their advantage. Remaining dissipates it by doing insignificant tasks or ‘mental chores”.

Flow states are hard to get and difficult to sustain the high potential state of mind where you easily perform challenging tasks. Getting into this ‘flow state’ is easy and requires little effort during your morning hours. All you need to do is — just start. It is easy to guide your energy now than at a later time of the day.

How to effectively use your morning energy to your advantage?

Spend your morning time doing your most important work that can produce the most significant outcome.

3 Conditions

If you plan on tapping your morning hours’ high energy, then make sure you do the following 3.

1. Always have a plan before you wake up.

To avoid juggling thoughts and spilling your precious energy by making fuzzy decisions and choosing the tasks from your plate, have a plan.

Having a plan = Clarity. Without clarity, you can’t commit to the task and focus. It is hard to put your brain on the right (desired) track at the beginning.

Don’t let the world decide the direction of your thoughts. This is not the time to consume the world. That is, reading your emails, checking social media, reading the news, etc.

This is the time for creation. Morning is the time for producing intellectual products.

So, plan your morning tasks the night before. Maybe during the previous day’s evening or just before getting into bed. I prefer deciding just before bed. Sleep on your plan.

Just start to work on the plan in the morning. Don’t clog up your mind with the process of choosing a task or by addressing your confusion.

2. Make sure the task you chose is an independent one.

Make sure the task is independent of other tasks. The task you chose must not wait for input from other tasks or other people or anything that is out of your reach. Everything you need to complete the task should be within your hand’s reach.

Small switching (between tasks) and tiny hiccups are more than enough to break your flow.

Think of a task that you can do in a closed room where you have everything that is needed to complete the task. Cut off all communications. Don’t let anyone’s (good or bad) energy affect your flow.

3. Choose the one that compounds

The type of task you choose to do in the morning should be more like a repeated process than a single-time task.

Writing an article every day is a process. Training to win the Olympics seems more like a training process rather than a single-day goal.

The task may change, but the type of the task may not. I don’t recommend choosing specific tasks with deadlines.

I choose the type of tasks that allows me to flow, that allows me to explore, and try different things to improve them over the course of time.

Remember, it is all about tapping your high cognitive function for a significant outcome. I would never recommend wasting this time on chore-type tasks that won’t contribute to your long-term goals.

Choose something long-term, that is not going to complete in near future. Choose the work whose outcomes can build over time into a big one. Like, writing a book. Remember, the compounding effect. Try to form a habit out of this.

2 Really working tricks to keep you go

1. Set up your bar low and start immediately.

Reduce your expectations of the quality of the outcome. This reduces the fear, friction, and other psychological effects that stop you from entering and flowing with your work.

Remember, you’re just embracing the morning focus energy. You’re practicing tapping your high mental energy.

Focus on the process at the start. Make it effortless to sit in the morning and work on high-cognitive tasks. Make it your second nature. Make your body and mind cooperate in this process by doing it every morning. Eventually, you don’t need extra effort to wake up, sit and start to work on a big focus-demanding task.

Once you have mastered that, then you can start to improve the process for far quality outcomes.

2. Look at your streaks for motivation, not the results.

Many people lose their motivation by seeing the results of their work immediately after finishing it for a few days.

I understand you need motivation. A gratification, a positive sign of progress to keep you on the path of progress.

I wrote every day in the morning, publish them online, then with high expectations I look for the viewer’s graph to move steeply. Most of the time it is always opposite to what I expected.

I found that the metrics are not motivating. They never fed my inner fire. (But the readers’ comments and emails surely are motivating and satisfying.)

What I found to be very motivating are my “Streaks”. Once you moved to 20 days, 30 days, and so on without breaking it, I found it very hard to break. My emotional side of the mind is now cooperating with my intellectual side of mind every day. It is now easy to kick off my laziness in the morning.

Looking back my published article list is far more motivating than seeing the analytics. Analytics serves as a tool to find where you can improve. What works and what doesn’t? It was never meant to act as a motivating trigger.

Change your mindset. Never allow yourself to get motivated by the outcomes. Get motivated by the process itself.

Never allow any external happenings to be your motivation factor. Find your intrinsic motivations. Tracking your streaks is one of them.

Feel free to ask me anything in the comments. I am happy to clarify your queries.

Read More on How to Use Your High Morning Mental Energy to achieve long-term Goals— esp. for those who find it difficult

When you switch from one task to another, a tiny portion of the information is left in your conscious for a little longer even after you put yourself into the new task.

The mindset you exercised for your previous task happens to dwell for some time during the start of a new task, exists, and slowly decays until you flow entirely into the new task at hand.

These residues cause little hiccups in your performance and consume a significant amount of your cognitive power (especially if you’re involved in any creative process).

It is true for all situations regardless of the value of the task or whether it is a productive one or a recreational one.

Solution to cleanse attention residue

Take a break between tasks.

Interstitial journaling.

Take a walk between two different types of tasks.

Never ever choose to multitask.

Make some obvious changes to aid your brain to notice the difference like changing the room, or changing the light color. Physical and environmental changes are more noticeable for a brain to pick up the signal.

Try meditating for a couple of minutes.

Read More on Attention Residue. What it means to your personal productivity.

Read? Now here are the 20 reasons why the Ivy Lee method is so powerful and efficient. This gives you the confidence to start trusting it and follow it for yourself.

1. Insanely simple planning system. Easy to implement and use. No need for any learning or maintaining a system. Even a simple pen and paper is enough. You don’t need any complex system or app to use this method.
2. It only prioritizes the priorities. So you focus on significant tasks that result in a significant outcome. And they get done.
3. It forces you to focus on your priorities, which means the task you do will move you a step forward toward your goals.
4. You wake with a plan in hand. You wake up with clarity. Your precious decision-making energy at the start of the day is used to work on important tasks instead of wasted in planning the day.
5. You omit silly tasks in the list. This means you get rid of distracting tasks. Yes, apart from distractions some tasks are distracting too. They distract you from achieving your goals and consume your valuable time, especially those energetic moments in the morning to noon.
6. You conquer one at a time. That means it encourages focus & flow. Usually, all 6 tasks are independent and don’t need anyone’s input to complete them. This means you can work at your own pace.
7. Taking tough decisions is easy if you take them earlier. Choosing your tough tasks for the next day is relatively easier than choosing them in the morning hours.
8. You don’t say “yes” to others before completing your 6 tasks. That means you’re the owner of your morning hours. Errands for the afternoons. “You” come before “Others”. Your tasks get done before you start to work on other people’s priorities.
9. It only takes a minute or two to plan in the Ivy Lee method. That means easier routines have a high chance of sticking as a habit. Once it becomes a habit, doing it will be second nature.
10. Completing your daily goals become easy as there are only 6 tasks. This gives you more motivation for other tasks for the day. The side effect of achieving your goal is being motivated for the rest of the day.
11. Sleep better with confidence that everything is already taken care of. Eliminate “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination”.
12. Eliminate the possibility of falling into “Sophisticated Procrastination”. You have a system that can’t be fine-tuned, thus you won’t waste time in tuning this system.
13. Achievable. The list of 6 tasks is achievable. (Self-motivated). An overwhelming task list demotivates you at the first sight. Seeing only 6 tasks on the list makes you feel comfortable as you have the confidence of completing them before the day.
14. Anything you do in the morning will likely stick and stay longer during the day. If you start the day with good focused work, the same state follows throughout the day. The Ivy Lee method is suitable to make use of this phenomenon for peak productivity.
15. The success of any productivity system is how much you trust it and how much you can rely on it. The Ivy Lee Method is so simple and hard to fail. Just pick the right tasks every day.
16. The secret of success is consistency. It is relatively easy to follow this method rather than other complex techniques for getting things done. Easy to cultivate consistency through this method.
17. Your willpower is limited. The Ivy Lee method is most suitable to exploit your willpower in the most efficient way by limiting your target for the day and limiting it to only the most important tasks. This method ensures your precious willpower is spent on important tasks before any other.
18. Limiting your “heavy-lift” tasks will give you better space to do other things in the other half of the day. It reduces stress as critical tasks have already been taken care of. This leads to a relaxed work state, which may increase your creative energy.
19. It reduces friction to keep you in the flow. You can focus on the work instead of managing your decision on choosing the next task. One important quality of achieving a “flow state” is that there should be no friction and you should always have the answer to “what’s next”. (I will explain this in subsequent posts, so stay tuned). Read [the article “Procrastination? Struggling to start?] Know how to move forward” where I talked about the 2-minute rule to overcome the starting trouble in productivity.
20. Stay on top of your goals and move in the right direction. Every evening when you sit and choose your tasks, make sure you choose the tasks that take you one step further to your long-term goal. It only takes a minute or two to do this. The Ivy Lee method not only helps you to conquer your day but also conquer your monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals.

20 points, done . Don’t hesitate to try this method for at least 10 days to see the outcome of it. More questions? comment below, I am happy to help.

Read More on Why Ivy Lee Method is an efficient task management method? 20 reasons.

It was from then, called “The Ivy Lee Method”.

As I said, it is stupidly simple. It comprises 5 simple steps.

1. Before leaving from the work in the evening or at the end of the day, write down the 6 important things you want to do for the next day. If you have many tasks pending, just choose the 6 most important tasks from the list.
2. Now order them by priority from 1 to 6.
3. Next day morning, start to work out the list from 1 then through to the 6th task. It’s better not to skip or reorder the tasks now. Just work through the list, one at a time. You are allowed to start 2nd task only if you finished the 1st completely.
4. Work through the list, and try to complete them all before focusing on any new tasks for the day. Move the pending task if any to the next day’s list.
5. Repeat the same process every day.

Simple right? But to make it effectively work, you need to remember the following 3 things.

1. Be cautious about picking and prioritizing tasks. It only takes 5 minutes to work your list everyday evening.
2. Little discipline and commitment to work through the list for the day.
3. Need to do it consistently.

If you ensure the above 3, the Ivy Lee method will definitely lead you to peak productivity.

I compiled 20 reasons why the Ivy Lee method is an efficient system which will be posted soon. Stay tuned. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter which only takes 1 minute to read every single issue.

Read More on The Ivy Lee method: The simple method for peak productivity.

Procrastination comes in many shapes and sizes. Most of them are apparently bad, yet some of them don’t look like procrastination.

Sophisticated Procrastination is hiding the procrastination by doing the things around the work but not exactly doing the actual work. Thus getting a sense of false fulfillment by doing them.

Working around the work? What is it?

Work requires one thing, and that is doing that. Taking action to complete it. Maybe in some cases a little planning or research. A little and necessary amount of research is good.

Scenarios like Planning on how to do the work, calculating all the possibilities, buying proper tools/apps for it, searching for multiple methods to execute it, setting up a system for similar work that may or may not come in the future, analyzing the different approaches, mentally calculating the accuracy of outcome in different possibilities, worrying about the influence of the environment, tweaking the parameters of external environment before working on the actual work, building a system before starting work, trying different systems for perfection, looking out for different strategies used by other popular figures or experts, etc, etc.

This is called the Meta Game. ¹ (No, not the Facebook company)

Sophisticated Procrastination involves focusing on the Meta Game (the game about the game) but not on the actual game.

Out of 100 tasks we carry out, only 2 to 5 tasks need very good strategic planning. Those few, novel projects need planning, approach, and strategy.

Why do we do this?

Maybe fear of failure (in some cases) to act on the task or project. Over aspiration to perfection. (Leaning more on using the perfect system, methods, and strategies instead of believing in your abilities.) and many more. You know them from your personal experience.

But the actual reason is,

You want to avoid the guilty feeling of procrastination. And you get a sense of (false) fulfillment by doing this. Sophisticated procrastination creates the feeling that you’re actually working on the task while you’re not. The apparency is deceiving here.

People who look for the best productivity methods, best productivity systems, and best personal knowledge management systems fall into this category if they do it frequently.

Note: Check Tools Repo where I listed the most useful methods, mental models, and systems to start with. (It gets updated frequently, so Subscribe to my newsletter, Snippetter to be on track with the top 1% achievers)

How to avoid this?

You can avoid procrastinating sophisticatedly by changing your mindset. The following mindset may help you.

Mindsets

Prioritise “Progress over Perfection”.

Allow your products to have 20% imperfections and ship them immediately. Allow yourself to be a little imperfect. Read my article on Pareto Hack to understand why you don’t have to cover the last 20%.

Sharpen your axes, but sharpening them is not the job. It is not even part of the job.

Remember, Anything that doesn’t complete the task is not work. Do not consider preparation as work. It is just a warm-up.

Some actionable steps

No need to waste your precious time searching for the perfect system, perfect methodologies, and the perfect approach. It doesn’t exist. When trying new methods, use them in actual work.

Build a (productivity) system while you work on a project (on it) and tweak them as your work needs. Do not wait for a system or method to get perfect. Just start your work.

If you’re strategically planning your projects, stay away from your tools and apps. Meditate on it at a separate time. Always keep in mind, you didn’t start the work yet. Keeping your tools away helps you focus on planning the work, instead of getting caught up in the process of tweaking your tools and methods.

Write down your strategy, instead of overthinking it. (This piece of step helped me hugely in avoiding sophisticated procrastination). Writing gives you clarity.

For Small Projects

For small projects and tasks, plan roughly. Do not overcomplicate your plans. Just change them on the go. All you need is flexibility in your plan or method or system to adapt to changes on the go.

In short, don’t wait for the changes to come. Adapt to them as they come by. Don’t try to build a bulletproof mechanism to defend all the changes you expect to come in the process (which usually don’t come in reality or come very less frequently).

Do not focus more than necessary on the probability of failures and don’t try to address them all.

For Repeating Projects

The biggest lesson for me is, a process can’t be perfected when I run through it for the first time. It takes many iterations to perfect them. Improve your process by 1% each time you do a particular work. For example, my writing process is almost got super fine-tuned in the process of writing more than 100 articles in the past year. Just let your work build the system on its own. I couldn’t create a good writing workflow at the start. I had one, but it never worked for me. I wasted almost a month on finding the best writing method.

When I started to focus on writing (writing only) everything falls into the place. Now I build the process in the flow and improved it in subsequent iterations.

1. Metagame, hypergame, or game about the game, is an approach to a game that transcends or operates outside of the prescribed rules of the game, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game. – Wikipedia ↩

Read More on Sophisticated Procrastination. And, How to avoid it?

You’re not able to sleep immediately when you hop to bed because of one of the following reasons.

1. Inability to complete your goal of the day (even if the reason for not completing your tasks of the day is genuine).
2. You are not satisfied with the output you gave out to the world.
3. You didn’t do any job that makes a (positive) impact.
4. Stress from work. The day didn’t go as you expected or planned.
5. You feel worthless. You feel ashamed of your efforts not converted into a product (productivity not happened).
6. Feeling that you’re working in a job that is not aligned with your passion or strength.
7. There’s no autonomy for you to work on your tasks at your own pace.
8. You failed to work on your tasks rather than worked on tasks assigned to you which are priorities of others.
9. You feel stuck and confused as you don’t know what to change in your methods of approaching the day.
10. You have a lot on your task list, but nothing gets completed. You see a lot of postponed tasks and get the feeling of failure.
11. Lot of your ideas stayed as ideas and never materialized.

And the reasons go on similar to the above. But it all boils down to two things.

Either the day didn’t go as planned or expected or you didn’t do anything as planned for the day.

So, the “Guilt of wasted day-time”.

If you don’t achieve in the day, you want to compensate them by doing two things at night.

1. Randomly browsing for ideas, methods, and shortcuts hoping they may help or aimlessly scrolling your social feeds just to avoid the sense of guilt.
2. You start to work on instead of embracing the bed and working through the night.

Most people fall for the former one.

Aimlessly doing things until they fall asleep. To put it right, “aimlessly doing things hoping that they get good sleep later”.

Falling to sleep = closing the day. Sleep is the final task of the day. In that sense, you don’t want to shut down without completing a few tasks. But in reality, you don’t attempt to do the task but wander away to avoid the sense of guilt.

Completing your goals of the day gives you a sense of accomplishment. Which in turn produces some “happy” hormones in your brain. This makes you feel satisfied, relevant, and confident.

Those who feel satisfied fall asleep immediately. Those who have the “guilt” of not doing their part up to the measure of their satisfaction level, they struggle to sleep.

This entire psychological phenomenon is termed as “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination”

How to avoid falling into “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination”?

Fix a goal for the day that is perfectly achievable or completable within the first half of the day. Choose the number of tasks you want to complete even if the day becomes overwhelming, tightly scheduled, or prone to change when other priorities enter unannounced.

The sweet number of tasks falls between 2 to 6. Depending on the size of the tasks (time it requires to complete, energy it needed, quality of the output) fix a number.

Now work on these tasks first thing in the morning. It is better to fix or plan the tasks the previous day or evening. It is also fine to plan in the early morning if you don’t find it difficult to choose the priorities among your list of tasks.

You may have 100 tasks (which is a mess) but you can only have up to 6 tasks as a goal for the day.

Start small. Completing the target of the day gives you confidence, satisfaction, and everything you need for a good night’s sleep.

I am doing “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination” now. How to avoid it if the day goes bad?

My first recommendation is not to let the day ruin your night. Fix minimal targets the next day. This is the first, actionable, and effective step to avoid “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination” altogether.

Yet, for those who face this issue now, the only thing I found working to escape this trap is Journaling. Yes, just writing it down is the simple and most effective solution.

It is better to use your pen and paper, but typing on your phone is also fine if you committed to only using the app for journaling and nothing else until you put down your phone.

Now open a blank page (any journaling app is fine, any notes app is fine). Write down what you did for the day (for yourself and the world). Where things went beyond the plan. How you were interrupted.

Eventually, you need to focus on finding reasons, how your work impacted, and how much of your work contributed to the world, to your company, and to your friends. Focus on the positive things that happened on that day.

Cultivate gratitude feeling. If not at least fake it. This piece of advice looks philosophical, but it is pure science. Thank you for the good day many times in your writing.

Writing streamlines your thought. Your thoughts won’t wander now. You’re focused now. You find good reasons that you can be proud of or in the worst case, you find the real reasons that didn’t work.

Whatever the case, you either get relief by knowing you have done something or get clarity to approach the next day. Both help good sleep.

Thanks,

Happy sleeping. Happy successful day.

Read More on ”Revenge Bedtime Procrastination”. This is why you couldn’t sleep (early) at night.

The most annoying scenario that just every one of us went through many times in our life. The neuroscience study has an explanation for this. It is called the “doorway effect”.

Forgetting things when you move from one room to another.

The doorway effect or “location-updating effect” is a known psychological event where a person’s short-term memory declines (or turns to null) when passing through a doorway moving from one location to another when it would not if they had remained in the same place.

According to the neuroscience study (and an old psychological explanation), the human brain is designed to hold memory for a very short time. Author Cal Newport calls it “Working-memory”. At the same time, the brain is very good at holding information very brightly for a period of time, that is when you working on a particular task.

During this time, the brain holds the information about the task and all other closely-related information in reach.

Limited cognitive space

Why would we have a memory system set up to forget things as soon as we finish one thing and move on to another? Because we can’t keep everything ready-to-hand. ¹

Assume your brain has a lot of shelves and boxes. Every box contains similar or related information. The relation (connection) factors to the topic, emotion, or any context. You pick a task, your brain just opens a box and spread across the table, and starts to work on it along with the new information and goal.

Because of the limited cognitive space capacity of your brain, you need close the current box if you want to open another box in order to give the table space (your working memory) for the contents of this new box. Once you opened the new box, the memory of the old box usually diminishes or vanishes in some cases.

This is the reason why your short-term memory is so powerful when compared to your long-term memory. To keep things in your long-term memory, you need to open that particular box contents (which you need to remember for a very long) should be accessed frequently.

In short, the human brain is designed to think inside the box.

Note: Now you know how SRS (Spaced-repetition system) for learning works most effectively.

Trigger for Switching boxes

You don’t need to put effort into closing a box and opening another. The brain does that for you even without any conscious commands.

Your sensory inputs trigger this process of switching boxes. The moment your eyes see another room, your body feels the temperature change, and your ears hear something, these senses trigger your brain to switch boxes in the blink of an eye. (The same concept applies to distractions too).

Doorway effect in context switching

As switching boxes happens on autopilot, it is not much of a strain for the brain. But if you try to do it intentionally, then it puts a heavy load on your brain. That is you it is so hard to remember what you forget when you cross the door.

Not only moving from one room to another trigger this effect. Moving from one contextually connected project (or set of tasks) to another triggers the same effect. Because still, your sensory organs are feeding the changes to your brain. Opening your email inbox, while you peruse through your projects notes in your notes app causes the same effect as switching rooms physically.

Changing from one window (or an app) to another contextually disconnected window (or an app) like a social media feed is equivalent to switching rooms (in terms of the digital world).

Let’s say you are trying to write a book or doing your taxes, now you immediately switch to your browser to check a ticket for your next trip. The change in context triggers the ‘doorway effect’ which causes your brain to wrap the contents of your book-writing ideas to a box and put it away to free up your cognitive space to load information about the trip you’re planning.

This type of context-switching takes a heavy toll on your cognitive performance or at least heavily diminishes your creative energy.

Context switching is not bad, just your brain is not designed for that. To gain optimal performance from your brain, just wrap up your current task/project before opening another.

Note: Interstitial journaling is the best way to handle these switching effectively.

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-doorway-makes-you-forget/

Read More on The “Doorway effect” of multitasking in personal productivity.

5 Categories of tools for your Personal Productivity System.

1. Task Management (including Projects and Goals Management)
2. Time Management (events to attend, meetings, time allocated for various activities in your life)
3. Notes Management / Ideas, PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) / Minutes / Journaling (including physical notes).
4. Files Management (including physical resources), Document management.
5. Communication – Email Management, People/Contacts Management, Chats, Social Media, etc.

Every tool out there in the world of personal productivity space falls under these 5 categories. Do not confuse the areas of life like finance, family, and work with this.

If you have an app that can manage your tasks and time (task manager and calendar) then it’s an added advantage. If an app can do all of the above 5, then you need to be very careful on choosing it. I wrote about this in my recent article Maslow’s hammer – The all-in-one tool. Using one (like Notion) for everything limits your approaches and reduces your quality of work.

How many apps or tools do you need to use for optimal performance?

Minimalism is better, but optimal-ism is even better. You need different tools to handle different jobs. Even though you don’t want to, admit you need it, if you want to function optimally. That is, do more with less energy. In short to be efficient.

Because at the end of the day, these categories are interconnected and interwoven to complete one task. That is to make personal productivity effective and easy.

How to reduce the number of tools you use?

So do not count the number of tools you use. Count the time and energy needed to complete a task (that you frequently do) with and without the particular tool. Based on this evaluation choose to eliminate your tool or keep it with the tool bag.

There are two different sets of tool bags.

One bag contains the tools in the above 5 categories which you use multiple times in a day. Let’s call these ‘primary productivity tools’.

The other contains, “secondary tools”. The workflow tools do their job to support the process. These tools have significance and add up more value to the product. For example, a PDF editor, a screenshot annotator, an image resize, or a compressor. These tools are used infrequently. In some types of jobs, it plays a big role and is used frequently. But within the personal productivity frame, it is not the case.

Limit the number of primary tools. There’s no limit to your secondary workflow tools.

Is using too many tools a drag to your productivity speed?

Yes and no. It depends on the nature and workflow. If your workflow needs it, you need it, don’t deny it just because you don’t want to.

If your workflow doesn’t need it, it doesn’t. Do inject forcefully just because you love the app for its look and features.

Choose the tool by its function. Some tools are cool and fun to use. But they contribute little to your overall productivity.

A tool should not require more time to tweak it than to actually use it. Consider the ratio 1:100. Tweak it once, and use it 100 times. Then this is the tool that deserves to be in your tool bag.

If you spend more energy and time configuring and tweaking a tool than using it in the actual play, then this is the tool you need to throw away. Or in some cases, the tool must be used in the wrong way or for the wrong purpose.

Make sure your tools work together and work for one purpose.

As long as you can transmit data from one app to another tool (either manually or through automation) in a smooth way, then it is a suitable candidate for your toolset. For example, I can see my calendar events in my task manager. My notes app works with the calendar app. If I copy some content from my Notes app and paste them into the mail, it should be formatted properly. Likewise, there are numerous use cases. But you have to worry only about the use case which you are going to frequently use.

Even though you’re going to work in one app at a time, in reality, you’ll be switching between these often. So make sure the switching is easy and distinct.

Another caveat of using multiple tools is, a different version of data exists in different apps. To avoid this use one app (it may be your task manager, calendar, or your notes app) use one app in the above category as your “Source of Truth”. Read What is your SSOT (Single Source of Truth) app?

Automations?

I like integrations. I kind of allergic to automation in my personal productivity system. Automations are good. I use them too. But it should replace my manual work (chores), not my intellectual work. I don’t want things that are important to happen on my back. This philosophy of mine is strict only to my “personal” productivity system.

I too use automation like my reading highlights (from web and read-it-later apps) sent to ReadWise. I like my posts delivered to Twitter followers at the right time. At the same time, I hate auto-schedulers that schedule time for my tasks in the task list.

As long as you don’t miss anything happening within your system, automation is cool. Automation is for us, for the system. It should not dictate what you should do (next).

Compromising the features

There’s no ‘perfect’ system. Once you create an ‘ideal’ system or app, the measuring point of ‘ideal’ moves two steps ahead. Practically, it is impossible to create or set up an ideal system.

If anyone is saying (especially on YouTube) that they have a super-perfect system, then they are lying. You can make it look perfect, but it can be never used perfectly.

Choose your compromise with logic. Not with emotions and influences. If you want to use an app that is very unpopular but does the job, then it is good to go with it rather than using a popular app that does it in a less optimal way.

Process defines the outcome.

Look for the beauty in what is created. Do not beatify your process unless you’re a YouTuber.

The process should be fun to use. After all, you’re going to use it every day. The process itself should be joyful. I agree, some apps’ design aesthetics are super cool to use. Make sure it does the job and doesn’t requires you to compromise a lot in your system to use that one app.

If you’re using an app, it shouldn’t feel that you’re using it. It should work with your natural flow (at the lease after a month’s use).

Focus on the product, the output. No one looks at how ugly the process is if the product is a masterpiece. I am not advocating using an ugly-looking process. I am just saying don’t worry about how your process looks in others’ eyes.

Keeping the process clean and making it look beautiful are two different things. Chefs don’t use fancy knives. They use an old knife (which may not look colorful) for the finesse of the cut and they do it in a very clean way.

Process defines the outcome. The product should define the process too. If your (cool) tools are not helping to beautiful and functional products, then using them or having them in your toolset is rather unnecessary.

So, how many apps?

I don’t have a number, because I don’t know what you expect from your productivity system.

Create a system that takes care of your day-to-day work. Make it your second nature, so you can focus on achieving your goals by using the system.

Adding too many apps to your primary tool bag will be counter-productive.

Tools-Repo

By the way, I like to mention that I’ve created a tool repo which is basically a note-to-self database of apps and my opinion on it. Check it out if you’re interested. If you haven’t subscribed to Snippetter, then do it now. It is free now.

Read More on How many apps do you need to be highly productive and efficient?

aka law of the instrument, the law of the hammer, golden hammer.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Abraham Maslow

Every tool is there to solve a unique problem. Maybe some tools can solve a few more issues but not more than that.

Once you’re familiar with a tool (in our case, a productivity app) we want to use it for multiple purposes. Like it or not, the tool is designed to solve a unique problem (some feature-rich apps can solve a few more than intended). But never all.

The type or nature of the problem determines the tool that needs to be used. Not the other way around.

A shovel is a shovel, a spade is a spade. Maybe we don’t have to be that strict in selecting tools. But definitely, you can’t replace a hammer with a shovel. (Yes you can, but it’s not a wise decision).

You can have a tool kit for certain similar tasks, and a bag of tool kits. You must if you want to play at the professional level. Only amateurs use one tool for everything.

Distinctive tools for distinctive categories and distinctive areas (of life). If you use multiple tools for the same category of needs, then you may worry about having plenty of apps/tools in your tool bag.

It may deem a little more effort to switch tools, yet if you focus on the quality of the product (outcome) you wouldn’t mind the extra switches in your process.

The process determines the outcome’s quality as long as your process is defined by having the outcome in mind.

Amateurs posing as professionals. There’s no shortage of people (on Youtube, and Twitter) who use Notion, Logseq, Evernote, and Noteplan for everything. That may feel awesome until you’re in the process of building your system. Once you put it into the work to extract output from the system, you’ll find its shortfalls.

Most people using one tool for everything are just having fun with the process of building the (ideal) setup in that tool. I bet they rarely produce something out of it except the built system.

Chefs don’t use a knife for everything, a good carpenter never uses a hammer for everything, only amateurs do.

A good start to pick your tools.

Check my comprehensive list of tools → Tools Repo (edited, updated every week)

For a better understanding,

Distinctive tool for distinctive categories. I use Things 3 for task management and RoamResearch for knowledge management.

Distinctive tool for distinctive areas. I use Things 3 for personal task management, while Notion and Google Workspace tasks are for collaborative task management at work. Logseq to manage work-related knowledge and for my academic research.

To break it down further, I use Screenshots to capture a single window, Loom to capture a process in the video, and Scribe to create a step by step guides to explain the process to my colleagues, students, and my site readers.

Over-relying on a familiar tool is just a comfort and a lie you telling yourself. And you need to know that fact is a fact. No single tool can replace everything.

Read More on Maslow’s Hammer – The all-in-one (Productivity) tool

Like the trigger words provoke psychological emotions, the trigger words inside your PKM should invoke your memory intellectually.

Keywords, Tags are something that is shared by different concepts inside your note bank. They relate and connect across notes. Keywords of a particular document tell that they are mentioned inside the document. Tags add more context to the document.

The purpose of “Trigger points” is entirely different from keywords and tags. It functions as same as a keyword or tag which is to pull aside content that is relevant. But “trigger points/words” function as a trigger to pull out something from your memory in a most natural way.

Trigger points/words that help you remember a “piece of knowledge”, a concept, and the things associated with them without significant effort.

You took the note a couple of years before. Looking at the same note after a long time you wonder how these notes come into your collection. The content feels new to you. You’re naive to the same content which you understood well at the time of taking it. Now you need to read a significant amount of your note to understand what you understood at the time the note is taken.

On one side, the notes are for referring, and yes most note-taking methods satisfy this particular need intrinsically. But wouldn’t you like to recall the particular knowledge piece without significant effort? by not even searching your notes?

By using trigger words, you eliminate referring to the entire list of notes related to them. In the moment of seeing a trigger word, your brain re-surfaces the concept/knowledge piece that is kept at the bottom of its memory.

Keywords are for externalized memory (second brain), while “trigger points/words” are for your memory (your natural brain).

Trigger Points/Words – helps you to refresh your memory quicker. It is the crux as nuts in the shell that can be denoted with (very) few words. (Check Step 3 in the Note-taking workflow: To build and extract knowledge from digital notes ).

Over the course of time, I started to write my own “trigger words” in between the notes instead just highlighting some keywords as trigger words in the source text.

For me usually, the trigger word connects what I already knew (and probably never forget) with what I just learned now and want to remember later without much effort (without referring to my notes).

So the precondition for a “trigger” is that you should already be personally, intellectually, or emotionally familiar with it. It should share the characteristics of the concept you want to remember.

The recipe for the best trigger words is simplicity and personal touch. Not all of my trigger words follow this recipe, yet once I started to use them again and again (reciting, revisiting, spaced repetition) it will eventually get personal.

Naming your trigger words has another advantage. It comes naturally to you. When in urgency (both at the time of capture and retrieving) you don’t have to fuss with words, jargon, and other gimmicky words to quickly relate or connect.

Yes, trigger words can be a link (for the fans of back-linking) when the different knowledge pieces talk about similar concepts. But the caveat is, you might get confused when you connect more concepts to a single trigger word.

In simple words, trigger words are associated with a single idea regardless of how many times the idea is mentioned in different notes. It can bring back the whole picture of the idea in your brain the moment you read it.

When you skim through a note that was taken a couple of years back, you’ll find those very few highlighted words can bring back all the understandings that you had while taking the note. After encountering those words you feel familiar with the idea which was not the case before glancing at the trigger words.

Highlighting this type of information in your notes helps you to skim your notes faster. Eventually, after considerable revisiting of the notes, the title of the note becomes the trigger word. The ideas are now settled on your crystallized memory which might not need any revisitation to remember it on demand.

The simplicity factor is to make it easy to use, reuse, and remember with less effort.

A keyword is to pull all the notes that contain (relate) to that particular keyword.

Similarly, Trigger words/points are used to pull the memory to the surface (conscious) that was dumped deep down as a result of not visiting them frequently.

The most important factor of a successful PKM (personal knowledge management) system is to revisit your notes at optimal intervals.

So how to find the optimal interval for revisiting a note? It varies from note to note (topic to topic). The simple idea is, if you can remember all the trigger words/points under the particular note, you don’t have to revisit them. When one or a few trigger words start to fade away from your memory, then it is time.

To know whether you can remember the trigger word under a note, you need a very quick visit to the note. (Keeping the trigger words at the top of your notes helps, that’s why I write a summary that includes these trigger words at the top of each note).

Understand the difference between remembering the trigger words for the topic and the concept (knowledge piece) that you want to remember when you encounter a trigger word.

It super-strengths the principle of augmenting the knowledge (instead of learning the concept as a new knowledge piece) which I discussed in “knowledge association“.

Any keyword can be a triggering word so that any abbreviations, story titles, pictures, or anything that is in a readable form. Don’t try to fix any type of rigid rule here to identify your trigger words.

Metaphorically, trigger words are like “bait” that attracts relevant ideas of fish from the bottom of your memory lake (this line could be a trigger point for this entire article). Knowing what baits to be used when is part of the work that needs to be done by us.

If you don’t have a fundamental understanding (Building blocks of true Knowledge: Atomic understanding) of the topic in your second brain, then trigger words become useless.

Read More on Purpose of Trigger points in PKM (No, NOT keywords)

If you were able to answer the above question, then it’s almost easy to find that “enough time” to spend on the task.

The relation between “Time & Effort” is more or less inversely proportional. If you are ready to spend your sincere effort, then the task may require less time to complete.

The other way to see it is, your effort is sporadically distributed across the time spent on a task until its completion.

Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.

Parkinson’s Law

We’re focusing now only on the duration of the task, not when to do it.

There’s a sweet spot between them, where you can have a deliverable ( a completed task ) that has only essentials but is not perfect or polished.

The trick is when to pronounce a ‘task’ as completed. Define the task’s completed state before the start of it. By nature, people try to over-perfect things when they have excess time for the task. Learn to close the task when reaches the ‘enough state’.

Avoid dwelling on a task after it satisfies the expectations that you set prior to the start of the task.

Good effort + Shorter duration = Word done optimally.

When you’re in doubt in the middle about whether the task is completed or not, whether it is the point to stop continuing it, then always consider it is completed and stop.

Give preference for progress over perfection.

I don’t know how much time you require to complete a particular task, but I do know you only need a minute to read the Wiser Workflows Newsletter to digest wonderful ideas like this. Precise, high-signaling content only. I appreciate your wise decision to check out Wiser Workflows and subscribe.

Read More on How much time is “enough time” to complete a task?

Read More on The inevitables of decision making. (and how to avoid some bad ones)

It is a different feature than document history or versions of documents.

When does it help?

I have a version of the document which I am sending to my colleague. He makes changes to it, and the document is getting changed over a course of time.

The Different versions of the document only show the state of the document at different times.

Compare document shows the exact difference of things. What is changed to what?

When you collaborate, it is easy to see the changes others make. Over some time you’ll lose the memory of where it all started. What are the changes the document undergone? This feature can tell you that.

Read More on Compare documents and see the differences in Google Docs (feature)

There are 5 scopes/areas of management in personal productivity. Each requires at least 1 exclusive app for managing the data.

For a project, the data relevant to it resides as tasks in my todo app, and a few notes in my notes app. Some in chat apps, and some as files in my Google drive.

A single source of truth (SSOT) is the (information technology) practice of aggregating data from many systems within an organization to a single location. SSOT or SPOT (Single Point of Truth) is not only helpful for teams, IT companies, or big corporates.

The same strategy can be harnessed in the personal productivity realm too. When there are different versions of data that exist in multiple locations, in different states. Sometimes some data exclusively exists in one location but not in another (this is the case for me and for most people, I presume).

For personal productivity management, I substitute the purpose of SSOT as a single reference point (instead of aggregated one). Remember, it is NOT about managing team projects or collaborative productivity.

You need a single place to look to check where you are and what to do next and where to go.

By nature, I can use my calendar app, any communication app, or file apps as my SSOT app.

Then the choice comes down to the “Notes” app and the “Task” app.

Notes app is a good choice. May look old-school but effective for most people. The problem I faced is, I can’t see the progress or active projects list with a notes app.

I am aware of tagging and filtering notes. But the pain point is different. The ability to go in and get out of a note when you need to make some specific change in a specific line of the note in a specific note is hard (especially through mobile apps).

For those who say “this is the age of Notion”, Notion is as far as the best candidate for being anyone’s SSOT. But Notion shares the same pain point as stated above this line.

I recommend Notion if you access it often through a desktop. Notion.so could be anyone’s cup of their tea. But it is not my cup of tea (as SSOT) and I found it after using it for almost 2 long years.

I use my To-Do app (Things 3) as my SSOT.

Every project inside the To-Do app holds the latest state of the project, what’s done, what’s next, why the project is started, and at what state it can be pronounced completed. Thankfully, Things 3 supports markdown notes for the project and each task.

It is super convenient to check and update the status on the go. If you choose apps like Todoist, the ability to add attachments changes the game level.

BuJo users don’t need an SSOT app. Because the nature of bullet journaling is having everything in one place. If you don’t manage multiple projects, and if you’re a creator who works one project at a time, I suggest BuJo as an SSOT app.

Anything that works for you is a good choice. Some use just ‘Stickies’ as their SSOT app. What do you use?

Read More on What is your “SSOT app” for Personal Productivity?

There are a bunch of text expander apps (like textexpander.com) for different platforms with different capabilities. Most of them I see are not friendly with my wallet. I need a text expander for my base workflow. Not my entire workflow depends on it. So I don’t want to spend much on it.

So far, I used my Mac’s (syncs with iPhone too) built-in “text replacement” feature. I wanted something powerful and handy, that works everywhere (in my Windows machine at work). I wanted to insert dates, and timestamps with a shortcut. That is, placing dynamic content in a single step.

My quest for the best text expander ends when I found Magical Text expander at Chrome Webstore. Magical Text expander is the best, most free, most powerful, and most reliable extension that works everywhere inside Chrome.

So far worked every time. Without a hiccup, which usually occurs with all Chrome extensions like this.

Now if I wanted to type my email, all I have to do is type // (// is the prefix to trigger the shortcut) and then type @ to put my entire email ID in the place of the cursor.

As simple as that. Just type the // to trigger Magical. Refer to the below animation.

You can have parameters within the expander that needs to be filled in the place of a typed shortcut. These parameters (mostly dynamic) are automatically loaded and used in the place of expansion. The parameter support makes Magical a suitable ‘text-expander’ for complex and frequently repeating workflows.

Magical has the ability to pick content from major websites like LinkedIn, and Google Sheets. It can copy multiple fields and use them with one shortcut to fill a spreadsheet which normally requires a few dozen copy-paste tasks.

Magical has high potential. It is all about how you configure the shortcuts.

For eg; %clip% denotes “clipboard” (recently copied / cut content). The above picture shows that the 2nd shortcut “new” has the %clip% parameter.

At the time of usage, the portion with %clip% will be replaced by the clipboard content. Likewise Magical supports, %date%, %time%, and a few more basic dynamic variables.

It has a neat interface to set up your shortcuts.

You can create either a shortcut to expand or to transfer content. The first one just expands the content (with parameter support). The latter transfers the content from one window to another. Eg. From Linkedin to Spreadsheet/Google Docs. Transfer does the copy-paste task in one step.

Magical text expander syncs its content across all your Chrome browsers installed on different machines (by logging into the same account). This makes it work everywhere and comes in handy if the major part of your workflow can be done inside a browser.

Links

To understand it better, try it.

Chromestore Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magical-text-expander/iibninhmiggehlcdolcilmhacighjamp

If you want text expanders to work outside Chrome, then you have to depend on something other than Magical.

Read More on Magical – Text Expander (for Chrome)

The app is still in its early stage and looks promising to fulfill the needs that other similar apps failed to. I don’t want to talk about team apps like monday.com and similar others.

Routine brings the tasks from different sources like Notion, Gmail, Slack, etc. That means can send the tasks from different places and see all of them in one place for better decision making while scheduling during the weekly review.

Routine is now only available for Mac and iOS.

I use Things 3 as a task manager and Fantastical as my calendar app. Routine is a ‘blend’ of these both. The app retains the functional features and user experience of Things 3 and Fantastical while playing to be both. Some handy features that are available with Routines are

• Natural Language Processing (for adding tasks and events)
• Quick entry view (if you’re using Things 3, you can quickly add a task from anywhere by just clicking Ctrl + Space)
• Neat Polished design
• default “Inbox” setup
• designed for Mac and iOS

Other things I like about Routine are,

• ability to see tasks that are not timed (with no due time) at the bottom of each day in the calendar view.
• Ability to bring in tasks from different sources
• Ctrl + Space -> shows the dashboard with the right amount of information to glance

I will put up a review after having my hands on it. Until then check their Routine’s YouTube Channel for a better understanding of how this app works.

Routine is invite-only to access. Just sign-up here to access it early.

Read More on Routine (an app) is a blend of Things 3 and Fantastical.

I was a long-time Todoist user. After switching to Things 3 (approximately 4 months ago) I looked back to Todoist twice. But, stick to Things 3.

Filtered Views (or) Filters feature of Todoist is a crucial feature for me when I was using Todoist. I could filter and customize my tasks view based on urgency, priority, and tags.

Tags Filtering (custom view on Todoist) helped me to filter the similar/same tagged tasks in one view. In other words, I could batch the tasks using tags and view them in a single place so I can start completing the similar tasks in one streak (like a Pomodoro method).

I can tag tasks in Things 3 and filter them to view tasks with tag filters in the ‘today’ view. Either you see all the ‘today’ tasks or tasks with selected tags from ‘today’ tasks.

Secondly, tag filtering is not a charm in the iOS version of Things 3.

I know Todoist and Things have different design aspects and focus on different working methodologies. Most of the Things 3 expert users handle batch tasks only on the Mac version. There’s no quite good functional solution for iOS.

Recently, I found the hack by Tiago Forte in his video on How I decide priorities of the week.

The hack is to grouping tasks with simple re-arranging which Things does elegantly and titling / separating them using dummy ’title’ tasks.

I batch my tasks based on energy levels. I only have 3 energy levels (so easy to maintain / review in the long run).

I have one more task group called ”Roaming or Errands” which holds the tasks that needed to be done when I was out. I separate these kinds of tasks because they can’t be done at my workplace or at my home. And I don’t batch tasks based on locations as the ‘Areas’ list (of Things 3) already covers me on that. So tasks relevant to shopping, and tasks like picking something, doing something when I go to town, etc go to this group, decluttering the clumsy view (esp. when you have numerous tasks for the day).

I never mark these title/dummy tasks ‘completed’ ever. Instead, they are postponed to tomorrow at the time of the day’s evening review (sometimes in the morning).

That’s all from me for the post. If it was helpful, give me a wave in the comment. To appreciate my efforts, you can buy me a coffee.

Read More on Batching tasks in Things 3

Read More on Don’t fear the talented, but the persistent ones

Read More on From Information to Wisdom – Personal Knowledge Flow

Read More on Immersed Flow – ‘Flow’ in Productivity

Read More on Note Taking Process – Progressive Summarisation

From post : Note-taking workflow: To build and extract knowledge from digital notes

Read More on Notes Stack – From Progressive Summarisation

From article – Note-taking workflow: To build and extract knowledge from digital notes

Read More on From taking-notes to Creation – Progressive Summarisation

While taking notes, you write for the future (stupid) self (and for others). You read, you understand and then you write (or draw) it for better understanding (and teaching yourself and others). You preserve your understanding (state of mind) for the future in form of notes. Data and conclusion for future reference.

Journaling is for “now”. Journaling is for clarity. Journaling itself is the process of understanding. You write only for yourself. You speak the mind. The journal notes are never meant to revisit though you revisit (relive your memories) it is not primarily meant for it. It is to mirror you. Journaling is to declutter your mind by putting thoughts into words so that you can differentiate logic from emotion. It is an aid for emotional intelligence and emotional wellbeing.

While Journaling, you write in a flow, no rules, no topics, no chapters just do not need to be organized in any way. No rules. Free form writing, even gibberish is fine.

On the other hand, note-taking is purely for knowledge. Facts, logic, and data. The notes are made for connecting, expanding to form new knowledge (findings). Knowledge notes processing (in mind) before writing. Some sit there unchanging, some need constant processing (improvement) if you want to make (or extract) something out of what you learned.

Notes expand. Journals zeros in. Both will have many open ends in themselves (in form of questions).

In PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) those open ends are closed by experience in Journals, while notes are not meant to have openings. Read Building blocks of true Knowledge: Atomic understanding where I wrote about ‘atomic notes’ that are complete in their state and don’t have an opening to write more about them. But they can be referred to, reused, and connected to form new knowledge.

In journals, the option to address an incomplete piece of writing or to close an open-end question is completely under your discretion. No pressure on completing or perfecting it.

Journaling serves the purpose in the process while note-taking serves the purpose when it is converted into a product.

Contrary to the belief, Journaling is not meant for the future primarily. It is for your own reflection, your own clarity (for your own decision-making). Notes are also for clarity and decision-making but are meant primarily for future reference.

Revisiting your journal to relive the moments is one good thing but in terms of interstitial type journaling, it is not the primary intention. Recounting your past experience gives you greater mental clarity over the presence and it has many other benefits that we can discuss in another post.

Philosophically I’d like to say “knowledge notes are for the brain and journaling is for the heart”.

Those who do both can understand what I said. If I missed anything that you have in your mind, please let me know in the comments.

Read More on The difference between “journaling” and “note-taking”

Ideas come and fade out in seconds. Maybe one of them may lead you to your holy grail.

I’d like to discuss the importance of jotting down your thoughts and ideas instantly somewhere. And then having a system to work it further at a later time in this piece.

I am NOT talking about taking notes. What I am talking about here is entirely different from note-taking. Ground-breaking ideas appear out of nowhere and at any time. Mostly, when you are least expecting it. These thoughts don’t arise during work, not when you read a non-fiction book or an article at the office, not when you think hard for a solution or search hard for something.

Contrarily, these ideas appear in your mind when you are doing something polar opposite to serious work. While reading a story, while watching a movie, when talking to your children, at the gym, or anywhere inappropriate. Noting these thoughts down is a good habit.

There are two types of work or two types of roles. (I heard this through Shu Omi)

• Manager,
• Maker.

The manager wants to get things done and highly relies on task management, team management, and work assignment. Maker wants to create things, like writing a book, designing an interface of an app, writing a code, drawing new art, etc. Some may play both roles. Regardless of the roles, ideas and thoughts pop out in their head all the time. Most of them are relevant to their work, but do not appears coherently at the relevant time.

People get random ideas at random times about random things. Though they can’t act on it immediately, they can record it somewhere for later action.

Capturing is important. Don’t rely on your memory here. Your brain is a place where thinking happens all the time. It is not supposed to remember things. Practically it is not good at remembering, except for some gifted people. The retention time is smaller, especially for random thoughts.

Capture all your thoughts immediately, before it fades away. When capturing don’t waste your time estimating the importance of the content or how you going to use it later. “Just focus on converting your thoughts to text (or sketch), nothing else”.

I use the app Drafts to capture my thoughts and ideas instantly and later I process them. The text I captured may come out as a tweet, a chunk for my Alvistor Newsletter, a trigger for a blog post, a novel idea for my academic research, or simply become a task in my task manager. Check the below article if you want to know more about Drafts. Drafts(app) – An app for text and to do more with text… The free version of Drafts is more than enough for standard needs. [More articles on Drafts(app)].

You can also use Evernote (30+ types of information you can collect with Evernote) or any notes app to do the capturing. The faster one is better. For the Apple ecosystem, I highly recommend Drafts, and Apple’s notes take 2nd place in the recommendation.

Read More on Capturing your thoughts! Why it is a must?

We are hungry for new facts, ideas, and changes happening around you in your interested field.

In short, we are curious to know the latest trends. To become the first to know it, we follow or subscribe to trend-makers. In the beginning, a person hoards editorial content to learn the trend, and eventually, they found themselves following experts and icons of the field to cut off the noise (opinions) and to get the information/idea firsthand (facts as it is).

When I was using Feedly, it just dump me with thousands of articles (as I subscribed to a few dozens of website feeds)every day, where most of them are repeated or a rework of the same ideas (original source) by copywriters. It costs a lot of my energy to skim through them to find the right article to read.

So I started following selective people to follow on Twitter and then subscribing to original thinker’s email newsletters. I still felt overwhelmed and I had to spend a lot of time skimming through them to find the right article/content to read.

Then tried a few curated content providers to reduce my time to find the right thing to read and get updated.

Refind.com is the best bet that I settled with. Refind uses Machine Learning algorithms and user responses to contents indexed (added) to it and segregates them based on the interest categories. Then serves them to you with filtered best of the best contents.

The contents are filtered considering various factors. Apart from the universal curation, Refind curates news for your preference and based on your activities and responses. As you use it every day, the suggestions get better. (The recommendation algorithm needs the training to recommend better as each day passes).

Now I only get 15 articles a day (the default is 10 per day). I elect to read at least 5 per day out of that 15.

Of course, I read from other sources too, but Refind helps me to complete my reading target in a hectic day with minimal effort.

This is not a review post, just a recommendation. Try Refind yourself.

See you, until the next post.

Read More on 2 minutes a day with this app helps me to be up-to-date

Obsidian graphs (also Logseq’s) are pleasant to the eyes, bubbling around when interacting, highlighting connections of the hovering nodes, ability to filter the nodes with few parameters, etc. It’s nice to have the UI touch in the graph views of these bi-directional linking note-taking apps.

But the graph view should be useful rather than appealing. Before jumping in, there are two graph views. One is an overview (includes all the nodes) and another is a ‘page-graph’ that shows connections between the current note/page to others.

Let’s see how Overall View (Graph Overview) scores. Definitely, Obsidian’s graph view is better than any other app, while Logseq is giving a better user experience when searching and browsing within the graph view and RoamResearch’s graph view is not quite good.

I like the way you can interact with the graphs and filter the connections using tags and other parameters in Logseq. Obsidian allows you to move a node away from the graph and put it out of the clutter to get a clear view of the connections.

On the other hand, RoamResearch presents you with a boring graph view (in Graph Overview) section. A strict bordered, brick-like graph is what you can see at the first glance. Not much to play in the view, zooming and zooming out just shows the connection, and the connected nodes (notes) are distributed all over the graph. The nodes preserve their position even when you interact with them using a mouse.

But I like the highlighting of links when I click a node. The same is available in Logseq and Obsidian, with a better aesthetic feel and better implementation.

Let’s talk about Page Graph View

This is where RoamResearch beats all the other apps. Roam makes the page graph extremely useful. The pages that mention the current pages are aligned neatly on the top, while all the links to the current page are aligned at the node’s bottom. Arranged neatly in a straight line with variable size nodes imitating the density of links (number of connections).

RoamResearch’s graph is better readable in terms of connections and contextually sound than any other app’s graph view.

In the case of Logseq, it gives a dial-type graph that is almost useless for me, except to show off my notes connection in a fancy animated graph that nicely bubbles around. Don’t mistake me, it shows the connection between notes well, but not that much contextually like Roam.

Obisidian’s graph view is similar to that of Logseq. So In my opinion, Logseq’s overall graph view is the best as it gives the ability to filter the graph with tags and other parameters. RoamResearch’s Page-view-graph is what I rely on heavily to understand my note’s connection.

What’s your opinion?

Read More on Comparing RoamResearch graph-view with Logseq and Obsidian

I’ve seen people using Roam, Logseq, and even obsidian for managing all their action-oriented (todo, events and task assigning, project management etc) contents. But in reality many failed as these apps are not work-management apps, rather the opposite, knowledge management/idea tool.

What if Roam is cloned with the focus of managing all your tasks, calendar events and even your projects and communications like email? The answer would be look like legendapp.com

I’ve tried it for a week, in the end to find it is not my cup of tea. Because I’ve a well-performing productivity system in place and I don’t want to disturb it as long as it works for me.

This app reminds me of Obsidian mostly but Roam at first sight. Even though the bi-directional linking feature is sparkling, the approach on how to use it is entirely different from Roam, Obsidian, etc.

The note content is sortable, (yes it follows “a line is a block” principle followed by RoamResearch) but the note contains task, a statement of note combined with priority, tags, and calendar setup with a email window. If you see all these in one window of the app, that should be clumsy. Surprisingly, the app looks nice, clean and organized.

The concept reminds me of an app NotePlan which combines task, notes and calendar in one place. I tried that and wrote this after -> Is the “NotePlan 3” app worth the hype? Likewise this app tries to combine multiple forms of data into one.

Legend is far more sophisticated than any other app in the list. You should try it at least once. You’ll definitely like it even though it is not what you need right now. Or to switch immediately.

If you create many notes in this app like we do in note-taking, then there’s a huge risk of things go missing in the crack or you’ll eventually find it hard to use later. The idea is to create only one document / note for one project.

You can see this one document in various customised view. You can see things as outline, sorted in any way you want (created, priority), with a huge set of filter options, and ability to see same or different note in different pane.

You need to get acquainted with the app as there’s a different terms used for different contents and its containers. Board, Pane, Item. Board is like a Graph in RoamResearch, while an item is similar to a page and pane is a window to see them.

You can access email (I haven’t tried it) and your calendar within this app, side by side. It has a bit of a learning curve that will eat up your time and energy before switching to use this app for daily use.

The free plan is all you need for personal use. Check out the app and decide yourself at https://legendapp.com/

Read More on “Legend” (App) is for Deep Work, while Roam, Logseq, Obsidian are for Knowledge Management

Keeping your productivity metrics always up is also another form of being monotonous in disguise. It is an easy way to get stressed. Eventually, you’re going to wear fully out of your willpower. Losing interest in an area is one thing, losing the “mood” to work (to create) is whole another thing.

In my personal experience, productivity is like a short streak, like a wave. It comes and goes. I assume it is the same for every other unless you’re God or lying to yourself.

Pushing hard and working hard is a nice strategy that pays only for non-creative jobs. I think pushing harder always leads to the opposite result as most of the energy is spent on moving against nature (of slowing down) rather than for creative work.

For me creating something is the actual work. Other things are just preparing, presenting, and packing what you created. Those tasks are secondary work.

If you know Pareto Principle, 20% of your original creative work will definitely contribute to 80% of your outcome. Read this later -> Pareto Hack – Rule of thumb for greatest personal productivity

You’re not going to be in the mood of creating all the time. Because it is unnatural. Will-power is limited, your dopamine supply is limited. Even if you try to become ideal, the world is not ideal and you are not a superhuman too.

Let the wave (mood to create) crash. Let it rise again. Let it be natural. Learn to harness the tide of productive flow instead of forcing it to be always high. (I assume you already know about the “flow” state of mind.)

Flow can’t be achieved through willpower but through imagination and a relaxed mental state. Forcing the flow is working against the flow. It is just a waste of your energy.

Some people work better when they are threatened by a “Panic Monster” (If you don’t know what Panic monster is, then Read this article by Tim Urban). Some work better under the stressed situation. Some create the best piece when they work long without sleeping, some by fasting for a day. Some get the flow of creativity after a walk. Some after relaxed meditation.

Whichever works for you, use it. Use it to prolong your flow state of being productive. Ride the tide. Remember it will go down to zero, sometimes negative (burnouts). You have to let it go and wait for the next high tide.

If the wave crashes or flows low, do the unimportant, peripheral, or easy tasks in your list (that remaining 80% of work contributes to 20% of your outcome). Just wait for the next wave of productivity streak. You will know it by your feeling when it is about to come.

Read More on Why can’t you be productive all the time? How to be optimally productive.

After all, people who share productivity advice (on the internet) need readers/views/followers or for fame and money. So they need to focus on a huge audience. In most cases, this is the truth.

If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.

Naval Ravikant

The key is specific people need to take a specific idea out of it and applying for specific needs in their own personalized way to make it work for you.

So it’s not about how good the idea is or how well it is said or who said it. It’s all about how you receive, how perceived it and how you applied it, and how well it fitted for your needs or expectations.

Not every idea is bad or not everything shared is for you. You can’t (shouldn’t )try every piece of advice or change your productivity system whenever someone shares it.

If the idea is so promising and too good it will travel long and stay long like GTD, PARA, etc.

If you’re attracted by new ideas, tools (apps) often and you’re making changes in your personal productivity system based on your consumption then I don’t think you’re actually working. Your work has less priority and apparently, your urge to change the system takes more priority than the actual work. In other words, you are not focusing/doing the work.

I’ve covered similar thoughts earlier. Why no idea is working for you? Why you couldn’t progress?

Don’t force yourself to be in those first few who claim themselves as early birds to try a new tool or advice. There are a lot of people in the productivity space trying new apps, concepts, ideas every day and reporting them.

Take the foundational idea that is well-received (proven, standard) and start tweaking while experimenting with your own working style or needs, and then build your own process and system.

It’s not the idea/advice. It’s not only a good system. It’s not the best app you use. It is about you, your own working style, and your work needs.

For some people working at night diminishes their potential for others being night-owl makes them more productive and creative. It depends. Depends on numerous parameters.

Read More on Which advice to take for becoming more productive?

Even after a decade I couldn’t exactly (or near to exact) predict the time needed for a particular piece of work. 8 out of 10 times I fail to fix the right duration for a task or fail to execute it within it for many unpredictable reasons. I wonder how others cope with this time-blocking strategy.

I love the concept of time boxing. Maybe I don’t understand the term right. I like setting a time in my calendar to work on similar kinds of tasks. More or less similar to task bunching but with time specificity. Not duration specific (maybe yes, but at least not all the time).

I strongly believe in keeping your mind free to flow is the key ingredient of greater creativity (thus true productivity).

I heard it many times, and it is probably the best advice. Try to manage your attention instead of managing your time. It is hard to get your attention to one work and keep it in the ring for a certain period of time. That is where the work is getting done.

Read More on Don’t plan too ahead. Time-blocking is not for greater creative productivity

Recently I heard about Raycast. A replacement for Apple’s ‘spotlight’ search feature in Mac. Obviously, Raycast is a contender to Alfred. So I decided to give it a try for a week. Well, originally my plan was to use Raycast alongside Alfred.

After installing it and starting using it, I never looked back Alfred. That doesn’t mean Raycast is all the way better than Alfred. But for me, it is. Remember I am not representing the power users who play with Alfred’s workflow and automation with fine coding.

There are a few reasons I decided to stick with Raycast or the areas where Raycast shines over Alfred.

• Raycast has a very little (easy) learning curve. This is may be because I was using Alfred for more than few years and Raycast is close to Alfred in terms of interacting. With few tries, you can understand how Raycast works while Alfred has somewhat less-steep learning curve than Raycast. For example Raycast few preferences (settings) to tune. Most of the functions are built-in like calculator, seeing calendar schedule etc.
• Adding skill to the tool is easy in Raycast. Raycast has an in-built store, where you can find a add-on for a specific functionality and add it then and there. Raycast is relatively new to Alfred, yet it’s store has all the specific add-on fuctions I needed. In Alfred, it is difficult for me to build a workflow (custom functionality that users can build on their own, if they are good at coding). To extend Alfred’s functionality I used workflows shared by other users in Alfred website. Maybe for a power user Alfred could be the holy-grail. I won’t rate Raycast in terms of extending its functionailty with custom coding as I don’t do that myself.
• I love Raycast UX/UI over Alfred’s. I personally think it is far more polished and sophisticated than Alfred.
• Utilitarian ‘Window management’ options. Just invoke Raycast and type “left” and choose “Left Half” from the list to snap your current app’s window to tile on the left half of the screen. (Formerely I was using separate app for this. )

• I love the ability to access those sub menu options through (Cmd + K) button. It gives more flexibility than I done in Alfred. (If you try it, you’ll understand what I am talking)

• Love the built-in calculator with natural language processing. I like the converters and currency converters with latest currency values.

• I love accessing Menu bar menus through Raycast. (Alfred completely misses this feature). For example, if you’re using Chrome, and you want to access Chrome’s menu (located in the menu bar), you can invoke Raycast while Chrome is open, and (after choosing “Search menu item” from list) type the menu item name, then Raycast will filter out those menu items for you to access. Browsing through menu made simple and firey-fast with Raycast.

• You can see your calendar schedule with Raycast
• The store is filled with lot of ‘extensions’ for many integrations and the list is growing. Unlike Alfred, searching them is easy inside Raycast.
• It is completely free to use for personal use.
• There’s many more tiny reasons. One of it is ease of setting up Raycast. Another one is ability to set up Global shortcut to invoke Apps. I didn’t list some of the features that is also available in Alfred like accessing clipboard history, etc.

If you have any other points why other readers should choose Raycast over Alfred or why Alfred is still best, then share them in the comments.

Raycast or Alfred? Apart from personal preference, Raycast is for both beginners and power users and a new contender with full potential. It’s better to try once (as it is free). I highly recommend using Raycast in your Mac.

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Read More on Raycast for Mac. Is this Spotlight replacement better than Alfred?

Initially, RoamResearch existed like a ‘proof-of-concept’ but later raised into a fully functional product to serve with more and more extraordinary features. Most of its features were dreamy. It could have easily monopolized the market if it abstained from charging the bulky price of $15 per month.

When they announced their pricing plan, I started looking for other alternatives. Obsidian was in its closed beta (through Discord) collecting feedbacks and growing gradually. Eventually, everyone started to talk about “backlinking” their notes. Notion implemented a partial backlinking feature within the limits of its design ethics.

Logseq entered the market looks like a clone of RoamResearch, but only it runs locally. Logseq mimics most of RoamResearch’s functions and design aesthetics, and it had more. It grew into something more than RoamResearch in some aspects while Obsidian gained more users than Roam with more flexibility and cost point of view.

I started my ‘knowledge gardening’ (I started it even before the term is coined) with many others when RoamResearch was entering silently. It started as testing, eventually, I built more knowledge base with it before I myself aware of it. During those times, Roam introduces more and more features every day, I just stayed there wondering what else they (Conor White-Sullivan) have on their sleeves.

I tried Obsidian side by side with Roam and recently tried Logseq for a couple of months. I couldn’t stay in those apps for long, so I came back to using Roam. My decision may be biased because of my long-time usage. But I have a few reasons why I am sticking with RoamResearch rather than switching to other/new alternatives.

Reason 1. I use multiple devices to access my knowledge garden (collection of notes, linked/networked). Obsidian has a wonderful iOS app, while Roam doesn’t have an official full-functional app. I should’ve gone for Obsidian if multi-platform support is my concern. But, my concern is about syncing my notes and accessing them a few moments after from another device. The loading sequence at the starting is still a pain in RoamResearch but I am willing to take it for the benefit of accessing my notes everywhere. I like cloud-based serving although I understand and accept the privacy risk in it. (I will talk about this later in another post)

Obsidian was focusing on ‘local-first’ but later gave options to sync through third-party file-syncing services before providing its own syncing service which is also pricy ($8/m) but only half of what RoamResearch is charging. Logseq being ‘local-first’ and privacy-focused failed to ease the process of syncing my notes on the go. Here comes the second reason.

Reason 2. In the case of Logseq, I have to set up a few things to make it work and sync. Obsidian being more flexible, has the same requirements of a few initial set up and a few more setups later. Both apps require little maintenance works or at least require few other services to run which I need to check regularly. If not, have to face a few precious data losses which I don’t like. I want it to run for me, work for me. I don’t want to build a tool, customize it to the core, tinkering with plugins and other codes. Don’t mistake me, those things are fun to do, but I just don’t want to explore and play with them anymore. I want an app for real work, that too with low maintenance needs. So that I can focus on working instead of making the app work.

Reason 3. It is pretty much the same as “Reason 2”. I don’t want to do too much customization, but I want to use the features as it is. RoamResearch has everything I wanted. Other apps had them too, but I had to set it up or do something to make it work seamlessly. Roam has a wonderful implementation of features that a real researcher needs. Other apps have them too, but it is more like an addon. This might look biased, but it is not. Roam has a clear vision and knows what users need. It does so far given the right features that no one has ever thought of. I personally feel Obsidian is clumsy. Logseq is quite good, but it still lacks a few powerful features Roam has.

Note: Logseq’s TODO, DONE, NOW states for the task is a nice feature that Roam lacks. Yet I am not looking for a task manager here. Logseq is my second choice to Roam.

RoamResearch is costly (comparatively) $15/m, with an education discount (scholarship) it comes for $7.50/month. Right now I am enjoying it for free because of my early adoption of it. I may subscribe for the subsidized amount or may move to Logseq if I can’t afford it when they started to charge me. I believe I will stick with Roam.

I had written a few more articles on using RoamResearch. Check them here.

Read More on Why I chose RoamResearch over Obsidian and Logseq

I myself highly rely on the voice-to-text (dictation) feature of Drafts to capture my thoughts all day long. But it isn’t flexible as I had to pause and wait for the app to convert my spoken words to text (although the voice typing is faster, it isn’t seamless yet) and then resume talking.

Sometimes I use on “Voice memos”, but it is hard to process later despite its easiness to capture thoughts.

The recent update for Drafts 30.0 introduces a new feature that helps to capture text from pre-recorded audio files. This is incredibly a great addition. Now regardless of the voice recording app, I can record and get the data transcribed to (typed) notes. All you need is the voice file. It supports audio from ‘video’ files too.

To try it out:

• iOS
  • Tap and hold the “+” button, and select “Transcribe…”. You will be prompted to select an audio or video file.
  • Share any audio or video file from other apps, including Files and Voice Memos, to Drafts.
• Mac
  • Select File > Import... from the main menu, and choose and audio or video file.
  • Drag and drop an audio or video file on the Drafts app icon.

This feature is available in the free version of the app. Apart from this video and audio import, Drafts now supports importing text from PDFs.

Read More on Drafts (app) now capture text from your voice recordings too (Transcribing)

Why it is hard for me to see the growth? Why am I stuck in everything?

Every day you read more, learn more. Every day you find something that may work better than what you found yesterday.

No path is better than another in the end. In the middle it may look (or truly) better than another at one time; and not at a later time.

Constantly changing your ideas should not be taken as being flexible or being adaptive. But, this means not being firm, not having enough belief in an idea you chose. That doesn’t mean you should never change your decision.

Appending ideas, adapting them is different from changing them entirely favouring a new idea. Constantly changing paths lead nowhere.

Humans are creatures of habits. If you do something repeatedly, you become good at it or that pattern becomes part of your life or even may become part of you. If you constantly changing ideas, tools, paths and other things in your life, then you will be good at only changing things frequently. This pattern never lets you stay in one idea/path even after you find the best/right one.

So how can I keep up myself on track? That too in a progressive path?

You need a purpose (not just a goal) and you need to value it. If the purpose is greater than you, it is quite easy to do more than just try. You also need unshakable belief in your own purpose. This is why soldiers are ready to die for their country. Without a strong purpose, you’re just in it for the benefit expecting it through fluke or luck. That will not give you enough power to cross the hurdles and exercise patience during tough times and continue doing even it is not rewarding at the beginning.

If you want to win big, then have a bigger purpose in your life. Remind yourself every day of it. Act accordingly.

This is what I learned the hard way. It may look like a cliche. Every hero in history had a purpose and the size of their victory is as much as their purpose.

Purpose gives you clarity. If I tell more, it may look cliche. So I leave the rest to your thoughts.

Read More on Why no idea is working for you? Why you couldn’t progress?

If I wait for longer, will I be rewarded big? Is really instant gratification bad?

“We often make choices based on immediate outcomes. What can I do to experience a little joy in the next 30 minutes? What can I accomplish in the next hour?

But if you always expect to get a little bit of reward for a little bit of effort, then you often overlook actions that lead to greater payoffs down the road. The relationship between input and output is rarely linear.

The course of action that could provide greater happiness, meaning, or satisfaction in the long run may not make you happy in the next 30 minutes.”

By James Clear

There’s always a trade-off.

The trade-off here is whether you want it doubled for waiting or halved for hasting.

In my opinion, the idea is oversimplified.

Compounding (interest) effect! I see compounding takes place everywhere. Even with laziness and procrastination. Where do you want that compounding to take effect?

Compounding implies many more things rather than focusing only on doubling ROI.

You need to choose a few projects. (Few) seeds may turn into a tree. Not all seeds turn into a tree. Choose few, Choose wisely. Choose based on the returns a project may give.

We only have limited willpower. To work without feeling that small appreciation, those small motivating rewards is stressful and difficult. To keep on going, you need that willpower of yours. It is the costliest resource in the world, even costlier than time. Non-rewarding tasks have the potential to deplete your willpower in no time. That’s why you need to work on very few long-term projects.

Postponing rewards and procrastination are two different things. Postponing gratification is not postponing a task at hand. You’re not delaying anything here. You’re just working without expecting of those small rewards and always aiming that big one at the corner of your eye.

Getting instant gratification is not necessarily a bad thing. Getting a few rewards instantly is not a bad sign that you won’t get a big reward. But remember, you should not choose your work based on what gives your reward quickly. The quick rewards are usually small and kind of satisfactory for the moment. This satisfaction has the power to turn off your spirit to do big and more.

Always remember why you started it. Most people couldn’t keep up with their plans, that has a long way to reach their goals. When working without rewards, it might make you work monotonously. Sometimes it pushes you to the negative side of the feelings about the work and even on yourself for choosing it.

I had times where I even forgot why I started working on a project. Eventually, I drop it in middle or continue without knowing why I am doing it and what for. If I am not dropping it, I would be going on the deviated path. I overcome this by noting down the purpose of the project and reminding myself every week.

If the purpose you have is so strong, then you will get the energy to work on the next day even when you’re all sucked up the last day. The purpose will indirectly remind your big reward which acts as a motivation. Remembering purpose also tells you what to do next and keeps on tract like a light at the end of a cave.

So again, How long can I postpone my gratification? Maybe never. When you’re rewarded, enjoy it. Just don’t dwell with it and never choose your next task for instant gratification.

Do the work for the sake of it. The completion of work itself is a reward provided if you’re working in a meaningful project.

End of thoughts.

Read More on Is instant gratification bad? How long I can postpone my gratification?

Now, I am using it every day, frequently, for every text based content, as a quick capture tool. The USP of Drafts is “where text starts” and in my usage and experience it stands up to it.

Unfortunately, this app is available on iPad, iOS, Mac, WatchOS. As it is only available for Apple ecosystem products, the features it offers are tightly coupled with the system and offers swift experience when using it. Working great with automations and customisations. This is one of those ‘iOS only, iPad only’ apps (Fantastical, GoodNotes, Superhuman, etc) that makes Apple’s productivity environment so powerful and efficient with that usual pinch of elegance.

What ‘Drafts’ does uniquely as text editor?

It opens in a snap with an empty space (new note) to enter your text. Any form of text. I can capture my thoughts, any form of thought without worrying about where it will go later. It may be a ‘to-do’, ‘event’ to record in calendar, a ‘phone number’, an article idea for my blog, a thought for my museletter (by the way I run a newsletter in the name “Alvistor Museletter”, consider subscribing to it), anything to remember later, an change or a point I want to make in my meeting notes, a quick note down to remember for short duration, a mail draft, a journal entry and you name it. Anything in text. It first goes to ‘Drafts’ app for later processing.

You can turn your words into the thing you intended to make out of it. It gives plenty of options under its ‘Action Directory’ to take action with the text entires you made (quickly captured). For example, you captured a quick thought in your ‘Drafts’ note. Now you can post it as a tweet without opening Twitter. Or the same may turn in to an email to your circle of friends or you can post them into your blog or just save it in your notes app for later reference. The same content can become a ‘to-do’, so that it can be sent to your fav todo app or reminders app. Even you can record it as an event in your calendar.

In nutshell, you can convert your text into anything. Capture first without worrying where it goes, fussing with thoughts why you capturing in first-place, which app to open, how to type, etc, etc. First dump all your thoughts  before you forget in a fraction, later you can decide what to do with it.

Editing. Tagging. Workspace.

Drafts is not all about quick capture and actions. It gives you a wonderful editing experience within the app. It’s simple yet very powerful. It supports most of text editing functions. I love how it supports multiple markdown syntaxes (including RoamResearch styled formatting, linking and others).

You can process your notes (drafts) and organise them with tags, workspace. Wonderful search function, possibility of [[inter-linking]] notes (RoamResearch style), merging, moving, etc, etc.

In plain words, never underestimate this app by its look. It’s snappier, powerful, feature-full.

 It has bit of steep learning curve, it takes time for you to get acquitted with its interface. The interface may feel clumsy at first, but trust me, it is in right proportion. It’s only available for Apple platforms.

I am planned to write an article on how I am using Drafts. This article is just an intro about the app which I heavily forced myself share to the world as soon as I found it very useful to me. It now became an inevitable part of my productivity workflow. I strongly recommend this app. The free version of the app is more than enough for an average person.

Post your thoughts and questions in comments, if you have any.

Read More on Drafts(app) – An app for text and to do more with text…

It is in how much time the reader spends in thinking about the idea you shared in your writing. How many thoughts do your words trigger in his/her mind? More importantly how many changes it may or might bring to them.

While reading, the reader may nod their heads agreeing with your idea, shake when they couldn’t agree with you and they can even take time to chew (what they just read) in their mind. Finally, they can come up with an understanding or decision after a thought process. In my opinion, that’s a good quality writing.

Some considerations for ethically responsible writing…

Write your ideas and then bring them to the right audience. Not the other way around. This piece of advice looks counter-intuitive. But in the long run, your reader base increases as more and more relevant readers find your content.

In the end, they should forget you (the messenger, the writer) but take away the idea (message) with them. Ideas should be the core of your writing. Not gimmicks. Aim for perpetuation of your ideas.

It’s not how much they retain or remember the exact words. It’s all about how much they built a new ‘thing’ in their mind with it.

Help them to make their decision. Do Not push yours. And don’t try to decide for the readers.

Incept. Don’t try to manipulate. (Readers can sense this tone easily sooner or later). Convince by reason, not by emotions.

Worry only about how it will be perceived. Be precise. Try to be more clearer and less ambiguous.

Be responsible for your words. Be more responsible for the readers’ understanding. After all, the goal is to make them reconstruct your idea in their mind in the way you want. Making them feel as you wanted them to feel.

P.S. Ethics are judged based on intentions and values. Not based on the skill of writing.

Read More on Measuring the ‘ethical’ quality of a writing

Organising should ease you in the process of “doing”. Planning too. It may increase your effictivity, not productivity. Productivity comes before being effective.

Planning, Organising, Using the best tool, etc., etc..
Nothing is worthwhile if you are NOT putting your primary focus on ‘doing’.

Organise, Plan, and Use all the tools for Doing. Not the other way around. We are wasting our energy, effort, time and most importantly our will-power to become productive in the process of working the work. (A form of procrastination). A procrastination and self-doubt in disguise.

Self-doubt? Many people beleive in the tools, different task manager apps, tricks learned from productivity blogs & self-help books, podcasts and many other thing more than their self-capability.

Behind every one who wants to be incredibly productive, there’s unending search for best productivity method. An exhausting (sometimes unsatisfactory) process of planning and organising to get the best and bestest out of your work. An yearning for a magic workflow and tools/apps. An unwaning motivation for being perpetually productive. And you name it.

The reality is, tools are just tools. Using them doesn’t count as Doing. Automations are not to be counted as Doing. Planning is half-job done, yet it is also not counted as Doing either. Doing only counts.

Don’t wait up. Don’t doubt. Don’t look for other best option. Just Do. The optimising process follows it.

P.S. Spend not more than 5% of your time and energy for planning and organising your To-Do-List or task manager.

Read More on To Do… to Done… & things in the middle…

NotePlan, basically a note-taking app that supports tasks (Apple Reminders) and calendar (Apple Calendar) integration to convert the app to a digital planner. The app is native to the Apple environment (iOS/Mac) runs smoothly on your device. On the other hand, it doesn’t have a web app version.

I had huge hope for this app before trying and eager to use it. I have been using this app for the whole last month on both iOS and Mac and have come to know for sure that NotePlan is not up to my needs and my productivity style. Yet it might be your cup of tea!

Your tasks, notes, and calendar.
All linked in one place.

– NotePlan 3

Pro side of NotePlan 3 (Skip this section if you’re using NotePlan 3 now)

• There’s no app in the market so that integrates Notes, Task and Calendar in one place. NotePlan 3 offers an eagle-eye view of your day with an ability to see your today’s task, calendar schedules and the notes of the day and other notes linked to ‘that day’. Evernote has Calendar integration, but it stands nowhere around NotePlan’s tight integration and Calendar view while editing your notes and tasks.
• NotePlan is extensible with the plugins. Plugins wrote by others for you for specific purpose. In my case many plugins came handy to my day to day work. To name a few “Task sweeper” (helps to move tasks from one project notes/date notes to another in bulk), “Repeat Extensions” (to handle recurring tasks).
• NotePlan 3 claims tasks are first class citizer in the app. You can add ‘#tags’ and ‘@mentions’ in anywhere in notes and withing task canvas. Nested tags (#projectx/tag1, ##projectx/tag2) and nested mentions (@client/sales/john, @client/desing/doe) are something no notes/task management app offers so far in the market. The ability to filter my tasks hierarchically with nested tags is the feature I want in my current apps Todoist and Evernote.
• Commnad bar interface eases the work if you want to work all-keyboard. You can add tasks, switch to other notes/ dates, run specific plugins etc with the ease of your keyboard.
• NotePlan 3 offers basic back linking support for notes. You can see your references for your current note at the top of every note, including date-notes. The app supports markdown, so import and export of your data is quite easy. Apparently markdown support opens the possibility of using your NotePlan 3 notes with other networking-notes app like Obsidian and Logseq.

Cons of NotePlan 3

• NotePlan combining both task manager and note manager, it fails to be a good project manager. You can’t track unless you add your tasks in [[Project Notes]] and add the date link separately. It works extremely well with day to day task management if you don’t put your task under any notes but on ‘daily notes’.
  • I have to review all my tasks everytime to plan my next day. I have to move them all to next day (thanks for the Sweep tasks plugin which made the work easy).
  • It doesn’t support Reccurring tasks natively. But there’s workaround which will not be reliable sometimes.
  • Task filtering based on tags and mentions is so powerful but not convenient as I have to visit the ‘Review’ pane to view it. Although, it supports custom filter, I find myself switching between ‘Review’ pane and notes view often and it distracts my flow to edit my filter few times a day. If you don’t rely on filters heavily, NotePlan 3 is a good choice for you.
• [[backlink]] References view are not quite useful if you have numerous notes referring your current note. In my opinion, the Reference notes view should be under the current note view like RoamResearch.
• Missing indented tag/backlink support – After being avid user of RoamResearch, I like nested tagging/linking support. The (child block) content indented under (parent block) content shares the tags and links metioned in the leftmost/top block.

In the example case given below, the tag #tag1 and link [[link to some page]] should be also extended to the child block. But it is not in the case of NotePlan 3.

* This is parent block with #tag1 and [[link to some page]]         
         * this child/indented block also share above tags/links

If NotePlan 3 supports indented tagging and indented tasks (sub task) you can add tasks like

o Ask @John to do #desin for [[Project x]]
     o collect requirement 
     o do this
     o do that

if you want to assign the 3 tasks to @John which is a #desing work for [[Project x]]. But in the case of NotePlan 3, I should be entering tags repeatedly like

     o collect requirement @John #desin for [[Project x]]
     o do this @John #desin for [[Project x]]
     o do that @John #desin for [[Project x]]

Adding tags and mentions everytime feels hard for me especially if you jotting down quick in a meeting and if I fail to add a tag in hurry, then there’s a huge chance I miss out some tasks in the crack when I use Review filters. This makes NotePlan less reliable for me.

This also triggers one more issue, Note-wide tag. You can’t tag your entire note/ note content as NotePlan 3 only supports individual block tagging.

• On the notes Front, Compared to my current note app Evernote, NotePlan is far far away in terms of features and reliablility
  • Attachements. NotePlan don’t play well if you handle many attachments like pdf, images (quickly captured with your phone camera), sketches etc.
  • Your notes’ storage space is limited to your iCloud storage limit as every notes will be saved in iCloud.
• There’s a scaling issue. When your notes grow the app’s loading time significantly affected. After the recent update of the app which uses some cache system to boot up the app faster, I still suspect it is not enough if you are a avid note-taker or journaling everything everyday.
• IMAO $60/year for this app is little higher than what it is offering. It is not offering storage space, server side processing or any other services but only the app.

Who can use NotePlan 3

• NotePlan is finely suitable for people who use Bullet Journaling as personal producivity system and having all the devices within apple ecosystem.
• If you’re juggling between very few projects and most of your tasks are not falling in specific projects often. In other words, it is only suitable for personal productivity and not for team’s.
• If you rely on few #tags and @mentions and ready to repeatedly use it if the necessity arises.
• If your journaling is all text and no attachements
• If you need simple solution that integrates your calendar and reminders in iOS/Mac.

Feel free to share your opinion below if you have points I missed.

Read More on Is the “NotePlan 3” app worth the hype?

Perceiving and judging as the same process, as an interlaced mental event. It is having perception, having multiple (more than one) perception and building ‘one’ complete understanding from it, by choosing fitting perceptions and eliminating unfitting ones. Doing it iteratively, and constructing an imaginative model of the concept you understood from the ground up (using atomic understanding). This process is called “mental visualization”, which I refer to as “reflective thinking”.

For students who learning from books, it is not the process of creating the mental model of what’s written in the textbook. But, here we try to re-create the mental model which was in the mind of the author. Book and text are just medium for knowledge transfer, not the knowledge itself. The true knowledge transfer should be from one mind to another.

It is impossible to tell whether your visualization is as same as the author’s or the truth. But we try to move as close as possible to the true understanding in every iteration of perception and imagination.

Making Whole from Parts

In reflecting, we add more and more blocks to the mental model (visualizing) iteratively and making sure, it true as a “whole” as it is true as “parts” (atomic blocks). The addition or merging of any new perception in an iteration should always preserve the whole truth of the system. This is where we depend on past knowledge and understandings. As long as you’re good with your basic understandings (atomic understandings), reflective thinking is a less stressful process.

It is a pleasant thinking process. What do you feel when reading a story or novel or any fictional books. As you read, you build a imaginary world inside your mind, you add more objects and alter your imagined model of world as more descriptions are parsed in your reading. Every word, every description of a scene counts to build a imaginary scene in your mind. Here, it happens all at one time, reading and imagination happens parallelly, ephemerally.

In the case of non-fiction books, you have to stop between a few lines to take a time to think about it before building an imaginary form of it. The reading and imagination here will not happen parallelly. Only reading and understanding happens at the same time. Reflective thinking happens between each stop while you’re reading. You might have to read a few lines again to make sure you’re building the right mental model in your visualization. May be again and again, in some cases from starting. This is why most people get more understanding when they read the books the second time. (This happens to a lot of people while watching a movie, they see new things that they haven’t in the first time watching).

When the content in books isn’t enough to build your mental model of a concept, we tend to search, seek additional information for additional understanding to aid your reflective thinking and also to make sure the things you understood is true, and close to what is given in the source.

Resonation & Reflection

Resonating is different from reflecting. Resonating is something that stuck in your mind, which is hard to get rid of, and you want to know/think more about it. Reflective thinking is a positive, active process, involves focus, mental power to direct your mind to work in a certain way.

Box it, build with it.

Reflective thinking is a more streamlined process of thinking. Thinking with boundaries. Boxed thinking. You have set to things to learn, you know the scope, you know general outline. Within that, you’re building a sophisticated mental model of the concept you understood. The model is more or less alive, working, animated model within your imagination world. Remember, you’re not inventing anything new here, you’re just re-creating. So, do not bring your out of box thinking here, unless it is to find a suitable analogy or example to associate your new concept with.

Now we have a box of pieces. The pieces here are your “atomic blocks”, your fundamental understandings and core concepts involved. All you have to do with your imagination (reflective thinking) is to build a whole concept with the pieces inside the box. Not to reinvent, but to recreate. Join, integrate, mix and match, manipulate, realign, do whatever you want to do with those pieces. Just make sure, all the pieces are fundamentally true (meaningful) and so does the built mental model.

Verifying.

It is hard to say that your mental model is right. There’s always the trap of illusion of understanding. But if you are sincere in your “Reflective Thinking”, (assuming that you can do it with your mental capacity) you can always say whether your understanding is right or not both during the progress and at the end. Every iteration refines your understanding and verifies the correctness by itself. Some part of your mind will always tell approximately how much you’re right, but it does not necessarily have to be true. The accuracy of your verification depends on your self-assessment ability, past knowledge and your self-belief.

As long as you find your mental model is unsatisfactory, you will go another iteration of processing details and merging them to your existing mental model to make it true within your imagination.

But, self-verification, validation isn’t enough. Then how to verify? Comprehending… (in the next article in this series, subscribe to Alvistor Museletter for updates and more insider insights).

Read More on Beginning of original thinking: Reflective thinking

You may have same app, same workflow. But how you do it may not be the same always. As the problem changes, you need to change your approach too.

There may be numerous way to solve a problem, but only few to do it in an efficient way. You may not know what that way is at beginning of solving a problem. But you will see options and choices when you enter into the solving mode or doing mode.

Do it for future, not only for now. Getting things done is not our only goal, gaining experience out of it and using it for future works is the primary goal of any work. Completing a task may be the by product of your work.

Read More on Optimize Always & All Ways

Linking & Tagging

1. Differentiate the purpose of tags and page links – I personally use #tags (as keywords) for filtering and [[Links]] to make connections. In Roam, both tag and links work as same, its difference is just a visual aesthetic. So you can determine how to use tags.
2. Colour code your tags
3. Use interrogative tags
4. Use prefix in tags – check ‘Tagging’ digital notes – Efficiently and Elegantly for the above 3 tips.
5. Set actionable tags to develop your ideas – Use tags like #to-process, #working, #to-summarize which states the stages of your content and ideas
6. Link within the page title – You can add a link within your title. For example, you can name a page as [[[[Book]] by [[Carl Jung]]]] (instead of [[Book by Carl Jung]]). This particular page also filtered and appears in the “linked reference” section of both [[Book]] and [[Carl Jung]] pages.
7. Remember Roam’s page links are case-sensitive. – [[Book]] and [[book]] is two different page. (check 19th tip to merge typo pages)

Blocks Management

8. Indent properly and make sure each block carry a single point of an idea (Read Building blocks of true Knowledge: Atomic understanding)
9. Option+drag to copy blocks to another place – This will leave the original block and copy the reference to the dropping place. Instead of moving the block, you are creating a reference. This method is useful as you can always see the places where particular points are referred to.
10. Use the keyboard shortcut to move the indent up and down (Cmd+Shift+Arrow), left and right (Tab, Shift+Tab)
11. Click the Indentation line to collapse a section of block or the whole page (Check below Video till the end)

Importing

12. Roam highlighter chrome plugin – Eloquent is the best highlighter for cross-tab note-taking in Chrome
13. Highlight and tag on the fly while reading at the source. Preparing the note before importing it into Roam reduces the [[linking]] strains after imported.
14. Use Readwise.io to “automate” your import from different sources.

Extending Roam

15. Try Roam42 extension
16. Navigate blocks using the keyboard (roam 42)
17. Change theme of Roam

Finding, Filtering & Managing Pages & Blocks

18. Use page-level block filters to find the content within the page
19. Merge page by renaming. If you have two pages [[Book]] and [[book]] as a result of a typo or If you want to merge two different pages into one, then just rename a page with the same name of the page you want to merge. Roam will give you a warning as “page already exists, want to merge”. Accept the warning, then both of the pages will be merged

20. Use individual page graph (not the ‘Graph Overview’) often to find relevant content and understand the connections of your current notes
21. Use alias instead for creating multiple pages with a different name
22. Use blockquote (type > at the starting of your block to make blockquote) to make points prominent on a page.
23. Use templates to insert things (meta) quicker. (check below video)

24. Try learning how to use filter queries (below is my declutter query for sample)

25. Always indent your meta or type it in the same line (as one block). This will help you filter your content using iterative/combined filters. (I will explain this in my future posts and as a video).
26. If Embed videos, in next block indent, tell what’s it about (helps you to filter and find the videos later)
27. Embed pdfs and images, (try to upload an annotated version for quicker understanding in the future). As usual, tip, add what that pdf has inside in the next sub-indented block.
28. Add your opinion in the next line (one indent to right) below the block. Helps you in the future to know why you added a particular idea. (I will explain why you have to use indented blocks in later posts, in the crux, it will help you to filter)
29. Set the block “content-type” with tags (eg. #quotes, #articles)
30. Use #inbox tag or use #Quick Capture. Capture first, organize later.
31. Always summarise long page in meta or in top of the page
32. Create pages from your daily pages as it will give you time context in the future.
33. Use collapsable parentheticals (()) to place your explanation inline and hide it. So that you only have to see the core content, not the full explanation and the full explanation is always at your disposal if you want to see it. (check below video)

To Do

34. Visit the [[ToDo]] page often – This filters out all your todo actions from every page you added a todo checkbox
35. Change a block to checklist by Control+Enter (shortcut)
36. Use the (Delta option) little triangle to move the block to tomorrow instead of copy-pasting it. And also you can know how long you’re procrastinating

Accessibility, Reliability and Security

37. Always watch on your syncing status before leaving
38. Use in the chrome app window, instead of on a tab inside your browser. So Roam will not disturb your browsing and vice-versa.
39. Just refresh at least once a day to make sure Roam runs with up-to-date codes. (sometimes Roam update notification is not working as intended)

Editing

40. Use Grammarly? especially if you’re a writer
41. Get familiar with Kanban. Use {{kanban}}
42. Focus on your writing (by hiding left and right sidebar with shortcut) control +/ and +\
43. Learn shortcuts for frequently used actions or navigations. For eg. Switch to today page with a shortcut (Alt-d -> Win, Ctrl-Shift-d -> Mac). L
44. Use the browser’s search function to find a word inside a page instead of using Roam’s search (If the page length is big)
45. You can draw – (Try typing “/drawing” in Roam)
46. Try a flow chart – (Try typing “/diagram” in Roam)
47. Add versioning block to see how the content evolved in one place. Press Ctrl+, to add a new version in the same block.
48. Do not delete, instead use strike through and versioning. This will help you to see how your content (ideas) evolved over time.
49. Use control+z if you have lost any block in the filter by removing a tag

Exporting your knowledge

50. Try using the “output compile” page. Create a separate page in Roam and tag this page as “output” or “project”. Use block reference to move all the points (blocks) you needed on one page. Then organize those points. By maintaining all the “output” pages inside Roam, you will always know how many times you used a point, when, and where. This is basically creating a draft inside Roam with details of the blocks from where you referred from.
51. Use the right sidebar to pin an “output” page and collect points while browsing your knowledge on the middle pane. Because the middle pane has the options to filter, browse, search the contents.
52. Export the compiled output page once the core idea is finalized. Don’t try to decorate points inside roam.
53. Always keep the block reference (citation) use the “text and alias” option.
54. You can export selected or filtered pages only containing a particular tag or words

Others

55. Do not use roam for task and project management (but you can use it for project ideation), this will not help you in long run and will result in a cluttered, overwhelming data dump instead of knowledge mining space. (Also roam lacks reminders, notifications, progress tracking, etc. so not a good alternative choice for a reliable calendar app or task app)
56. Roam is only for knowledge management (commonplace book)
57. Never copy-paste content ( unless it’s a reference, book quotes, article highlights) always comprehend in your own words
58. Always for sentences that can be reusable and as an isolated point. Make connection with indentation
59. Don’t dump your database. Bring in only best of best into roam. This way you can maintain it as an abstract knowledge space. Which will ease your thinking process and finding the relationship between numerous concepts within a single page or graph view
60. Understand how the graph is displayed. The upper bubbles have a connection to this page and lower bubbles are connected
61. Don’t do your progressive summary inside roam. Roam is a place where you only import your bold passages. (With reference source link )
62. Use simple words (no jargons needed) whichever is easy to remember and recognize in future
63. Do not use roam to show off. Roam is your back office. Don’t waste your effort in perfecting the presentation. As long as you can understand it is enough. Make roam work for you. Not the other way around.
64. Roam will not do your thinking. So don’t dwell with Roam all day. Use it to verify your idea and to get ideas out of what you have collected and connected
65. Never try to create a dashboard inside the roam. Favorite the pages according to the need of the hour
66. Never preplan how you going to use the Roam and set up. Just let go, eventually, it will make a setup out of itself (Rome was not built in a day)
67. Go wide and broad collecting data and connecting them. 
68. Use namespace
69. Always display namespace and square brackets for links (to avoid misunderstanding in future)
70. Don’t use document view unless necessary
71. Click the block and open it in full view. Every block can be considered as a page
72. Embed blocks instead of referring if the block is highly evolving in nature
73. Declutter and clear inbox frequently (else it will become overwhelming) and your processing quality will decrease
74. Avoid using Roam in mobile except to capture. As mobile interface can’t give you visual feedback of connection as in desktop view
75. Tag and link pages reference- connect for future use (along with current relevance)
76. Make sure Roam resurfaces your relevant knowledge (which you collected in past) without searching specifically for it. For that, you need to glance at “linked reference” and page graph often.
77. Any app should help you to complete the work faster, quicker. If you’re dwelling in roam for the whole day, it actually means you’re using it in the wrong way. Use frequently but briefly as the days go by.
78. The simplest way is the best way – use the functions and features you need. Don’t force yourself to use all the functions and new features for the sake of using them.
79. Get inspired by other’s workflow (no need to copy them or switch your workflow system overnight) as roam allows you to change anything later
80. Ask the community, Take inputs and get exposure. Never stop improving. Read roam newsletters.
81. Popular isn’t always the best. following others might stop you from doing your work in your own way. It has the risk of stopping you from creating a new workflow for the problems you only facing.
82. If you want to use emoji, use it at the end of the page title
83. Don’t try to structure your content. PARA organization will not pay out much in Roam
84. Even if you automate the import, process them first by adding relevant tags, connecting relevant pages. Roam is not a dump yard.
85. Write obvious points too and make obvious connections. ( it may not be so obvious for your future self)
86. The multi-column view is better to make connections, ( the wide view will help to see the big picture)
87. One column view is better for adding data to roam (so other pages will not influence your current opinion)
88. Use other note-taking or collecting apps in conjunction to avoid everything goes into Roam. Keep Roam as a top layer, an abstract layer of your knowledge representation. I use Evernote as a dump where it will act as filters for my irrelevant thoughts and tractionless ideas. I move things to roam only if it makes sense or has the potential to impact a little. Condensing helps me to understand the big picture in roam.
89. The first choice is to have only one graph for everything. (Ideas from other areas may inspire you to solve problems in other areas)
90. Improve your typing speed and accuracy every day. The ability to put in typed words on the moment you think about something (before you forget) is a significant skill.
91. Have agenda before start using roam on a day. For some, roam may be addictive. You only work with all the data inside Roam, grooming it, but never take something out of it.
92. The first choice to keep your roam graph private.
93. Believe me, no one is ever satisfied with their own work and comfortable showing it to others. Record your dumbest ideas, opinionate, argue yourself in roam without worrying about its look. Let’s roam be the furnace to forge and support your ideas.
94. Join courses only for learning the fundamental ways to use Roam. Otherwise, get inspired by shared ideas in the community. (Reddit has a good active community, you can also check Roam’s discourse site)
95. I suggest not to use roam for spaced repetition system for studying. use Roam as spaced evolving system for your knowledge. It is not memorizing tool, but a “thinking aid tool”.
96. It’s better to use your mother tongue sometimes to explain complicated ideas. Roam doesn’t care about the Language.
97. Always maintain a clear distinction between your ideas, thoughts, and information from a source  (along with source location details)
98. By nature of the design, Roam has the risk of details slipping through the crack. So make sure every block is connected to at least one other block or at the least indented to make a relation
99. Don’t structure your notes beyond indenting (that will be counterproductive and against Roam’s basic idea of structure-less note-taking experience). Keeping things atomic is the core strength of Roam.
100. Rely less on search and more on interlinking. Nothing wrong with making too many connections (page linking) as long as it is meaningful.

If you got any value from this list, subscribe to the newsletter or follow us on Twitter, FB, YouTube. Give me your thoughts about this post in the comments section.

Read More on 100 tips to use RoamResearch like a pro

Why tagging (is important)?

• To specify the attributes of the content or note. Like, what type of content it is, what it is about.
• To add contextual information, adding more meta information to the content or note.
• Adding more value to the content by specifying its importance and relevance (keywords) and status
• To specify where-in the future it may or might require
• To help you filter (and also order) the content according to the needs and relevance later
• To neatly organize the notes – categorize (by areas of interest) and prioritize (by needs and importance)
• To focus or keep away other contents away that are irrelevant to the current task
• To avoid notes or information slipping through the cracks when you have an overwhelming amount of notes.

When (should you tag)?

Well, almost all the notes and all the time, may be not. I am not sure myself. I try to tag any note or block (in case of roam) if it is isolated from all the other notes in my repo (database). First I check for actionable tags (explained later in this article) and then relevant keywords and at last if the particular note carries more value, I attempt to tag with keywords (where and when I will need it in future).

I make sure that the current note will at the least make a connection with two of the other contents in my knowledge collection in any way possible (either by tagging or linking). The answer for this depends on the type of data you collecting and the purpose of it.

What to tag (based on context)?

Contextual Tags (Interrogative – 5W tags)

Interrogative questions applicable: Why, Who, When, What, Where, How.

It’s cliche idea of tagging of “People, Place, Things”. I added few to address “what type of idea? what type of content? from when and where it is taken? and where and when it will be needed?”.

• Why – maybe define priority, the reason why the note is considered
• Who – or with whom, people involved, the team involved, it may be even a company or client.
• When – maybe an event, a time frame (like q1, q2, 2020), for day theming (Wednesday, Morning Routine), Gantt form (after design, after launch, closing the day, etc.)
• What – Things, what type of content(audio, chart), what type of reference (quote, book, research paper).
• Where – Place (Home, Office, Moon , Newyork-trip)

“How” doesn’t exactly apply here, but it is transformed to Actionable tags.

Process the info Tags (Actionable tags)

This action says how this note or content can be used and what process it needs to get it prepared.

• #inbox – tells me that the note is a draft and needs to process
• #-tagit – tells me that I need to add some relevant keyword tags. Usually, I add this tag on the fly while reading an ebook in kindle or reading a blog post in Instapaper which pushes the highlighted content to roam automatically. You should check this workflow.

Status Tags (What’s Next Decision tags)

Unlike ‘actionable tags’ tells me what to do with the note, these ‘status’ tags help me to decide what to do next with the data. (Usually at the point, where I haven’t decided what’s next?). These tags denotes the stage of the evolving note which usually I have a tentative goal to reach or get out of the particular note.

• #:inProgress – tells me that this project (or task) is in progress and helps to (filter and) limit my attention only to it

Other tags (to distinguish between normal notes and important notes)

I know most of the notes are important notes, but only some notes you use frequently which constantly evolves (like evergreen notes) and you’ll frequently access them. The next set of notes contains very core of your idea or it may provide a big picture of an idea in one place. I mark them with tags specific to its importance.

There’s no particular standard for these tags, I use it as the time needs.

Allow tags to evolve; but keep it bare minimum

I am not talking about labelling (which is adding relevant keywords. to the subject of the note). I am asking only to keep your value-added context tags (5w tags, status tags) to bare minimum, so it is easy for your to apply and retrieve. Make tagging as your second nature and know in and out of your tags.

How to apply specific tags?

Tags help with reference more in output than in input (taking notes). So tag for future use, not only for the relevance to the content or based on current context.

Tag for where you’ll need the note in future, instead of what it contains.

Thinking which tags are possibly applied here will give you more possibilities of relating current note to your past notes or knowledge and also future needs. Which tags you will probably use in future to find this content.

How to tag efficiently?

Prefixing tags with Symbols

Use symbols to prefix your tags. This helps me lot in entering and filtering as all the notes app have this ‘auto-complete’ feature in the search function. For example, I always prefix my “What” tags with a slash “/”. Like /quotes, /books, etc. When I type the first prefix letter “/” the auto-complete feature populates the tags which I already used, so I can select one out of it.

Ease your tagging process and improve your note’s discoverability by prefixing tags with symbols.

Why prefixing tags?

• Thus easy to enter and easy to search in terms of context later
• In this way, my notes system is resilient to producing multiple tags with typos (eg: #books, #Books are two different tags, but intended for the same)
• This saves my precious decision-making time and mental energy to add few tags.
• At every step of the search filter, it reduces the complexity and filters the notes step by step, not drastically which puts some notes away from your sight (slipping through cracks)
• You can enjoy tagging notes again (like me)

Finally, These tags are easy to remember in a specific order

Tip: I use rhyming words “Yahoo Whether” (whY-a wHOO-When-What-Where). Don’t research this anagram. It helps to remember the order I have to apply 5w context tags (in Evernote). I don’t fuss too much if I can’t fit all the 5 W’s, instead, I apply what I can answer immediately. (In Roam, I use Roam templates, you can use Text expander too).

Color coding tags

If your notes app allows you to color-code your tags, just go for it blindly (pun-not-intended). The visual feedback of these color-coded tags helps you to recognize their context within a fraction of seconds at a glance. Remember our brain is good and fast at recognizing color than reading the tags. Use distinct colors for quick recognition.

Prefix and colors give more context to the tags than the tag itself

How I use tags? (For Inspiration)

This is not a tutorial. So, no need to follow exactly. Add your own ingredients.

If you like this idea, got any value out of this, consider subscribing to this blog and place a comment if I missed addressing any important issue. Oh! don’t forget to tag share this article with your friends who might get a huge benefit out of it.

Read More on ‘Tagging’ digital notes – Efficiently and Elegantly

But you can’t afford to lose your thoughts and linking connections between what you read and what’s already you knew. The urge to connect these in your collected notes (Commonplace book) would be easy to suppress, if you know those connections will be made later without fail (i.e. your fear of forgetting the good point you read and its connection is wiped out). This will give you free of mind to flow with your reading without worry.

I thought sharing what I do will help others. For the sake of example, I am using the Amazon Kindle app to capture and RoamResearch to organize my notes (and using Readwise to automate exporting highlights). You can apply this same method (with little tweaks) to your workflow using any ebook reader or note-taking apps like Notion, Evernote.

Step 1: Capturing with easy and on the fly

Whenever I highlight something and record my thoughts (which is pretty rough and I don’t care about sentence, grammar) as notes I do it without thinking lot. If I felt those notes have to be polished further, then I will add a tag/label “#inbox” at any part of the sentence.

Likewise, I add “#-tagit” and then add the ‘keywords’ that is relevant to highlight or the note.

Why not directly tagging those keywords?

You can directly tag the keywords if you can remember them correctly. But often I find it difficult to find the right form of the keyword. For example if I tag a keyword ‘Note Taking’, there’s plenty of formation which I could have been used. Like ‘note-taking’, ‘Note-taking’, ‘notetaking’, ‘NoteTaking’, etc.

So instead of thinking of the right keyword, I mark the keyword (without worrying much to be always correct) along with the tag “#-tagit” . (why I use “-” before “tagit”? I use my own custom tag-prefixing solution to distinguish them for easy note/knowledge processing, which I try to write about in the future.)

Text replacement to simplify further

Use simple text replacement tool (in my case, I use iOS’s default one, see the below screenshot) to eliminate the frequent typing of this tagging notation (#inbox, #-tagit) in the small keyboard. I use, “x” as prefix because not many words start with x (to reduce false-positives) and easy to find and type with a small keyboard rather than finding symbols if I set them as prefix (so, eliminating the time to find symbols every time).

See it in action, In the below screencast video (from my phone) I focus on taking the notes and the process I use is demanding very less attention to make it work and easy to tag without thinking much.

Step 2: Moving your highlights & notes to your collection

You can export your highlights to your notes collections which I assume to be in Notion, Evernote, RoamResearch, Bear or anything you use. All you have to do is export the highlights and import them to your notes app.

It’s better if your notes app supports ‘tags’ for the next step in this process.

Step 3: Organizing in your notes app

I personally use Roam (RoamResearch) as my PKM app (Personal Knowledge Management) to process all my knowledge “notes” in one place.

(See the below screenshot) All my notes with is marked with #inbox tag will be filtered in one place in Roam for me to process them further. Remember, I took the note roughly on the fly while reading. Now, it’s the time to rephrase and rework them to proper note which can be reused in future and expected to convey my thoughts which I have now in the future without ambiguity.

Like wise, the tags #-tagit also can be filtered (refer below screen shot) and I can now process them all in one place. This step is rather easy than rephrasing or formulating as this doesn’t requires my thinking. All I am going to do is to connect this note with relevant keywords.

To see it in action how I just connect them to keywords see below screencast video. All I am doing is, selecting the keyword, Roam will automatically present any linked notes/keywords which I already used and I select one among the autocomplete list produced. Finally, I select the right keyword and remove the tag #-tagit.

How to automate Step 2 ?

I use Readwise to automate the process of collecting all my highlights from the web and then upload them into my Roam database and Notion. (Subscribe to Alvistor, to get new ideas for your productivity flows)

Below are screenshots of my Readwise page showing Import and Export settings.

I export all my highlights and notes to Roam to process and also to Notion as a repository. I use Evernote as my direct note-taking and collecting app.

Give me your thoughts and ask your doubts in the below comment form.

Wishing you a productive day!

Read More on ‘Tagging’ ebook highlight notes on the fly while reading

It’s commonly known as ‘The 80/20 rule‘, I call it as “Pareto Hack” when I apply this strategy to my productivity planning.

Let’s first check the truthiness of the statement. Will really doing 20% of the work is enough to achieve 80% of the result? Yes and No. We have to understand it better. The principle is about the relationship between input and output, cause and effects. For business sales, 20% of a company’s customers are responsible for 80% of the sales (only 20% loyal, repeated customers are buying 80% of the products, while the remaining 80% are just casual buyers who reason to only 20% of the sales). Also, 20% of the employees are responsible for 80% of the results. Roughly 20% of the population will contribute to 80% of the country’s wealth.

Likewise, you can see this relationship pattern between cause and effect everywhere in this world.

Even though 20% cause leads to 80% effects, this doesn’t mean any random 20% will lead to 80% output. Only selected 20%. Not any random 20% of the employee will produce 80% result in a company, Only the top-tier of high-performance employee circle does this.

The Pareto Hack is finding the 20% ’cause’ (which will bring 80% output) and acting on it while eliminating other tasks to achieve most effortlessly.

The bitter side of this principle reveals that we give more attention to tasks that don’t affect the output on a large scale. We are busy, just because, the work isn’t over yet. Why the work isn’t’ over? because you’re not focusing on the tasks that will complete the work significantly.

We are ‘busy’ doing less impactful tasks. The first task of your workflow should focus on setting priority, and the second is to focus on it for the entire day until its completion.

The biggest and usual mistakes of setting priorities are, we often choose tasks that easy for us, else which is asked of us urgently (by your higher-ups). Urgent doesn’t mean it’s important. I find people prioritize the tasks that they love or close to their heart (in name of passion). I find this odd because if it is passion, you are gonna do it anyway without much effort.

When I ask others, what is the most precious and finite resource in the world (in a productivity sense)? Everyone’s answer is “time”, some will say money, energy, skill, or talent.

Your attention is the costliest and precious resource in productivity. The ability to concentrate on one task, to keep your focus within the work in question needs will-power. So, I’d say Will Power is the most finite resource you should be used cautiously.

The Pareto hack of daily productivity is knowing where to put your finite attention and energy to yield maximum result before it depletes for the day.

Busy people always waste their precious energy doing urgent and non-impactful tasks. (I am not talking about procrastination here). Another set of people always waste their potential in doing irrelevant tasks, because they lack the ability to focus, their will-power muscle is weak.

To summarize in simple steps,

1. List the tasks
2. Set priority based on how much impact it will make in output.
3. Ruthlessly eliminate other tasks
4. Select high impactful tasks (Start with 2 tasks/day or 2 hours/day)
5. Use your will power to stay focused on the most important tasks
6. Do not overdo it, because you have limited will power to keep up.

Well, I opened up a window for you to explore. I’ve written few articles involving this Pareto Hack, check them out. If you liked this perception consider subscribing to the Alvistor newsletter, so you will be getting more useful ideas (weekly) to explore and implement.

Read More on Pareto Hack – Rule of thumb for greatest personal productivity

Remember, they all started their career as a single entrepreneur, so you can surely take their words experience and adopt some for a productive & successful career and business.

Scheduling

1. Schedule your day in short intervals (Elon Musk)

Believe it or not, Elon Musk (founder of Tesla, Hyperloop, SpaceX, etc) chunks his day as small as 5 minutes. He schedule the day with tasks, work, meeting with the interval of 5 minutes. That means he spends his attention and distributes it to all the important tasks, that’s why he is able to manage many business as a single man and become world’s richest.

Now, you don’t have to split your days in 5 minutes. But surely you can set from 25 minute to the maximum of 90 minute time and block the time to one particular task and stick with the schedule. The key points here are, “stick with the schedule” and “keep your task duration tiny as possible” so that you can spend your attention without getting distracted easily and most importantly you will complete the task. (Remember Parkinson’s Law: work expands to the time allocated to it)

2. The 2 pizza rule – keep meeting small (Jeff Bezos)

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon has been following this simple rule, that he would only invite a few numbers of people to his meeting, who can be fed by two pizza on whole. Don’t fuss with the number of people, it’s just a metaphor that you only need to invite most important people in very low number, i.e. necessary people in the team.

Why? Restricting the meeting to who matters most will give you lot of clarity, harmonious decisions and importantly saves time. The trick here is, you have to decide who is most important to the meeting based on your agenda.

Decision Making

Minimize decision fatigue (Mark Zuckerberg, also Steve Jobs)

You could see Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook (and Steve Jobs) in all public-appearing with a same round-neck t-shirt, (probably similar colour shades) with no or very less apparels. His idea is to eliminate decision fatigue on small and trivial matters, so that power can be used to take important decision in critical matters.

The take away is, you have limited attention and will power to use your attention to take decision throughout the day. Using them in trivial matters like (what socks I should wear today, will this tie go with this shirt) will deplete half of your decision taking energy even before the day starts. By routinising these things you save this energy for later big use and stay stress free for small, trivial matters.

Theme your day (Jack Dorsey)

Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter) assigns theme for every work day in a workweek. This enables him to focus on single themed work on a single day and this method avoids you switching your attention between different natured work.

If you set Tuesday as ‘Meeting Day’, do all the meetings, follow ups and other errand-type works on that day, so if you set Thursday as your ‘Learning/Research Day’, then do your personal improvement works on that day. So you can work on your own pace on Thursday without worrying about someone disturbing you in middle in name of casual meeting. By theming like this you don’t have to change your mood and attention too often as different theme of work needs different brain capacity and mood zoning.

Reviving

These hacks may look like counterproductive, yet pays multi-folds if you do it regularly in long-run.

Meditate on daily basis (Ray Dalio)

As focus and concentration are the primary investment to any work, you need to sharpen your axe with the help of meditation.

A simple meditation is letting your mind think in a way it wants and not interfering with it for few minutes to hours. This lets your mind wander and settle down. Controlling a hyper-mind is a very difficult and exhaustive process, but you can do wonders with the settled down mind which is easy to direct to focus on the work you want to concentrate on.

Focus on your sleep cycle (Jack Ma)

No matter what, sleep is more important than food and breathing if you want to be productive as hell. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba says the importance about it, so do every successful people.

He says “If I don’t sleep well, the problem will still be there,”. “If I sleep, I have a better chance to fight it.” He reiterated this in 2019 when speaking about rejection and failure. “Of course, you are not happy when people say ‘no,’” he said. “Have a good sleep, wake up, try it again.”

Provenly sleep improves your problem solving ability rather than fighting with a same problem all night up.

Keep one day completely free (Dustin Moskowitz)

Dustin (found of Asana) recommends a day without any commitment. No meeting, no blocked calendar, no task allocated for the day. Leave the day as it is and take your time to find out your individual priorities to work on that. If you feel ‘self-aware’, ‘whole’, ‘accomplished’ in your personal matters and in individual productivity, then only it will reflect in your undertakings.

Workflow System

The 80/20 Rule or Pareto Hack (Tim Ferris)

I have talked more on Pareto Hack on Alvistor.com itself, which states that only 20% of your effort is enough to bring out 80% of the result. But the trick is to find where that (20%) task lies around in the entire project. Find those most important sector of the project and work on it. The other 80% of the work will only result in 20% gain, so its better to ignore them instead wasting your effort in perfecting it.

Seek Simplicity (Steve Jobs)

The ‘Apple’ founder say seek always simplicity in your work and designing any system (including your personal productivity system) which you planned to use it for long time. You’re simplifying, to make it easy to follow and use it with less effort. The complex and hard-to-do systems are pretty known for discontinuing in the middle of course.

Continuous life long learning (Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates)

Life long learning, the internet termed it as “5-hour rule”. The rule is you make sure you will learn something new in and around your industry or things you doing (your work) for a minimum of 5 hours every week. Consider this as your personal R&D sector of your Life’s business.

Where the learning stops, your life or business’ falling starts.

Read More on 10 promising productivity hacks from 10 successful entrepreneurs

Deeper understanding is a process of deduction and reconstruction.

Deeper understanding (unlike superficial understanding) demands active mental effort, it’s a cognitive process of questioning your own understanding until you make sure you know things rather than you believing or assuming you know it.

Most of the time, we don’t question our understanding further when we reach a point where things make sense on what you reading/learning. We assume or believe instead of knowing as it is, trying to fill the gap by guessing the meaning of those chunks that we didn’t understand fully. We often stuck at this “Illusion of knowledge“, the sad part is, it’s hard to be aware of this illusion when you’re inside it and even if you’re aware of it, we neglect it, because thinking is hard.

Break down to its atomicity

Atomic understanding is a concept of breaking down the concepts or theory into its atomicity, and then understanding those ‘units’ first and then moving on to integrating, interconnecting those units to understand the whole concept. In a broad sense, you need to see it as ‘whole’ and then as ‘parts’ and then again as a ‘whole’.

‘Atomic’ in the form of a single irreducible unit or component in a larger system/concept. You can’t further deduce it. I refer to this as “Atomic Block“.

Almost all concepts or theories (basically anything you want to learn now) can be deduced into smaller parts or to their atomicity. Rarely, you find a basic concept that can’t be deduced further, it is called as “First Principle”. (I will talk about this in my next article in this series).

How to deduce to atomic block?

Simply by asking questions, follow-up questions, too many questions until you can’t make meaningful, relevant questions further out of the concept under consideration.

We rarely question analogies or obvious concepts. Obviously, our primary understanding is accepted without questions. But for deeper understanding, it is not good to accept things without deducing even if you feel you understood them better. Every question you get during deconstructing/deducing your concept can be answered with a help of a simple Google search, right?

We often heard this cliche from every expert asking you to be strong with your fundamentals. It’s not enough to understand primary fundamental concepts but to understand the concept’s fundamentals (in other words ‘atomic block’).

True knowledge is built with fundamental knowledge. Here in this context, make sure your ‘atomic block’ is based on reliable understanding which is true to its core.

‘Reflection’ by interconnecting your ‘atomic block’

Step in the sequence: Deconstruct Understand Reconstruct.

Reconstructing is may not be as simple as deconstructing. As I said in the beginning, this portion of the process requires your cognitive effort. People know ‘deconstructing’ a machine(concept) and learning from doing it so is “Reverse Engineering”. No, it is not. Learning from reverse engineering takes place only when you try to reconstruct what you dismantled in the previous step.

I pretty much recommend hand sketching, mind-mapping (with tools like Whimsical), or the promising old school method of visualizing for this reflective thinking process. Visualizing is equivalent to computer modeling (like CAD) inside your head.

If you can’t imagine it, you didn’t even understand it, if you can’t comprehend it, you didn’t understand it better.

Breaking concepts into basic tiny building blocks and building right up from the ground in your imagination is a visualization or reflective understanding.

eg: Gravity

What is gravity? (take a moment and try to comprehend the answer in your mind to know how you have been understanding this so far) Gravity is a force that attracts a body towards the center of the earth, or towards any other physical body having mass.

To deconstruct the above statement: Gravity is a force. Now we need to be knowing what force is? Next, a force that attracts a body towards the center of the earth or any physical body having mass. Now we need to know what ‘mass’ is. And then we know the line not only talks about the earth but about any physical body having mass. If you deduce it further, it talks about the force between two physical bodies having ‘mass’. Then you will know the force is attraction force, that attracts towards the center of the body. That’s why you call that center the center of gravity of the object. Likewise, you deduce it and make questions about it to deduce further.

Later, the reflective part comes in. (Newton’s analogy with apple) So an apple is a physical body, so does the earth. According to the concept learned, two body attract each other, apple and earth attract each other. As earth is quite a larger mass, as the apple is a tiny one, it moves towards the earth instead of other way around. Likewise, moon is kept in its place because of earth’s gravity. What if a bigger object (some other planet or a space rock) comes near earth. This kind of reflective thinking/imagination, visualisation will make your understanding better and wider and deeper. Those few left out questions in deconstructing will arise here and it will be answered, making the topic thoroughly, deeper, and wider.

How to take notes with atomic understanding?

Atomic block: In note-taking, the notes on this one, independent, solid piece of knowledge is Atomic block note or “Atomic note” or simply it’s an “Atomic block” in your notes. These ‘Atomic Blocks’ can be clearly showcased with the use of ‘indents’ in your notes. (Note-takers who using RoamResearch and Notion would understand what a note-block is and indenting it).

(In)Denting ‘blocks’ in your notes make it straight and clear.

At every indented line, I deduce the concept to simpler and smaller chunk, until it can’t be simplified further. The last rightmost indent is my atomic block. (If I had to tag or link to other concepts, I do at the last indent line. RoamResearch users can use this to properly filter and it has many other uses which I will explain in another post).

Regardless of the indent, each block is your ‘atomic note’ for your future use and reference. Once done rightly, you can re-use it, and to recite the concept, a simple layered glance should be enough for it.

eg:

In the above example, on the final indent, I quoted “Force”, assuming “Force” is already understood as another ‘Atomic block’ of knowledge (which I already understood). Likewise, you build your knowledge with ‘atomic blocks’ in notes and atomic understanding to build in your knowledge in mind.

That’s a brief on Atomic understanding. More practical ways (demo) will be given in future posts, consider subscribing to pick ideas from my work 🙂

Read More on Building blocks of true Knowledge: Atomic understanding

These are the questions and skepticism in your mind, I presume. Yes or no, either way, this article is my best attempt to answer all those and share my evolved method of digital knowledge management system I personally use.

Preface: If you’re not familiar with your own Personal Knowledge Flow. Try to find the missing links of your mental process (part 1) before you proceed with this article of note-taking for knowledge (part 2). I strongly recommend you subscribe to Alvistor newsletter to receive future articles on this series. I only brief the methods here leaving more room for you to customize and use them in your own style (use the comment section at the end of this article for doubts and feedback). Credit: This method is highly inspired by Tiago Forte’s Progressive Summarization which I’ve been using for 3 years.

Unfortunately, this method of summarising will not work well with learning mathematics, derivations, equations, etc.

Step 1: Combining Source

In the general case, a web article, a digital book (eg. ebook from Kindle), PDF textbook/doc, etc act as your source. It’s better to take notes for every individual source with this method so that combining them later will be a cake-walk for you.

If there are multiple sources (few blog articles and a book) for one topic, you should consider taking notes for each source, not for a single topic it falls in.

In some cases, you might be collecting a few lines of information from a source which is not containing more than that. If it is a piece of meaningful information, These chunks of information may be appended to your primary source.

In the case of academia & research, you may be having lecture notes (given by your professor), your notes (taken while in the lecture), teaching-texts or textbook, etc. For this, I suggest you roughly order them as sequential as possible (else in one place/folder) when you convert to digital. (If you have written notes, You can try scanning your written notes with apps like Evernote (which can hold all your source of different types) or other apps that have OCR capabilities to convert them to digital text. This will not work in all cases).

Once you collected them as one long source, try to remove the unwanted formattings and simplify your note as much as it allows you to. Making this source-note editable (at least highlightable in the case of pdf) is the first step.

Step 2: Primary review / Bolding passages

This step is similar to what you been doing so far to take notes. But here, we are going to do with ease. All you have to do is read your source and go with the flow of reading/understanding. Whenever you come across a line that you feel important, meaningful, relevant, new (to you) just select them and “bold” them. (If your application is not allowing it, then underline them).

If you have a dilemma about whether to bold a particular passage or not, just bold them if you stuck at a particular line. Because you need to be in the flow of reading and bolding side by side, instead of being stuck at a particular point. In a practical sense, you can’t find out what’s important and what is not at first glance. This step is more of a process of elimination (of unwanted info) rather than finding important points.

Remember this is not where you take notes, you’re just skimming to find relevant and meaningful info from your source and marking them to refine in the next step.

General guideline for bolding passages

Read & Bold, don’t try to make your decisions harder. If you see anything concise and straightforward bold them. Bold important passages, key sentences, any chunk of a sentence which should give meaning if you only read the bolded passages.

Bold passages should not truncate the relevancy and context of the point. So select a wide sequence of words (but not wider).

Overall, all your bold passages should cover the Core Essence of the Content & Encapsulate Ideas of the source. Bold Definitions, Theorem, Final Findings, Quotes, Concise-Conclusion-Statements, Sentences that are critical to understanding the concepts.

Extracting the core idea that you need now and also for possible future needs. The one mistake we do is we take notes for current needs, but here if you feel this particular point might be used in any place in future or it might be helping your future reference, then select them to.

The whole aim is, whenever you revisit your note, you don’t have to read it from start to end to find the important relevant points. Compressing the size of the note in this way makes it easier to refer to in the future.

DO’s

• Bold anything new for you to know
• Bold concise, straightforward sentences
• Bold anything you agree with and not agree with
• Phrases you want to take-away as it is

DO NOT’s

• Don’t bold the examples, explanations
• Don’t bold repeated points twice
• Don’t waste your time in reinventing the wheel, i.e. don’t bold things you already know well.

Step 3: Highlighting Keys/Keywords

So far we prepared the notes and understood what it carries as meaning and marked them in bold. Now we start again like previous step (do not make a copy of it, use the same note for all these steps) but this time, we only gonna look at bold passages and pretending blind to those other sentences.

Highlight the Best of the Best passage, Keywords, Trigger Keywords, Key Phrases, new words, or names that are introduced, pivot points that connect you to what you already know and what’s new in the notes (Like I did in this paragraph and in next & check below-attached picture as example).

Trigger Points/Trigger Keywords are mostly words or a few sequences of words that will remind you of the whole concept (in the bold passages) if you see it in the future. They just act as a trigger to your brain to recite.

DO’s & DO NOT’s

• Highlight the best of best phrases inside bolded sentences, keywords, terms, and words that help you to remember the idea associated with the term.
• Don’t highlight outside your bold passage.

Why Bold and then Highlight?

Most of the time we skim, it is passive. Reading is hard and need active participation. We do not revisit our notes often, even if we did, we only see it and 99% never willing to read our own notes. But assume all you notes has bold and highlights like I mentioned, you only got to see your highlights to remind all of the things related to the note, without even reading it. Even if you couldn’t recollect some info, then you can go one level deep (not starting over) to reading bold passages. This should be enough for most use cases. But if you do the next steps right, you will never have to revisit your notes, still having the previous knowledge of your notes.

Step 4: Summarising

This is where your original step of note taking for knowledge comes in. The note layers from the past 3 steps will be preserved for the future reference and context. It will help you to refer the facts from source and act as a proof for your claims in the knowledge you acquired.

Now summarize. Based on what you highlighted and bold summarize what’s in the source. Then add your points/idea/insights to it specifically differentiating it from the source idea.

Where to write the summary? You can write above your source-note or below at the end. The top is the optimal place, so whenever you revisit your note you see your summary first. For advanced digital knowledge building, you can summarize in special knowledge/mind-mapping+notes building apps like RoamResearch to connect your thoughts & summary with your other notes summary.

It depends on your work, whether you take an informal summary (for gaining and building knowledge for creativity and innovation) or a formal summary (along with building knowledge digitally, for reusing the learned concepts in your future work like writing, research articles, etc) or even both.

Taking informal summary

Write a summary in your own words (if you can’t comprehend and explain it to someone, then you didn’t understand it well yourself). Check this knowledge flow if you want to know when to summarize. It’s your summary, your words and it is for you. So don’t worry about grammar or structure as long as it gives meaning to you. Do not copy-paste from the source note. This will reduce your knowledge retaining capacity drastically.

Write for your-future-stupid-self. Don’t write for the current version of you. Take a moment and think will you understand this summary if you forget everything you read on this note? Never skip anything even if it feels so easy to remember now. (You only retain less than 5% of the note after a year.)

Add keywords, context information that you anticipate to use in search in the future.

Taking formal summary

In addition to the informal summary, you should be using a complete sentence that can be reused in your future work. Add points and reasons under those sentences (as a separate point) for ideas that you agree and disagree with your insights. Especially ideas opposing the current notes will improve your summary than summarizing the actual notes.

Every sentence you make should be atomic and has enclose its meaning within itself. If you needed a para, then keep every para atomic, independent of other para/sentence. This will help you to reuse them in future without changing much. Work once and thorough, so you can use it in future multiple times for different needs.

The significant benefit of this formal summary is you can extract knowledge out of your notes in a blink of an eye and it is ready-made to use then and there.

Step 5: Mapping & Remixing

This is where you build new knowledge, ideas with your summarised notes. Innovation & Creativity triggers are well supported in this layer. Seeing notes at this level gives you an abstract view of many concepts interconnected and the opportunity to give rise to new ideas which usually called creativity or innovation.

Add connections & Map your points

I urge you to subscribe for Alvistor.com newsletter to know &  understand more about this by reading following posts in this series. 

Add links to your relevant notes first, then to relevant concepts by mentioning their keywords. (You can hyperlink your notes if you using the notes app of your choice for beginner level. For intermediary and advanced usage, please go for mapping apps that support notes out of the box like RoamResearch)

After adding relevant notes to the current note in hand, move to adding supplementary notes and pre-requisite concepts (which you already having in other notes or to learn newly).

One important mapping data is adding few lines on future possible implementation ideas. Adding words that you use to search in the future about a particular idea so that this note will come up in the search result when you need it. It’s impossible to predict the future, but try to add every relevant word in this step.

Remember, I only briefed the method. Different digital note taking apps works in different way. You can customise this method to adapt your needs and skills.

Remixing

This is where you create a new note and add extracted concepts from all your notes in one place. Usually, this note is called “evergreen” notes. Whenever you take a note under a specific area or topic, you update this ‘evergreen’ note with the final extract. This one note will give you an Eagle-Eye view of all the concepts under the same topic. This where your true knowledge crux resides. (I explain this in later posts).

The beauty of this method is, you didn’t cluttered your notes when you worked on it. You iteratively, spruced it up while extracting your knowledge out of it. You now have layered stack of notes one above another.

1. Source – Base Layer
2. Bold passages – Concept Layer
3. Highlights – Keywords/Critical points Layer
4. Summary – Crux/Ideas Layer
5. Mapped & Remix – Knowledge/Innovation Layer

As a whole, your collected group of notes will maintain a virtual hierarchy as sketched below. Reading this sketch with the concepts told in personal knowledge workflow will give you more understanding of why we doing this.

It balances between discovering a point in your deeply buried notes and connects the relation between broadly distributed topics/areas.

You can Spend more time in reading and taking notes and later you can feel you have read nothing and knew nothing. This is because you didn’t do it right. Knowledge can be acquired with minimal effort because acquiring is not the difficult part. The difficult part is thinking and understanding. Give more time and space for your brain to think and understand than remembering and reciting.

Wish you for your new productive knowledge workflow.

Read More on Note-taking workflow: To build and extract knowledge from digital notes

Yet most of them are doing it wrong. In typewriting, you have to use all your 10 fingers and in the most appropriate way. If you’re not using all your fingers for typing, then it’s time to upgrade your skill. Believe me, this is the easiest and fastest way to learn perfect typing. And the funniest and craziest too.

Almost 9 years before, I learned my first typewriting with an animated tutor software online designed for kids (there’s nothing to be ashamed of in learning). I started touch typing (fundamental finger movements) in half an hour with very little effort. What I immediately learned is, how to use all my fingers in typing in an appropriate way for each key. Later in practice, I gained speed. I recommended it to many of my students, who found that to be a great resource to gain the typing skill.

The course name is Dance Mat Typing, and completely free to learn. Yes, it is designed for the kids. If you’re an adult, you might feel a little crazy about taking it, but I promise good results as early as possible than other typing courses. All I could say is, there’s no match for this typing class for the past decade.

It’s time to rewire your psycho-motor connections in your fingers for efficient typing. Hit the tutor at BBC Dance Mat Typing School at BBC Bitesize. There are only 4 levels if you’re keen and volunteer to put some effort into learning direction, I bet you can learn “THE Touch Typing basic” in less than an hour.

[edit: 14 Jan 2021] If you want to learn typing from start or wanting to improve your speed, we made a brief one-stop guide for beginners at our academia focused site.

Read More on The easiest & fastest way to learn typing in less than an hour

Forwarding from another source

1. Chat Messages & SMS
   • Important application/registration numbers, order information, transaction IDs, etc.
   • Slack messages, other teams/community app like reddit messages
2. Email
   • Similar to messages, an email containing important content for future references, including attachments
3. Web Clipper
   1. For Reference
      • You need content from a webpage? or You might need the article/news that the page contains. That’s when you use Web clipper to clip the text & image content of the page.
   2. For Proof / as Screenshot
      • Some websites are getting updated or there’s a chance that they might remove the content in near future, in that scenario you can use this Webclipper’s ‘screenshot’ option. This will snapshot the entire webpage.
4. Web Clipper – Read Later
   • If you using Pocket or any other ‘ReadLater’ apps, then it’s time for you to ditch them in favor of Evernote. Clipping web articles to Evernote gives you a common place for all your article collection to read later.
5. Link collection
   • You can only clip the URL and clip it to Evernote using the web clipper. In this way, you can collect links to websites, more or less using like a bookmark manager.
6. eBook highlights
   • Collect your Kindle book highlights by forwarding them to Evernote. This way you can have all your book highlights in one place.

Using Evernote’s built-in scan tool

7. Hand-written notes scan
   • meeting minutes, sticky notes, any written paper that contains the information you want.
8. Whiteboard scan / Projector screen scan
   • It is similar to scanning handwritten documents, but here you scan the whiteboard or any presentation screen.
9. Business card
   • Scan any business card with the Evernote scan option, the OCR is capable of extracting the name, email, contact phone number from the business card and it can save it to Evernote, from where you can add it to your contacts directly or maintain the information inside Evernote.
10. Receipts and bills
11. Book pages
    • If you’re not a big fan of eBooks and prefer to read classic paperback books, then you can use Evernote scan to grab a few pages of the book. The OCR capability of the app helps you to search the notes/highlights in the future.

Sketching & Annotating

12. Sketch [using Evernote’s built-in sketch tool]
    • Not all the ideas can be captured as text. Sometimes your ideas and points are in form of lines and curves, a doodle, a rough drawing, etc.
13. PDF & mark-up [Using Evernote’s built-in annotation tool]
    • You can’t edit PDFs, yet you wanted to highlight some points for future reference. Upload the PDF document to Evernote and start annotating without the need for any additional software. Here you are not capturing a PDF file as an attachment, you’re capturing points inside the PDF by annotating. Evernote has the ability to show the annotated pages first so that you don’t have to scroll to find your points when you open it later.
14. Quick snaps (annotate)
    • Take a pic, annotate to add more value and meaning to it. Then save or share.

Attaching and Linking

15. File cabinet (attachments)
    • Evernote can be used as a Cloud Drive to store files. Fundamentally Evernote is not a file organizer, but it does a good job in handling ‘in-line’ attachments inside the notes. It is nice to see the files then and there as an inline attachment, as it gives more meaning and contextual info for the files.
16. Cloud files (linking)
    • Files in Cloud? (Google Drive), just pull the link and use it inside the notes. You can capture Cloud files instantly in Evernote. It’s equivalent to attaching a local file.

Typing & Listing

17. Quick random idea
    1. Use quick capture shortcuts in Desktop (Mac-shortcut: Cmd+Ctrl+N, Win-shortcut: Ctrl + Alt + H) and in mobile to capture a quick thought without wasting time in opening the app or finding a suitable title for the note. Just capture before the thought/idea fades away
18. Minutes & Notes (usual note-taking)
19. Checklist (shopping list, packing checklist)
20. Routines, Guiding/Procedure list
    • You might be following a set of procedures, an order of execution of certain activities like exercise, yoga postures, etc from your fitness trainer, dietician. These data can be recorded in the order as it is in Evernote.
21. Drafts with block points (Bullets List)
    • Evernote’s bullet list is easily movable (by dragging). It’s a good way to record all your points/ideas that you want to draft and move the orders later before final writing.
    • Composing Email drafts
22. To-do list
23. Reminders (Note with reminder)
    • Setting reminders for notes is a way it as a task reminder.
    • Tip: You can create a Notebook with the name “TODO” and every note title can be your ‘task name’ and the note’s body content may contain subtasks or task descriptions.
24. Reminder note.
    • A good way to record where you kept what. You can record a ‘memory’ note which contains information like, where you kept the spare key, where you kept your car insurance, etc.
    • You can record your purchase dates of home appliances, devices to check whether they are still in warranty period (when you check in future date).

Tracking

25. Journaling / Personal Diary
26. Information tracker
    1. Diet or Exercise tracker
       • In weight loss training? or trying to get fit? Record your transformation progress with details and photos every day.
    2. Mood tracker (it’s therapeutic for some people)
    3. Medical health tracker
       • Record your symptoms and feeling of pain, possibly with health metrics (if you measure at home) like BP, the glucose level in the blood, etc.

Collecting

27. Memorabilia
    • Got a milestone likes on Instagram? A heart-touching comment on Facebook? Worthy feedback? Letters/Gift from besties? Just take a pic, add the relevant details, and put it in Evernote for a future nostalgic experience.
28. Quotes collection
29. Inspiration collection (Like Pinterest)
    • Idea inspiring objects/scene/items. Eg.
      • Movie Posters
      • Lyrics/poem
    • Places to visit (with pictures and details of those place)
    • Things to do (bucket lists)
30. Recipes collection (you can add the photos of the dishes too)

Audio

31. Audio note
    • Audio records of the meeting instead of meeting notes
32. Quick recording of a song (for lyrics or tune)

Did I miss something? You using Evernote to capture other things? What are they? Tell us in comments.

Read More on 30+ types of information you can collect with Evernote

There’s thousands of different advices, tips, tricks, methods, and what-not? available in form of books, youtube videos, and obviously from so-called productivity gurus. An advice for procrastination is a no-brainer. Everyone offers advice that they themselves never follow.

Why most of the methods to overcome procrastination doesn’t work? Maybe they procrastinated to think-out well about the cause of the problem, so they jumped to conclusion? or they procrastinated to follow the method themselves to (test and) find out which works better for whom and when?

Out of many methods, the one method worked for me is “2 minute rule” from the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. Basically the book is about habit formation. But I found this method works better for my procrastination issue rather than habit forming.

(Original) 2 Minute Rule: ‘When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

(Proposed) 2 Minute Rule: When you see some task on your task list or when you want to do something at sometime, just

“Don’t think further, Do. Do the task for 2 minutes continuously”

When I find the particular task as a worthy one, a valuable one whose outcome is really beneficial if I do it today (even it has an option to do it later), I usually follow this 2-minute rule for those tasks. This works well for me to complete long pending tasks in my task list.

(After procrastinating enough before writing this article) I closely watched my workflow and pattern when I follow this method for myself to overcome the struggle to start a task. I wanted to understand why this works and especially how it works.

The trick is if I let myself reason out why I should do the task now, I usually end up postponing the task for a later time. In a procrastinator’s mind, there are two psyches. One wishes (let’s name it as Good Psyche) to do the task, another reason out and convinces the counter psyche to procrastinate (obviously, this one’s name is Bad Psyche). Whenever you let this Bad Psyche to talk louder, it always wins out the Good one. It’s pretty good at convincing you.

From logical to silly reasons, it uses any points as a devil’s advocate. Its voices are like “oh I am feeling lazy”, “I am not in the mood to do this”, “I am tired, let’s take a break”, “you worked hard on the previous task, now you deserve a rest”, “let’s do this after watching this youtube video”, “why not tomorrow?”, “oh for this task, I need ‘that’ resource, so let’s start it after I get that”, “what’s it gonna worth, let’s think about it”, etc, etc. (share your mind voice in the comment section).

By engaging in this 2 minute rule, jumping quick into commencing the task, you’re giving very less time for the ‘Bad Psyche’ to talk and convince your Good Psyche part of your mind.

The method doesn’t ends here. Its just got started.

There’s 4 stages of your involvement or participation level in a task.

1. Initial Struggle
2. Partial Heeding
3. Intrinsic Focus
4. Immersed Flow

Each stage phases out to next phase after you successfully dwelled there for a particular duration. This duration varies for person to person.

1. Initial Struggle (commitment)

You’re trying to taking control of your mind.

You started the task, forcefully. The ‘Bad Psyche’ is still in act, talking, resisting, exhibiting tantrums, distracting your focus. It’s very difficult to shut it. Only one thing that can suppress it is your willpower. Use your willpower to continue the task (even if you don’t feel like doing it) with patience for 2-minutes.

Don’t fight with your bad psyche. If you give it your attention by replying or engaging with it will eventually make you lose. Try to fix your thoughts on doing the things. It May look easier, but it’s harder in action. Don’t worry it is just for 2 minutes.

On rare cases it might take more than two minutes, but if you crossed the first 2 minutes, it’s not a bid deal for you to drift to next phase.

2. Partial Heeding (challenging attention )

You are in partial control and need to put your full mind into the task.

In this phase, you’re partially involved and you dragging your ‘Bad Psyche’ behind you. It’s equally difficult like previous stage and for some kind of works (which involves active mind participation) it is more challenging.

You are now paying attention to the work or task in hand. It’s still a partial involvement. But the good news is, the Good Psyche is leading now and the Bad Psyche is following, but it is not quiet.

This part is where your concentrating practices help. If you’re habituated to concentrate on tasks in everyday life, this phase is a piece of cake for you. Tip: There are no separate concentration practices needed if you do concentrate on your day to day activities.

3. Intrinsic Focus (active involvement )

The task activity is in your control. Fully in your mind’s control.

At this stage, the bad psyche is now completely silent. And you won (your good side of mind). Now you have no problem to focus on the task. The focus is Intrinsic. You don’t have to do anything for this focusing act. Once you eliminated the distraction, noises in the mind, the remaining attention and mind awareness will be placed on the task.

4. Immersed Flow (merging with action )

You merged with the activity, you’re the action.

This state is one step ahead of focussed working. Zen level focuses on the work where you even forget yourself, forget that you’re working on a particular task. You are no longer a separate entity. You merged with the task. Most people don’t try to achieve this state of flow when they work. It might look difficult to achieve, but it is not.

You can see people dwell in this state while watching a movie or TV. Their eyes fixed on the TV, their mind is in that world that shown in the TV. If you tell them something, they listen to it and usually nod their heads, but never remember a word. They even don’t know they have been talked to. This is a flow state of mind.

Mind immersed within the action. You are inseparable from the task. Most artists, directors, engineers while designing, doctors while doing a difficult surgery, pilots when landing on a most difficult strip in bad weather will be in this flow state.

This is the stage where you beat all (including yourself). Happy moving forward.

Read More on Procrastination? Struggling to start? Know how to move forward.

A short disclaimer: this article is not for people who never tried meditating, or who doesn’t know what meditation is. This article is not about listing the benefits of meditation or how to meditate.

This is for people who tired of meditating and who wanted to make it a habit but couldn’t be successful in the process. If you are in this category, then this 7 reason makes greater sense to you.

1. Timing, Commitment & Habituation

Humans are creatures of habits. It’s difficult to build a habit, but it’s less difficult to lose one. When we want to build a habit, we should look only at the way of building it, instead, we focus on doing the task. Don’t be confused. I will explain it.

Unlike any task, meditation is only beneficial if done regularly. It is almost similar to taming a horse. The training of the horse does not depend on force but on habituation, no matter how difficult the training is or how bad the horse is.

Sitting and meditating for an hour is a difficult task and obviously tests your will power to do it. Here, you put your mind to doing the task, the difficult task of meditating. All you think is about imagining yourself doing the meditation, and for most of us, the thought itself weakens our will power to even try it. Usually, we deter or defer it at the last minute.

To overcome this, let’s just pretend to think and act (trying to cheat your brain and its logical reasoning behind it) you are going to do something that you usually do at a particular time of the day, regularly. Direct your thoughts on commitment and block a time in your calendar and keep everything off-schedule from that allocated time.

If you’re not doing meditation at this time, you are not doing anything at this time. That’s all. If you hold out against acting on anything during this time, Congrats, you’re already doing half of the meditation. Start doing this regularly, not forcefully, but regularly as a habit. Let your brain understands it is not a big deal, so it won’t act against this eventually. Over some course of time, a little will-power is enough to sit and assume silence with closed eyes.

Make a habit of doing nothing at first for a certain amount of time.

2. Planning for long duration

As I said, even the thought of sitting and doing nothing for an hour will threatens your mind like anything. When you plan for longer duration, you mind will argue with plenty of reasons that seems so logical, that half of you wanted to be convinced and skip the meditation for the day and another half miserable fails at arguing with better reasons.

When you about to sit for meditation, here are samples of your mind’s voice. Ironically, you never thought of wasting time when you have plenty of tasks at your hands for the day, but you will feel the time you blocked (for meditation) could be used to do those tasks or could be utilized to be more productive. You suddenly feel guilty for not getting close to your goals or you find excuses that are so reasonable, but when you think about it later, most of the time it is not.

To overcome this, use the 2 minute rule.

The rule is simple. No matter what, when the time for meditation comes, sit immediately. Doing this immediately before thinking will help you to avoid the inner conflicts in your mind. Once sat down, start to meditate for two whole minutes. That’s 120 seconds. Don’t count the seconds or don’t run a virtual timer in your mind. Just sit there for 2 minutes. How will you judge whether the 2 minutes is over or not? The trick is you don’t judge and you don’t even want to know. This simple target of 2-minutes will ease your brain and make it look so harmless to try. Little resistance = less willpower spent. In other words, it’s damn easy to do.

When you confidently believe when the 2 minutes is over, you could see yourself halfway through meditation. Almost everyone who used this trick doesn’t want to stop immediately, as they don’t want to spoil what they have already invested in this session of meditation.

Remember, the struggling part of any task is the starting 2 minutes

3. Expecting perfection – Couldn’t stop thinking

Many people complained to me, that they couldn’t do the meditation in a right way. When I asked them, what is the right way according to them? they replied, they couldn’t stop thinking during meditation.

Obviously, I understand this. Meditation is a state of being none, having a blank mind, motionless, thoughtless. But it is the state that you will be in when you succeeded in taming your horse. Not during the training.

You can’t do meditation, you can only practice it. It’s ‘practicing‘ meditation similar to ‘practicing‘ medicine.

You can never stop thinking in the meditation. If you do, you will only delay the results. Frankly you can never stop your thoughts. Your thoughts stops itself. Even if magically your mind is bending for your commands, that command itself is a thought. Don’t try to keep your mind blank or control your thoughts.

Let the thoughts run freely. Just watch it. Don’t reason it.

4. Ugly and undesirable thoughts

The most suppressed thoughts will come out to the surface with greater force during the first few weeks. Most people afraid to observe these thoughts. They regret having those thoughts in their mind. When you disturb the surface of the dunghill, you will get the strongest pungent smell. If you give its time, it will pass eventually. Unsheathing the surface may look nicer, but it doesn’t mean it’s ugly inside. Meditation is a cleaning process. Whenever you clean anything, you must face the dirt.

Understand this. These bad thoughts, nastiest imaginations are not who you are or who you want to be. It’s just laying there. This doesn’t mean you encouraged it to be in your mind. The more ugly thoughts is a good symptom that your mind is cleansed faster. But at the same time, do not run behind these thoughts. Just watch them coming and going away. You don’t have to stop meditating because of this.

When you clean the dirts, it will be more dirty before becoming clean.

5. Body pain

Unfortunately there’s no sitting position which is comfortable for long duration meditation. Sound mind dwells in a sound body. If you are exercising and keeping your body healthy enough to sit in a place for 30 minutes straight, then you have to be doing fitness before meditation.

I suggest, going passive on the body actions is a first step instead of assuming certain position or hand symbols (mudra). Just let the body take its form. Shifting position during meditation is not a bad thing to do. But, it delays the process.

Adaptation is the secret. Let the body adapt for a position (which is comfortable for you at first). I don’t have anything up my sleeves for this issue.

6. Not in a prepared environment

Preparation of the meditating environment and preparing for meditation seems to cost more of your energy and time on a practical day. If you don’t have an exclusive place only for meditation, then this is going to be the biggest hurdle of all the listed reasons here.

Setting up your environment shouldn’t take a few seconds to a maximum of 2 minutes. My suggestion is to clean your place in the morning if you’re going to meditate in the evening. To be clear, finish all the chores way ahead.

When it time to meditate, do some superficial cleaning and tiny routines like spreading the mat, adjusting the light, closing the doors, etc. If you do it for more than 2 weeks, next you can experience that these tiny preparations are quite enough to trigger your mind to fall on the track to do the meditation. This is more or less announcing to your mind to prepare for what’s to come. So it will obey and not resist.

Apart from this, announce your reservation to your family, silence your digital devices, so there’s no unnecessary intervention.

Announce with your preparations to your mind and others. Don’t do preparations that are similar to chores just before meditation.

7. Expecting instant gratification

Human mind works positively towards rewards. Positive reinforcement is the best way to discipline any habits. Meditation is not one of those things that gives immediate or instant reward.

Usually, people defer or deter this practice because they couldn’t see immediate or visible results. But you believe it or not, meditation always gives you immediate results. The sad part is it is not going to work in the way you expect. It is not going to give the results in the order you prioritized to get out of it.

Meditation is a holistic approach. The results will not grow in one direction it expands in all 360°. The size of the circle is very tiny for you to see it at the beginning. Until you see it, I suggest you not to expect anything to happen like wonders. I have no sugar coated trick for this final issue.

All you have to do is “do”, not expect. At the beginning doing itself as a reward.

If you still having any issues/doubts in this matter just posted in the below comments section I will try my best to answer them. If any of my suggestions helped you, share it with me in comments. It means much to me.

Read More on 7 Reasons you couldn’t meditate and be even more productive

Look the chart below, most of the concept is self explanatory.

Knowing

In the age of ‘Information Overload‘, we have access to billions of terra bytes of data. We are aware of the tools and resources to find relevant, coherent and meaningful information.

All we have to do is filter them, categorize them and consume them. Now we know ‘what is what?’. The basic knowing. This part is mostly passive (Listening to a lecture, a TED Talk, watching a video) and passive. I would say, partially active (eg. reading an article like this).

Understanding (The door)

When you really find that important and critical to your knowledge, you move further to the stage of active learning. Where you use your attention to learn based on the information available. This opens your mind to the door of a new concept, the actual mental process of learning starts here. When you open the door, you can see what’s inside, but you can’t see it all.

Reflective (The Room)

A concept or an idea you read to understand is the brainchild of someone who wrote/found that idea. Originally, the idea was in the form of non-verbal visuals and animations in the mind of the creator or founder of that idea. He transformed that idea to a verbal (Book, article, speech) and visual (charts, sketches) content. If you can recreate the concept in your mind, visualise it in a non-verbal form after resonating lot with the core idea/concept, that is where the deep understanding lies. You can now see the concept in your mind inside-out. It’s like you’re inside the room, where you can see all the things very clearly than you were standing at the doors at the previous level.

Comprehending (The Vault)

Most people miss this part in the process of learning. You were in the room, you have to be thoughtful to filter the most important and valuable takeaways from the concept (or room). It should be like crux of the concept. Very correct, clear, concise and coherent. It will be like the vault in a room.

Everyone has this experience of understanding the concepts a level more deep when they try to teach it to somebody.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Albert Einstein.

So, if you miss this step of summarising/comprehending in your own words you will not retain the concept for long and intact.

Knowledge – Association

Approximately at the age of 12, the brain stops growing in terms of volume(size). But mentally it never stops developing and changing. Likewise, the fundamental knowledge of your mind is solid. Anything that you learn further will be added to your mind with a link to your fundamental knowledge. Over the course, you build a numerously connected knowledge. Anything you add to it is added with links to your existing knowledge sphere.

For example, a Circle is a circle. When we accepted it, we never argued why it is called a circle. It’s fundamental knowledge. A colour red is red, we see, we accepted it as red. It is another fundamental knowledge. Now you learn what sphere is? so based on the basic principle knowledge of circle, you can learn sphere is 3d shape which looks like a circle from every direction you see it. Let’s assume we now try to learn a complicated concept, the shape of an apple. Now you add the knowledge of apple to your mind, with the help of sphere and red colour.

The chance of forgetting or losing your learned knowledge is very high, if you don’t associate your learned knowledge to your existing knowledge. I prefer connecting with my fundamental knowledge blocks.

How we use the knowledge?

Intelligence Vs. Creativity

Creativity is using knowledge with Imagination, whereas Intelligence is applying knowledge. The intelligence of the person is measure how he uses his knowledge and when. The ability to mix and match your knowledge to solve different problems makes you intelligent. While creativity is imagination process mostly not intended to solve any problem.

Creativity is a subconscious process. Intuition is also a subconscious trigger that aids conscious decision making. Both are backed by your abstract knowledge but not reliant to it directly.

Experience & Wisdom

The consequence of any decision (as a result of intelligence) is experienced personally. By evaluating the results, you can fill the gap between expected/predicted and actually happened. This helps you to fine tune your intelligence.

The constant and any impactful experiences strongly imprint on your sub-conscious (as Life lessons).

This later helps in tuning your intuitions and forming wisdom. Experience is subjective, while wisdom is objective. Wisdom is an abstract form of intelligence which is event-based, not the subject based (people involved, time and place). Multiple similar results of subjective experience form wisdom. That’s why wise quotes are in few lines.

If you like this article, subscribe to the newsletter. I will reveal few practical techniques to improve your personal knowledge flow in future articles.

Notes

The brain growth summary: 33% of the final weight at birth, 50% at 3 months, 66% at 1 year, 95% at 6 years, final weight reached around the age of 12 years. The remodelling of brain tissue then continues throughout life, but does not result in significant variation in size or weight, except in the case of pathology.

Read More on Personal Knowledge Flow. Find the missing links of your mental process

What is the highest, best, noblest destination in life? I doubt even any man knows the answer to that. No one ever reached that noblest destination ever shared it to us. Few good advice I come across by some real good wise people is to find your purpose, find your why‘s. The reason for the journey. Sometimes destinations are not important. Why you have to travel that particular path may be the most significant factor. Pretty much nomadic is also makes a great journey.

Destination or no-destination journey. It’s Okay, which path to take? Which is the most successful or best’est path? Nope, nothing is there like ‘most successful’ path. Every path with a different experience. But anyone who loves to travel enjoys all, who loves the destination will be ready to travel any path with the same virtues they possess. A path where your needs, desire, ambitions and satisfaction meets is you have to choose. You can change the path as your needs, ambitions and satisfaction changes over the course.

Summing the analogy up. Journey decides all. Not the path, not the destination. The journey includes changing the path, and even changing the destinations. Everyone evidently wants to be happy, peaceful, wealthy and healthy throughout their life, not at the end of when they achieve success. In other words, how we live is more important than how we finish it.

Okay, How can we possibly live it? Let’s not see life as duration as it is not determined for anyone. Let’s see it in a more qualitative way rather than quantitative. How to have a valuable life lived? As said life is all about the journey, you need a reason(purpose) to move in the journey. Along with fulfilled needs, challenging missions that keep the journey interesting, realising wishes to keep you happy and satisfactory for the peace you deserve.

I recently came across this wise idea with simple 4 point checklist to find your own way that makes your journey ideal in your own terms. (Obviously, no one should choose how your life should be, right?). This method is inspired by the Japanese lifestyle philosophy famously known as ‘Ikigai’ which translates to ‘worthy of living’ or ‘reason for being’.

Ikigai is the reason for living. Just not the reason itself. By living for that ‘reason’, you will live the life optimally for as long as possible in which all your needs, wishes, ambitions and satisfactions are met with better health, wealth and mind to enjoy the same.

So finding your Ikigai and following it will make your life worthy of living. Choosing your Ikigai. The 4 point checklist

1. [ ] What you love to do
2. [ ] What you are good at doing
3. [ ] What the world needs
4. [ ] What you can be paid for or rewarded for

Whatever the big thing you do in your life, your reason for living should satisfy all the above 4 conditions to make it as an ideal life.

Say suppose you have multiple choices in your life, you can choose the path which can satisfies all these 4. If you want to create a path, you can based on these fundamental needs of a worthy or ideal life.

1. First thing is first, Choose “what you love to do”.

Follow your passion, Do what you love to do, work hard, work smart, get inspired, blah blah blah. I often hear these invariably from almost all so-called “gurus”(motivational speakers, trainers, coaches).

That’s not enough. That doesn’t answer how to choose the career? how to be successful? how to achieve more? how to feel satisfied? how to be happy? how to improve my life? and all other sorts of questions you can imagine (including the few you have in your mind now).

2. You need to be “good at it”.

Obviously you can’t do anything in your life for a long time, in which you are not good at.

3. It should be Contributing to “What the world needs”.

This completes the circle of society. If you live in a society, you need to play a part in it and connecting with it. Giving back to the world what it needs makes you feel accepted, safe and appreciated. What you do must be received well in this world, so that you can get back what you needed, setting a flow there.

4. Finally, it should be monetizable. “What you can be paid for”

I have seen people miserably fail even after pursuing their dreams for long and sadly even after making it realise in life. We obviously know people who really work hard for their dreams, burnt their fingers trying new things are not peaceful. Obviously we’ve seen and pity a few people who are so honest and altruistic but not successful. They are well, talented, helped others but failed to keep their ship afloat. You can’t run long if your needs aren’t fulfilled.

You should be wealthy to the point where you can get all that you needed for a healthy, mindful living. “Money should not be the reason for what you do”, yes, I agree. But money will definitely be a significant reason to stop what you want to do. Keep the money at last in the list, if not at first in case you have nobler reasons.

• Profession = What you are good at + What you will be paid for
• Passion = What you love + What you’re good at
• Mission = What you love + What the world needs
• Vocation = What you will be paid for + What the world needs

For people who already found their “Profession” and “Passion”

The majority falls in these categories. Profession & Passion. This is for those who don’t love their profession. If you love your job, just skip to next title. Assuming you know what you’re good at and what you love already and assuming you already have a job or a way to earn for your living, I ask you to consider a work area (don’t confuse work with a job) which fulfils both conditions (“what you’re good at” and “what you love”).

If you don’t have many choices in the intersection area of what you love and what you’re good at, then make yourself good at a few things that you love (Obviously you can’t change what you love). There are two types of skills.

1. Natural
2. Nurtured

Skills always can be acquired by learning, regular practice and habituations. So take your time to nurture a few skills. I know it may not easy as it wrote in a sentence. But every day we’re learning, improving or expanding our skills for the job needs. So you can learn some in this if it pays you well.

If you’re successful at clubbing these three sections (“good at”, “paid for”, “love doing”), you are almost there. All you left with a task to find a ’cause’ that can give something to this world as a good deed.

Augmenting, “What the world needs”

The need of this world is never been in shortage. You can always find a way to contribute. I am not talking about a philanthropical work. It should not be as separate work. What you do must inclusively favour fulfilling some needs of this world (society, other men, animals, nature, etc)

For people who are in Mission & found their Vocation

I have nothing much to tell if you fall to this category. People who have a mission, first need to make themselves good at what they doing or want to do. I suggest, your mission should be self-supportive instead of inclining towards a funding model like NGO’s. As this is your Ikigai, not of any organisation’s. If you can’t make a decent living out of your mission, you’ll become the first reason for the failure of your mission if it is long term. I know you can be successful with your mission if you do it with extra-ordinary conviction, yet you will not be happy or satisfied, the worst case is you might feel empty deep inside.

Vocation is a very short-lived thing. Relying on it may feel quite beneficial for certain years, but it is a very very temporary state and leaves you stressed, unsatisfied and feel hypocritical in later years. If you doing your work as Vocation, constantly repeating and improving will make you good at it though.

What to do if you ticked 3 and can’t find a find a way for the 4th?

If you lack at choices that goes along with other three, then some tips to make it complete.

You can acquire new skills (what you’re good at) by nurturing, signing up for courses/programmes, training, etc.

But if you can’t match things with “what you love”, you should explore more to find more options that you may love.

The most challenging part of this is “getting paid for”. I am going to give cliche tips. Ask expert, research, learn to market your skill and passion.

I’ve covered about what to do if you can’t get augment “what world needs” in the process of finding your Ikigai.

Concluding…

Use your analytical skills and intuitions to find the perfect mixture and balance of all four. This is not a one day process, but only if you search you will find your Ikigai. I don’t think Ikigai is ‘set-once, follow-forever’ kind of thing. As the 4 parameters changes in your life, your Ikigai should be updated.

I use this idea personally in my life to set my long-term goals and in-turn to choose my short term goals and projects. I will try to cover more on this, the practical issues in further articles.

All the best, love you all.

You can find the book about Ikigai at Amazon India, Amazon Other countries

Read More on Making life Worthy of living. The 4 Point Checklist

A day comprises full of taking decisions. When the alarm goes off, should I wake or snooze it? A decision. Maybe a tiny one. Is it late? Can I skip breakfast? Another decision. Maybe slightly important one. Should I invest money in this? Hmm . A significant decision. Should I consider changing this job? A critical decision.

Tiny to significant. Elevator or Stairs? Left or right? Red tie or black tie. Yes or No.

Each day is filled with thousands of questions like this. A decision is an answer to a question. A problem is a set of questions in disguise. Some need to be answered quickly, some needs ‘quite’ a thought before deciding.

95% of the decisions you make in a day are by the subconscious and you get to take only 5% with your conscious mind. Psychologist says.

Can’t blame the subconscious

The way your subconscious takes decision is based on previous patterns. Repetition of same of similar decisions forms into a pattern which in turn forms a behaviour. Conditioning, compulsive behaviour, addiction, mannerisms, etc fall in this category.

So a repeated pattern of decisions or thought process eventually got hard-wired in the brain (mind) helps you to take that 95 % of decisions without effort with the help of your subconscious. Based on this hypothesis, you are now ‘you’ because of all the decisions you took so far since your birth.

[Sidetrack: I agree that many of your decisions at your childhood are influenced which partially contributed to form your subconscious. Life isn’t fair for everyone. But again, you have the choice to change. A decision to make and that decision is still yours.]

Emotional & Logical

Two factors of intelligence that affect your quality of decision are Logical Intelligence and Emotional. Logical intelligence is the ability to think logically, reasoning out and connect facts. It is never based on opinion or intuition. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, understand and control your emotions.

What type of intelligence do we need to possess for effective decision making? Well, both. I know that’s not a direct answer. For the sake of the topic I am covering now, let’s keep the logical side aside and focus on the emotional intelligence.

We tend to decide more from the influence of our emotional side when it comes to personal decision making. Ego and other’s influence plays a greater role. Especially in personal decision making.

So, what is the best way for effective decision making?

Self acquaintance

Self acquaintance is not a complicated concept. Claiming yourself. Mastering yourself. Master yourself to master everything. Mastering your decisions too.

Being acquainted with yourself is a greater power. Great practice for effective handling of anything within your life.

(Mental) Solitude

Let’s not confuse it with loneliness. Though both may sound similar, Solitude is a positive feeling when you voluntarily isolate yourself. It is not physical isolation. It is about mentally isolating your true self from other influences.

Two years before I wrote an article of information overload, where I wrote about how we’re constantly fed with information from others and the outside world. On better understanding, we are actually fed with tonnes of opinions every day. Most of the opinions and thoughts we have are not purely ours. We’ve lost ourselves in the crowd. (On the post about mental minimalism I discussed this).

Solitude is blocking the world and its influence while you stay among them. Similar to water on the Lily pad on the pond. Cutting the strings connected to your mind which were pulled by others.

Being vigilant of your own thoughts

This step seems like a simple one but it is not easy to do at first. Being conscious or aware or whatever it is termed, just be in touch with your own thoughts. Your own self. Watch your own thoughts. Find what you like and what you don’t. Find what you are and not.

Try to contemplate your thought process. Pull your emotions out of your thoughts. Sometimes you like some thoughts, sometimes you get annoyed of some thoughts. Just find your true version, a un-adulterated version of you. (feels like I am explaining about meditation )

All you have to do is listen and differentiate the different voices coming from different parts of you at a different emotional level.  Checking the thought where it arises. Who planted it. Cause of it. Just to verify its ingenuity.

Once you mastered this through practice, it will come more fluently.

Calm

Let the emotions settle down. At the point where you really can think without rekindling your emotions is the key for calmness. You can think. Without emotions or likes and dislikes. But no positive or negative feelings. Just bare facts or possibly truths. A good tip to attain this is suppressing your ego when you analyse your thoughts.

Let the calm mind leads to clarity.

Clarity

Clarity of present and understanding of the past.

Make your vision clear before dusting the objects. Have a clear mind before you see the confusing problem rather than understanding the conundrum in the first place.

Once the knife is sharpened well, half the job is already done. Clarity is that sharpness you need before deciding.

Confident

Let me not give you all the mundane and cliche advises like Decide confidently, Don’t afraid of criticism, blah, blah, etc.

Just go with the decision. Confidence is the energy you give to your decision. Even bad decisions driven by good energy would yield surprising results. Confidence is the positive vibe, the optimistic approach which enables you to execute your decisions efficiently.

Sometimes it may not be the best decision in other’s opinion. Sometimes it may not be the best decision factually. At least it was your decision, and you gained a perfect experience out of it.

Covering the uncovered

I leave it up to you whether to trust your gut feelings, intuitions when making decisions. It varies from one to another. So you should use your experience to find it out whether to rely on those feelings.

I totally not against asking expert advise or reaching to friends when you have to make a hard decision. It depends on the expert and your friend’s intentions, level of expertise and how much they know about you. But I strongly suggest keeping their advice as to options not as conclusions. Give a little more value to the ideas given by people who know you well for a long time.

You can be selfish when taking your personal decisions. I strongly believe self-preservation is a dominant goal of life (Stoic inspired).

You need to have clarity over the situation beyond the clarity of your own emotions.

Finally, it is your personal decision to take this opinion of mine. Get influenced by the facts and knowledge rather than by my opinions. Good luck.

Read More on Self acquaintance. A practice for effective personal decision making

Recently I got a huge paradigm shift about minimalism. I like to see it as a philosophy rather than a concept. It is more about mental than material. Reducing the needs,  primarily not reducing on things you use.

On first look, it may appear all-materialistic approach, but it is not. Later you’ll understand it is all about “letting go” of things you believe you want or need to live or just to perform day to day. Clinging less to materials and make yourself wander more freely. In both mental and physical aspect.

Mental minimalism.

I don’t even know whether the phrase “mental minimalism” exists. It is just extending materialistic version of minimalism to the mental side for greater benefits. Greater productivity.

Eliminating and reducing is a minimalism process. For mental minimalism…

Eliminating the options. Fewer things mean, fewer options to choose. The choice is a conscious decision. 90 to 95 % of the things we do day to day basis are done with our subconscious. Will power and decision-making power (cognitive resource) are very limited, thus; precious resource. Instead of wasting it in choosing trivial things, one can use those conscious decisions in the critical areas of life.

Decision making is a discussion between your emotional mind and intelligent mind. Reducing ‘things’ opens the room to discuss somewhat better elements that moves you to the next level.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Eliminating the distractions. The plain environment reduces or nullifies the distraction to aid your focus on the work at hand. Everything we see, we hear will kindle a string of thought in our brain. When you focus, all the strings in the thought thread is together and works towards solving one problem or different branches of the same problem. Whichever object that sets a new string that is entirely not relevant to the current focus is a distraction. It is somewhat easy to eliminate unlike ‘triggers’.

Eliminating the triggers. It is similar to a distraction. But it will take you somewhere else. Most of the time it is because the object is bound with emotional memories or it may kindle an emotional memory in your brain. When I say emotion, it includes fear, joy even infatuations.

The difference between ‘distraction’ and ‘trigger’ is; the hurdles or small hiccup in the thought process is a distraction, sometimes it ends up with a deviation from the actual intended path of thinking (maybe towards a finding a solution) and comes back to the track when you realise it. The triggers, on the other hand, it will set you in the path which is unintentional leaving the path you wanted or planned to take afore the ‘trigger’. Mostly this triggers act just before you start your work.

In short, distraction is a hindrance in the flow, whereas the trigger sets you in a different but unintentional path to flow.

To explain with an example, when you see a bill(invoice or something) on your table which has a deadline today. You take a moment to pay the bill online and resume back to work you were at is a ‘distraction’.

In another case, when you see the same bill and the bill amount is not making you comfortable, so you check it and check your bank balance, then you got worried about your financial state, then started to work on a plan on how to reduce your spending and it goes on. Now you forgot the work you were in, now carried away in a different path. Now the same bill becomes a ‘trigger’.

Any object or an event comes to your attention can be your distraction or trigger. So, minimize the things that come to your attention, limit the problems you take up to solve. Let go of other things. Make your intelligent mind dominate your emotional mind while you face triggers (if not all the time, at least during focussed work).

Eliminating unwanted influence. A general view on minimalism paves on spending less (time and money) with things and utilizing more time with people. Even the idea of digital minimalism supports that view.

I suppose there are no authentic guidelines for minimalism, so I take the liberty to set my own.

I am not concerned about how many people I meet or how many friends I have. But I am concerned about the influence they have in my thoughts and decision. This is entirely a different topic which I want to cover later in Alvistor.

You can’t totally eliminate the influence. Yet, reducing the influence of the outer world to help you to go deep into thyself.

What I propose is, be strong to eliminate the influence of others. If it is so much hard for you, then, reduce spending time with others or minimizing the interactions to preserve oneself if you find the other person is too much influencing. Whether it is a good or bad influence, I don’t want to argue on that. It’s up to you.

We are the sum of all the people we have ever met

Dirk Wittenborn

For those who in the position to work with a lot of people, I suggest making a habit of regularly spending at least 5 minutes a day to self reflect your own thoughts. Where it came from, who planted the thought, etc, etc. In other words, it is called “Meditation”.

Remember, any advice is an option to consider.

You may fail sometimes if you are on your own. But you definitely grow in the mental solitude. I am not talking about lone-wolf kind of life. Fair warning, this may not fit for all.

We are the sum total of our experiences.

B.J. Neblett

Mental Minimalism = Mental Clarity

How this mental minimalism works or benefits with greater productivity?

Clarity reduces confusion. Let you know what to do next with what. Gives mental space to fiddle with new ideas rather than shrinking with trivia.

Focusing more on meaningful ideas and thinking rather than sticking with things and meaningless choices and silly thoughts.

The clear mind rejects the urge to solve the unwanted problems. Reduces the number of projects you take up at a given time. Investing your energy on tasks which have to be done in the first place.

for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Paerto Principle

Invest your precious energy in that 20 % area with the limited attention span you have got.

Reducing the number of areas to think will let you think deeper in one area (which is now you at). The growth will be more vertical rather than spent wasted horizontally. I understand horizontal growth is also important, but too much is horizontal is no growth.

Even though you consider the wider scope, but the minimal scope and good focus will help you to aim sharper and go longer.

If you add something to your mind, it should make you worry less or lessen your worry/confusion. It should not add up to the worries or things you need to eliminate already. Minimal things mean, minimal effort to maintain them. As like materialistic minimalism, minimal thoughts reduces the effort to keep you calm and clear.

Finally, I wish everyone, More mindful, meaningful, peaceful mind. Feel more heart full rather than feeling tangibles and temporary emotional gratifications.

Read More on Mental Minimalism for greater productivity

Vimium = Vim + Chromium. It’s just adopting the editing methods of ‘Vim’ on Chrome as a technique to navigating websites faster with keyboard and eliminating mouse. Vimium is a Chrome extension that brings that feature to Chrome. Two years back I wrote about Vimium on an article on ‘How to browse like a hacker‘.

Since the time I switched to Mac, a few things kept me switching from Chrome to Safari. One significant reason is the lack of Vimium like an extension for Safari.

Recently I found the port of Vimium to Safari based on original Vimium source codes. Vim + Safara = Vimari. A company owned by Daniel Compton from New Zealand successfully ported Vimium for Safari. Thanks, Daniel. Now I can browse like a geek in my Safari.

Why Vimari/Vimium?

It saves me a lot of time, really a lot when I use the keyboard to navigate websites. Dragging the mouse all over the screen to click a specific link is a bit of labour (I know, it’s an exaggeration). Vimium saves a fraction of seconds to a few seconds every time I use to click a link in a website. These fraction of seconds add up and saves me at least 10 minutes a day.

It may not look like a big deal. It’s not about the time saved. It’s about the speedy interaction, the gap between my mind to click a link and my hand click link decreases. This kind of helps me to keep me in the flow of my cognitive state when I browse with Vimium. You have to use it on your own to feel, how seamless it is to use, how naturally you can click links and browse. You have to feel it.

You can download and install Vimari, the extension for Safari from here. Safari is not yet my primary browser. For now, availability of Vimari became a good reason to consider Safari for all time use. By the way, at the time of writing this, I am still with Chrome as my first-browser.

Read More on Kill the mouse! Browse faster with Vimari for Safari

Ironically people who made the very phone, who wants you to use their products now want to help you to use it less. Google as a part of its ‘experimental projects’ for Digital Well-being has developed 3 dynamic wallpapers that will remind you to reduce phone usage.

1. Unlock Clock

This wallpaper counts the number of times you unlock your phone. Pretty straight forward way to tell you how much you addicted to your phone.

2. Screen Stopwatch

This counts the screen time, how long you are actively watching your phone screen. Pretty neat stats to remind you how much you have used your time with your phone.

3. Activity Bubble

This counts both time and number of times you used (or unlocked) your phone. But the wallpaper is more graphically and indirect than the above. The bubble number shows how many times you used the phone and the size of the bubble is directly proportional to the screen time duration.

Setting Up: Just install the apps and change the wallpaper to see them in action.

I personally use ‘Activity bubble’ wallpaper for the past few days. Felt kind of geeky, yet the change in the wallpaper never goes un-noticeable yet non-intrusive as the animation of the bubble adding-up is quite good.

Hmm. I have to agree that, sometimes I feel guilty to see my wallpaper. Quite frankly it has not yet started to help me to reduce the screen time. But it provokes the thought, I should reduce my phone usage with a little bit of soft guilt. I presume that to some of you people it will be a nagger.

Download:

1. Unlock clock
2. Screen stopwatch
3. Activity bubble

Read More on 3 Dynamic wallpapers to help reduce phone addiction

Firefox Focus – Firefox Lite

Firefox Focus is a very lightweight app purely focused on browsing securely and privately. I like the way it is designed, simple. Once you quit the app, it deletes everything. Including the cache and history. If your screen locks in the middle of your browsing, then you can only get back to the browsing through authenticating using a fingerprint. A browser that never leaves a footprint.

Download ‘Firefox Focus’ – iOS | Android. Unfortunately, for Android users, Firefox focus is not available for some country. In that case, you can use Firefox Lite.

I recommend keeping this as a secondary browser. You can have your normal browser for day to day activities, and use Focus/Lite to browse the web in private.

DuckDuckGo

So many of you know DuckDuckGo as a privacy-focused search engine but the DuckDuckGo available as an app can be used similar to Firefox Focus as secondary privacy browser while you can rely on some full-featured browsers for daily productivity works. It also blocks trackers and leaves no traces when you browse around, clears the history in one click.

Brave

Brave is a full-featured modern browser, supports trackers blocking by default. The additional good thing is, it can block the ads out of the box. As the browser is based on Chromium (on which Chrome and other major browsers like Edge, Vivaldi are built on) it supports all the extension built for Chrome. So if you’re switching from Chrome to Brave, you might not lose anything, yet gain privacy and speed. You can try Brave, which is available for all major platforms.

Ghostery

Ghostery mainly focusing on blocking ads now extends its hands for cleaner internet. If you’re obsessed with tracking how your privacy is ruined by trackers, then Ghostery provides extensive insights on those. But it is not what we need here. Ghostery is available as an extension for major browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari; I recommend to use iOS and Android app as a secondary browser but not as a default one.

Tor

Tor may seem to be a simple app but network it relies on to connect you to the internet is not simple. It provides really true anonymity over the internet. We’ve already covered about the Tor for android at Alvistor.

Despite its start-up delay (which usually takes 30 seconds to a few minutes) to establish a tor connection, it is a powerful browser focused more on privacy and security. Speed is little low (when compared to other browsers listed above) as a trade-off for true anonymity.

Other Full-featured Browsers

Albeit the popularity and domination of Chrome and Firefox, there are few browsers which are worth mentioning for its effort to make the browsing experience better, secure and private.

Safari for Mac and iOS environment offers classy privacy over the majority of trackers. Also the new powerful and extensively customisable browser Vivaldi for all major platforms. Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge are quite impressive in their effort. But I encourage you to use these full-featured browsers as primary and make these simplistic browsers handy when you need better privacy.

Why should you use two browsers? I will explain in the next post.

Read More on Simplistic browsers to try for privacy, security and speed

Evernote is a powerful note-taking app. Alfred on the other hand speedups your interactions with Mac. What will happen if you club their speed and power for note-taking activities in Mac? A deadly combination for saving time at work.

Caveat: You need Alfred Powerpack to use this workflow (worth the money)

Setting up Alfred for Evernote

Download Evernote workflow for Alfred 4 here, and install it. (intuitive procedure). That’s all. You’re now ready to feel the rapidness of Alfred, Evernote combo.

Press Cmd + Space (you can change this combination in Alfred’s preference) to launch Alfred and do most of the things you can do with your notes in Evernote; just quicker than ever.

These are the 2 basic functions I use frequently in Alfred to access my notes in Evernote.

• Type ens then your search query to search within Evernote
• Type enn and type your content, or press return to create a new note

There are some pretty advanced keywords are available in this ‘workflow’. Some of them I use are

• Copying the note content to the current application – Search for a note using ens keyword, then highlight the note then use Control key to paste the note text content to the topmost application
• Select multiple tags to fine-tune your searching – Just add a second hash sign and select or type the tag e.g. ens #tag1 #tag2: my search query
• Search within a notebook – ens @ to search in a selected notebook

I only depend on Alfred for using basic search and quick note-taking in Evernote. As most of my work happens inside Evernote, I don’t need Alfred when I work in the Evernote app. The search is the most used function in my daily activities.

Read More on Use Evernote faster with Alfred

Be it, handwritten notes, a printed document, books, whiteboard, contact cards (business card), newspaper ads, certificates anything that is important in physical form can be scanned and converted into an editable text or searchable document (pdf or image)

1. Google Drive

The most reliable way. Upload your scanned document into Google Drive and open the image file in Google Docs (right-click the image file inside Drive and choose Google Docs). That’s it. All text inside that image is extracted and presented in Google Docs along with the original image. See this link for more information.

Google actually does the job pretty well. Conversion quality is far better than any other ways mentioned in this post. Obviously, the content is editable and searchable.

This method supports multiple languages too. That’s a pretty good deal.

2. Microsoft Lens & OneNote

The best classy experience of scanning with ease. Just point at the object/document, scan. Viola! The is intelligent to apply appropriate settings based on the object focused on the camera. It automatically classifies the content as a document, whiteboard or a business card.

The app integrates well with One Drive and Office suite apps like Word, PowerPoint. I personally like the simplicity. If you convert the image into PDF, the OCR search might not work with some PDF readers.

Adding a scanned image to One Drive’s OneNote automatically converts the content into searchable. In case, if you don’t want to extract the text but want to search and find this particular document in future, then just put it in One Note.

App store | Play store | Free

3. OCR enabled mobile scanner apps

If you want a little more sophistication and you do the scanning (digital conversion) a lot, say bulk scanning; typically scanning an entire book, then you have to rely on powerful scanning apps. You need to shell out a few bucks for the power these apps offers. I will list the top 3 apps available both for iOS and Android.

1. CamScanner
2. Scanbot Pro
3. Adobe Scan

CamScanner is my best choice albeit its recent malware warning controversy in its android app. The free version is more than enough for normal day use (if you don’t bother the watermark at the end of each scan). I was using its premium version until they change the premium to the subscription model.

Now I rely on ScanBot, indeed a good app (quality differs based on your smartphone camera) but not as good as CamScanner. But its iOS app performs better than its kin on android.

If you already using Adobe products and heavily rely on PDF associated features, or Photoshop, Illustrator type of apps, then just go for Adobe Scan.

4. Note Taking Apps (Evernote, Google Keep)

If you were following Alvistor, by now you would have known, I am a big fan of Evernote Premium (worth every penny) has inbuilt OCR feature that can even recognize handwritings well and make them searchable. No worries of converting them into text and processing, organising them manually.

Evernote has a sufficiently good in-built scanner that can dynamically recognize the content and convert them appropriately. A business card is saved as a contact after scanning. Evernote also has great PDF and image annotating capabilities.

For short and quick OCR conversions, use the Google Keep app. The pretty tiny note-taking app powered by Google’s OCR services extracts the content in the snapped image and saves as a note along with the scanned image.

Google Keep: App store | Play store

Closing remarks

The listed ways are pretty easy and efficient. Choose the one that fits you well. In my experience with these methods, I rely mostly on Evernote for storing my handwritten and pdf documents. I capture all the business cards into Evernote. Personally using Google Drive to store documents (that also needs OCR) like certificates, photos and other documents.

For my work, I rely on CamScanner Pro for perfection and quality. But it is optional though.

Read More on 4 easy ways to scan a document and extract text

The big deal is you can achieve more with lesser keystrokes and in incredibly less time.

Alfred has many features built-in like Text expansion, hotkeys, file handling/searching, custom search engines, cascade copying, etc.

I am using Alfred in my personal Macbook Pro for the last 4 months. I astonished by its power. It has a bit lengthy learning curve. But the adaptation will definitely worth the effort of learning to use Alfred every day.

Opening a file, searching and locating a file in my Mac usually takes 5 to 6 seconds, sometimes 10 to 15 if it is deep inside in my folder hierarchy. But with Alfred, I can find/open the file in 2 seconds regardless of where it is located.

Text expansion literally saved me 10 minutes of typing in my everyday use.

It has even more powerful features that comes as a separate extension to the app as ‘powerpack’. There’s a feature called ‘Workflow’ which help you to automate many operations in your Mac. Potentially it has incredible power to maximise your productivity if you work lot in Mac.

Over the course, the time saved by Alfred will be huge, by reducing your interaction time; saving that few precious seconds for every action, every time.

If you haven’t used Alfred, test it now. It’s free. Download it here. For day to day use for beginners, the free version itself enough. I have already planned to cover more about using the Alfred app in future posts.

To have a better understanding of Alfred app, see the below video (video link) demonstrating all the astonishing features of Alfred (bit lengthy video).

Trivial fact: Alfred is the most used app in my Mac.

Read More on Save incredible time with Alfred for Mac

There are 3 types of occasions where I can’t rely on Notion, but Evernote which plays better and scores a lot more than Notion. I’ve already mentioned 10 reasons why Notion can’t replace Evernote a year before in alvistor. Here are 3 more big reasons why I still use Evernote even after I embraced the power of Notion for the past two years.

1. Ease of use – as Note-taking app

First of all, I need a good, reliable and powerful note-taking app. Notion is primarily NOT a note-taking app. But Evernote is. The need, the purpose determines which app performs best. For note-taking, Evernote easily wins with its ease of use approach.

If you write a lot, or if you take plenty of notes in a day, you will find Evernote does the job well for you than Notion. The reason is, Evernote can hold structureless text inside it, which is quite an important feature that a note-taking app should have. Later these notes can be organized by moving them into Notebooks and adding tags. Notion handles notes in a different way. Every sentence is a piece of block which can be moved along (though you can make it as a paragraph). It is more structured even you want it or not. That means, Notion can be used as a good information organizer, not a note-taking app.

If Evernote is not your cup of tea, then I recommend a different note-taking app instead of relying on Notion for the note-taking purpose.

Evernote works great for beginners. Because it is simple and powerful. You may be good with Notion, but people with whom you collaborate may not be that advanced like you. Most of the people I collaborate with find Evernote as better notes exchange tool when compared to Notion. (People fall in love with Notion once they started to use it. But when it comes to Notes, Evernote is a good choice for you and your fellow guys.

2. Quick Input & Retrieval of data

Quickly jotting in an idea, that comes to your mind in a flash. Evernote is quick and reliable for that. You can put that idea in the form of random text/sentence, an audio note, a picture captured by your phone. Notion lags behind in this area of quickly inputting the data into it, in my real-world experience. In Notion, that information is needed to be placed in a specific place inside a note which demands a quick-thinking process to decide where it goes. That few seconds delay, where I have the risk of losing that short-dwelling idea in the damn fast flashing mind.

The OCR (optical character recognition) capabilities that can convert your PDF documents, pictures, scanned documents, scanned business cards and other forms of content searchable and meaningful inside Evernote. Thus, it is quickly retrievable.

Evernote is more reliable and efficient in capturing the data and retrieving them when compared to Notion.

3. Better Smartphone & offline support

Evernote has better smartphone support by offering a native app for all major platform. A notion document dwells inside the smartphone app as a webpage (thus longer app-starting time), which restricts its potential of harnessing smartphone-only capabilities. Evernote can function great in offline, Notion is far from the stage where Evernote is now in offline support. You can’t blame Notion for minimizing the offline support, it is a more complex thing to achieve technically.

Evernote is snappy, both in smartphone and desktop/Mac. But for Notion, it gives me the same experience for both the web version and app version. When it comes to Notion, no content is stored offline (but syncs faster). So if I lack an internet connection (due to network coverage issues), it is difficult for me to edit my data or to add anything into the existing notes.

I really hope Notion will fill this shortfall in the near future to evolve as an even more complete service with all the note-taking capabilities. I relying on Evernote for these 3 big reasons even though I heavily use Notion for managing my content.

In my next article, I will explain how I use Notion and Evernote in conjunction. The two different apps for different purposes.

Read More on 3 big reasons to use Evernote alongside Notion

All the major E-mail service providers including Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail are feature-rich and provides huge specs from storage space, security to itty bitty things. But none of them leaves the user with complete privacy (iCloud users are blessed with little more privacy). Skipping the talk about lack of privacy in service provided by giants like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others, let us talk about Proton Mail. The mail service focused purely on privacy and anonymity on the internet.

Proton Mail, the mail service found by a group of scientist who has a shared vision of more secure and private internet for common people. The company is Swiss-based, so your privacy is heavily backed by strict Switzerland laws. Your email data is buried deep for security. Oh yes, literally their servers are under 1000 meters solid rocks of the Swiss mountain apart from the tight end-to-end encryption they offer by default.

The end-to-end encryption works only if both sending and receiving party own a Proton mail email account. Yet, they offer top-class privacy for normal mail sent to other normal mail accounts. When it comes to privacy, it preserves the anonymity when you own an account in Proton mail. That means you don’t have to give all your (true) personal details to create and operate an email account in Proton mail servers.

Proton mail web-based UI is modern, accessible and intuitive. They have their own, a nicely designed app for Android and iOS. You don’t have to be a techie to use the service. The E-mail is more functional rather than with unnecessary gimmick features.

Though it is not everyone’s choice, it is worth to have an account in Proton mail for occasional use. But if you have more concern about your privacy, then just switch to Proton mail. The free version offers 5 GB of space, which is more than enough for a common man. Yet, the premium version with higher features worth every penny.

Read More on Proton Mail – Privacy-focused E-mail service for FREE

WhatsApp doesn’t have to be the default app for messaging when we have better choices now. Telegram is the worthy contender, has all the eligibility to replace WhatsApp with undeniable reasons. On a side note, I dumped WhatsApp in favour of Telegram a year ago. Let me reason out why you have to start using Telegram right now, based on my experience and perspective.

1. Privacy & Security

The first and foremost reason is privacy. As soon as I heard the news Facebook is acquiring WhatsApp, I had this mild discomfort of losing my privacy. Unlike Facebook, I use WhatsApp more frequently and on a daily basis. Despite the end-to-end encryption provided (in later days), the data is still in the hands of Facebook.

secret chats & self-destructing messages

As Telegram offers end-to-end encryption for normal chats, it has this option called ‘secret chats’ which harnesses the true device to device basis end-to-end encryption. Which means a message is only read by the intended user, only on the intended device he/she owns. These secret chats are never stored in Telegram’s servers like the normal chats. It has the options to make the message self-destruct after a particular time, which can be set globally to the whole secret-chat or for only the single message concerned.

username vs phone number

Unlike WhatsApp, your phone number is not the primary identifier for your account. Telegram uses a username based identifier for every user. If the user wishes to hide his phone number, it is possible. Even people without your phone number saved in their phone can chat with you by only knowing your username. So, I don’t have to share my phone number to the unknown people and I don’t have to save other’s phone number in my contacts to chat. By the way, you can have your choice of username for your Telegram account (if it is not already taken).

2. Less Distracting

WhatsApp is now oversaturated in terms of the number of users. Too much of messages to consume and process. It is not acting as a chat-app now, it is more like a social network. Telegram is a clean chat app with pretty nice features yet focussing more on enriching the chat experience.

status updates

WhatsApp ‘Status’. Why? WhatsApp at its core is a chat app, it should stick to that. Now it’s like a cross-over of Instagram and FB Messenger. Even though I have the choice to ignore them, it is still annoying (just my personal opinion).

better group controls

Telegram group can hold up to 5000 users in a group, yet it is still very very less annoying compared to WhatsApp group which can only hold maximum of 255 users. Admins of Telegram groups can tweak the settings to leash the activities of the users. Admin can limit the frequency of the user posting message in a group. The group is more manageable than a WhatsApp group.

3. Cloud storage

All your messages, media files like pictures shared, links, videos, documents and even any kind of file you share in the chats will be stored in the cloud. You can access them anytime by logging into the app, any number of times, from anywhere. No backups needed.

4. Media Exchange

quality/media compression

WhatsApp compresses the images before sending them to other users. This reduces the file size, at the same time reduces the quality of the picture/video. Telegram offers an option to send the media content as it as or after compressing.

file size – file type

WhatsApp limits the maximum attachment size to 16 MB, whereas Telegram offers whooping 1.5 GB for a single file. Telegram supports almost any file type to share and stored in their cloud.

5. Multi-session, Multi-account and Multi-platform

In Telegram, the same account can be logged in from more than one device. WhatsApp limits this to one device for one phone number. ( I don’t count WhatsApp web as multi-session as it needs the phone to be actively connected to the internet, even if you do chat only from the web version of WhatsApp). Telegram has a standalone app for Mac, Windows and all other major platforms, obviously for all smartphone OSes.

You can have more than one Telegram account (obviously with different phone number) and use it simultaneously in the same device. This is great for people who have separate accounts for work, personal and they don’t have to carry two phones for it. WhatsApp never allows you to access two profiles in a single installation.

6. Channels, Bots

Telegram has a unique feature called ‘Channels’. It’s a more elegant and functional version of the ‘broadcast’ feature in WhatsApp. Channel allows two-way addition of users. Either the person who owns the channel can add the users or users can voluntarily subscribe to channels.

Bots is a unique, AI, Machine learning-based service dwells inside Telegram, which can be used to perform some simple tasks inside the chats. For eg., an image bot can pull images from the given name.

Can you trust Telegram? (Must Read)

WhatsApp will eventually try to monetize, so the Telegram. In one way or another, they have to earn money out of their service. There’s no free bread in this world. Telegram’s encryption model is criticized by many security experts. They store all our message data in cloud semi-permanently (you can adjust settings to auto-delete them) invokes some privacy concern and safety of the user data.

All their core development is closed, which means their security model and source code is not open for experts to certify its reliable and secure. So by all means, I am recommending to switch to Telegram, if you have WhatsApp on the other hand, Otherwise I don’t recommend both. I am not vouching for Telegram’s security promises.

Few things you miss if you switch to Telegram from WhatsApp

Read receipts in telegram won’t work like WhatsApp’s. WhatsApp has more than a billion active users while Telegram’s user base is in a couple of hundred million. So there is less chance you’ll find all your friends in Telegram.

Any doubts? Please put your thoughts in the comments section.

Read More on 6 big reasons why you should use Telegram instead of WhatsApp

The SMS’s client has distinct sections for messages based on their category and importance.

• Messages
  • Personal
  • Transactions
  • Promotions
  • Starred
• Reminders
• Finance
• Offers

The app uses machine learning algorithms to distinguish and segregate the messages to put them in the above-mentioned categories. So far, it never made a mistake in 6-month usage. The less important or spam messages fall into the ‘Promotions’ folder, which comes with a handy setting to automatically delete the month-old messages. You can tweak the settings even to a week.

This app works offline well, as the processings are in-app, within the device. It can read a message and present them neatly, more human-readable form for quick understanding. It can convert a credit card bill reminder to reminders based on processing the due date in the message and present it as an actionable card. Even your online purchases, Train reservations, Flight tickets, Hotel bookings, movie tickets and many more. (see below screenshots)

The finance section is cool. The developers brought the game to a different level. Based on the transactional messages, the app can estimate your bank balance, credit dues on your credit cards, even your digital wallet account balance. It literally reduced my time browsing through messages or checking my bank app. Though it is not accurate, as it depends on the transaction message, it is quite helpful. (see below screenshot)

Apart from automatic smart reminders, you can set your own reminders, tagging a message. The ability to ‘star’ a message as an important one helps me to pick them quickly when it is needed real quick. No need to scroll through thousands of message.

OTP messages are real deal here. It can show your OTP message as a snap-in the notification, pretty easy to read it and then delete it then and there. Everything, every aspect of the SMS is nicely played.

The perfect app you need for managing your SMS. It does the most job for in organizing, declutters your inbox in a snap. It has a pretty good option for back up, which you can back up to Google Drive and get them back if you change another phone.

As far as privacy is concerned, don’t worry, your data never leaves your device. All the intelligent process that filters your message is happening as an in-app activity. (The app promises this “We do not upload your SMS data anywhere. Your personal information stays in your device and is not shared anywhere.”)

Read More on Microsoft’s SMS Organizer app declutters and organises SMS’s smartly for you

Before letting the list roll-on, readers should know I use a Mac on home, PC at work and use Android as a daily runner for casual and professional computing.

Apps that dwells in all platforms I use

These apps are truly multi-platform, so no hurdles in using them on all my devices.

1. Todoist
2. Evernote
3. Notion
4. Newton Mail
5. Google Calendar
6. LastPass
7. Chrome with Vimium
8. Google Drive
9. Grammarly

On Android

1. SMS Organizer – Intelligent SMS app by Microsoft
2. Cam Scanner – For scanning documents and receipts
3. Screen Master – For marking up images and editing screenshots

Apps for Privacy, Security and Performance

1. 1.1.1.1 and Warp+
2. Proton Mail
3. TOR Browser
4. VPN Secure – Get best VPN deals at StackSocial

Other Apps worth mentioning

1. Exercise Timer
2. Running by Adidas
3. Pocket
4. Novo Launcher with Sesame
5. Feedly 
6. Telegram

On my Mac

I am new to Mac. So far for the last 3 months, the best app that reduces my working time and increases my productivity in Mac is Alfred. Other than that, few of Mac’s default apps are helping significantly for my productivity.

1. Alfred for Mac

Read More on Top Productivity and Privacy Apps I use in 2019