We were all running around and laughing when we heard it. At first, it was too quiet to discern what the sound was. I moved toward it slowly, but stopped short when it came again - a scream. This time I ran. As I came close to the retention pond I could barely see the other side with all the reeds towering above me. What I could see was the brick wall that surrounded a neighboring subdivision. I strained my neck to find a better view when suddenly the reeds on the other side of the pond began thrashing violently and then that piercing scream again.

I snapped around to realize that the whole gaggle of neighborhood kids had followed me down here. I quickly scanned for the face of my little sister. Was that her screaming? No, she was there with me, her little body shaking and her glassy eyes reflecting the same fear that made my own body feel like ice.

"That's the alligator pond!" one child hollered.

We needed a grown-up. Now.

I ran back toward our apartments screaming for help then waited helplessly as one of the parents ran around the pond to investigate. My young mind raced with vivid imaginings of sheer carnage. It felt like we waited there for an hour. When the adult finally returned alone I was sure that someone had died.

"We were too late..."

Present Day

Spoiler alert! No one died. No one was hurt. I'm not even sure there was an alligator in that pond. We learned that the little girl had managed to climb over and fall off the brick wall that separated her backyard from the pond. The grown-up was able to untangle her from the reeds, but the child was too young to know where she lived. They had to go door-to-door before finally finding her mother who hadn't even realized she was missing.

Addresses

Back then, this whole ordeal provided a great teaching moment for all the parents:

"Memorize our address and home phone number."

"Stay inside the sidewalk line that circles our block."

"Come in when the street lights come on."

"No code. No go. Apple bottom."

Things have changed a lot since then. The migration of nearly every component of my life from analog to digital is almost funny to think about. Back then, there were physical addresses of the places I frequented, home phones tethered to someone's wall, and the dewey decimal system - fixed coordinates for static places with tangible bounds. Now it's deep links, URLs, and handles - all dynamic, constantly in flux, moving.

P.S. - If you wanna go deep on the intersection of our physical and digital lives, Drew Austin has a killer newsletter that blows my mind every time: Kneeling Bus.

So how do we wrangle the madness that is our list of web addresses? How do we find what we’re looking for when we’re looking for it? How do we cut the cruft when an address is no longer meaningful to us?

First, I want to point out how absolutely WILD it is that this even a relevant topic at this point. I grew up in the 90’s. I haven’t touched a landline in over a decade. My kids have never known a world without high-speed internet in your pocket let alone on a computer.

So why is tab overload still a thing???

Digital [Il]literacy

There's a term called digital literacy and Wikipedia defines it as:

An individual's ability to find, evaluate, and communicate information using typing or digital media platforms. It is a combination of both technical and cognitive abilities in using information and communication technologies to create, evaluate, and share information.

We're living in an explosive time in terms of technological advancement, which means there are lots of new technologies at our disposal from which we can "create, evaluate, and share information." Things are constantly changing and we're having to constantly change to keep up.

And if we go by this definition, we've only been in this period of transition for about 40 years! That may sound like a long time, but it terms of human history it's almost nothing. Even in comparison with more recent technological advancements it's not that long.

High-Tech: Railroads and Telephones

I liken this to railroads and telephones in America. Those technologies completely changed society, but it took time to build the infrastructure and time for society to acclimate to it.

Regarding railroads, Wikipedia states:

The American railroad mania began with the founding of the first passenger and freight line in the country, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, in 1827

and

By 1880 the nation had 17,800 freight locomotives carrying 23,600 tons of freight, and 22,200 passenger locomotives. The U.S. railroad industry was the nation's largest employer outside of the agricultural sector. The effects of the American railways on rapid industrial growth were many, including the opening of hundreds of millions of acres of very good farm land ready for mechanization, lower costs for food and all goods, a huge national sales market, the creation of a culture of engineering excellence, and the creation of the modern system of management.

It took about 50 years to get the infrastructure (and all the other systems that that entailed) in place at scale, which brought increasingly lower costs, greater access, and greater societal impact. That's five decades for our society to adopt a new technology that fundamentally altered how we move stuff across greater and greater distances.

Regarding telephones, Wikipedia states:

The telephone played a major communications role in American history from the 1876 publication of its first patent by Alexander Graham Bell onward

and

In 1890, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one telephone while a majority did by 1946 and 75 percent did by 1957

This time it took roughly 80 years to get things all laid out for widespread usage of a technology that would make it easier and cheaper than ever to share ideas across any distance.

Going back to that article by the University System of Georgia:

January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP).

Wikipedia states:

The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was rapid in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007

By this math, we saw a major shift from the implementation of this new technology called "the internet" within 30 years. However, I remember using the internet in 2007 and it sucked ass.

I'd argue that, between fiber optic, 5G networks, and Starlink, we're only just NOW beginning to enjoy the broader benefits of internet infrastructure at scale. Hence the explosion of things like VR headsets, the internet of things, and (perhaps most notably) large language models (LLMs). The internet (ok, and processing power) have now gotten cheap enough (and small enough) to really open up vastly new ways of operating as a society.

We're effectively 40 years into this ordeal whereas it took us 50 years and 80 years for railroads and telephones respectively. We're still learning this thing. We're still developing our digital literacy skills. And we still don't know what the fuck we're going to do with all of those open tabs in Chrome.

A New Paradigm

I'd like to propose a structured way of looking at links that has helped me refine my skills when it comes to managing URLs. In other words, this mental model has helped me choose the right "technologies to create, evaluate, and share information".

How to Categorize Links

My "matrix" works off of the two most important properties of any given link:

1. Frequency: "How many times do I access this link per day? per week? per year?

2. Permanence: "Will I care about this link a year from now? Next month? In 5 minutes?

How to Find Tooling

Based on where a given link fits on the graph, I'd posit that it merits very different tooling based on the relevance of the following factors in interacting with said link:

• Accessibility: "How much friction can I tolerate in accessing this link?"

• Organization: "How well will I remember where I put this link?"

• Context: "How much will I remember about the significance/utility of this link?"

• Clean-up: "How easy do I want it to be to delete this link?"

What I'm going to use the rest of this article to accomplish is to show you how I categorize links and how I chose the tools I use. The tools I use don't ultimately matter. What's important is how I selected the tools I chose. If any of the tools I highlight seem like a fit with your personal way of working, great! If not, also great! My goal is to give you a mental model to help shape the way you interact with the internet so that you can be more intentional and have more fun (and less stress!).

My Tools

TL;DR

If you're just here for the tools, here they are! Arc for browsing, Raindrop for an additional layer of bookmark management, and Reader as my read-it-later app of choice. Skip to the bottom for a video tour of all three.

High Permanence, High Frequency

Like my wallet, phone, and keys - I give myself a quick pat-down before I leave the house and then I can pull any one of these out without ever looking

These links are here for the long haul and they will get beat to death. Whatever system you use to access these needs to be easy-to-use and rugged as hell.

Accessibility: High

Because I'm using these multiple times every day, any friction in accessing them will compound over time...quickly.

Organization: Low

I reap the benefits of muscle memory on this one. The more I use these links the more ingrained their location becomes in my memory.

Context: Low

Again, because I'm getting so much practice in using these, the smallest visual clue isn't even necessary. I really just need something big enough to click/tap and in a fixed position over time.

Clean-Up: Low

Don't touch my links, bro! These are permanent fixtures, so it can be a total pain in the ass to delete them - I'll never know.

Low Permanence, High Frequency

The butt-wipes of the web - I use 'em once and toss 'em. Depending on the day (and my fiber intake), this could happen a LOT.

You want tooling here that's just as easy to delete as it is to open. Things like finding that meme, or looking up that keyboard shortcut, or converting teaspoons to ounces, or looking up the time in PST.

Accessibility: High

I have a quick question and I want a quick answer. Double-points for a global keyboard shortcut here.

Organization: Low

What's to organize? This link is useful for as long as it takes you to read the answer it displays.

Context: Low

Again, you're never going to see this link again - you've brought the context with you.

Clean-Up: High

This is crucial. Let these links die. They've had their time and now it's time for URL heaven.

High Permanence, Low Frequency

That one really nice outfit you had to wear to weddings and funerals as a kid. You know, the one that your mom would murder you over if anything happened to it.

There are a lot of really fun use cases for this one. Like my list of favorite apps, and my list of favorite gear. I even do my family wishlists this way!

The most important thing here is that these links are important, but the low frequency of access means you're probably going to forget a lot about them. You need systems in place to augment this for you.

Accessibility: Low

Low frequency means that I won't mind a little friction. We've got room to optimize for context here, so it's probably best to deviate from your browser on this one.

Organization: High

Low frequency = less memory practice = more forgetting = we need some powerful search up in this bitch! Double-points for tags and other searchable metadata.

Context: High

"I saved this link a year ago and marked it #important, but what the hell for!?"

...Don't be that guy.

Clean-Up: Low

The low accessibility of this tool will lend to you being more selective about what you put in it, so deleting things will be less important.

The Sweet Spot

The perfect ratio of milk to breakfast cereal. This one's pretty personal and totally depends on your life at that moment.

I treat this one as a catch-all of sorts because it can be really different if I'm on my phone vs. computer, focused on a project vs. trying to learn something new.

Side Note

When it comes to milk and cereal, I want to go on record as saying that the sequence is always cereal first, THEN the milk. Folks who pour the milk in first are probably murderous psychopaths and if that is you, please seek help.

This is the area that I feel most browsers are actually built to handle. Tabs for things you need to keep referencing throughout the day, but don't need tomorrow. Bookmarks for the things you want to keep around a little longer.

Accessibility: Medium

Because I see this as the realm of daily "work", this should be quick and easy to access, but not at the expense of good organization and clean-up.

Organization: Medium

I really appreciate some good hierarchal layering here. I'm using these links pretty regularly, so I can even go pretty deep with nesting this stuff. The trick is being able to switch between multiple links quickly here.

Context: Medium

Again, there's enough frequency here to limit the need for a ton of context. However, double-points if you can use a tool to help you organize these by high-level contexts or "areas" (ex. these bookmark folders are for this project, these folders are for this other project). I love browsers like Arc, Vivaldi, and Stack for this.

Clean-Up: Medium to High

This is the hardest part of this whole mental model. I suggest finding a tool that will close all of your tabs at a set cadence so that it forces you to organize a link or let it die. You'll waste way more time trying to find links buried in your sea of tabs every day than you will looking for the occasional deleted tab in your browser history.

Unknown Permanence, Unknown Frequency

A digital mailbox...but for links...and not for email.

Ok, look, I know email is literally a digital mailbox, but I really like this analogy here and I hate email, so please just let me have this!

This is for all of those links you get from bloggers, news outlets, and (if you're really cool) RSS feeds. You don't know if it's great or if it's trash, but you don't have time to find out right now. So you need an inbox and a way to parse it later. This is why I think read-it-later apps can be so great.

Accessibility: Low

These kind of links can be a real time suck and make for a great distraction when you're trying to write that blog post on URLs that you've been trying to finish for days. You want to be able to send these links away for parsing later and DON'T want them to be easy to get to. Double-points for share extensions and browser plugins.

Organization: Low

This is more of an inbox model, so some organization is good, but it's best to keep this more fluid. Double-points for tagging, assistive organization features, and killer search.

Context: High

Depending on how often you go through this inbox, context could help you parse these faster. Double-points for AI summaries, especially when you follow authors with ultra-cheeky titles and summaries.

Clean-Up: High

This one has the potential to become a total shit-show. I HIGHLY recommend purging your collection of subscriptions as part of the setup process for any new app in this category. Ask yourself, "Do I actually want to read this person's stuff? Or do I feel like I should read their stuff?"

“Should read”!?

Fuck that.

Reading “should” be fun.

Have fun and unsubscribe away.

Summary

I hope this article helped you think of links in a new way and maybe even gave you some practical ideas about how you can be more intentional about your usage of links across your digital life. If you'd like to see a more in-depth look at how I use the tools I described above, you can check out the video below.

Fortunately, I’ve found a way around this. 

Enter Spotlight

MacOS has a feature called Spotlight Search. If you're not already familiar with it, it's basically a universal search bar with access to many of the apps and data on your machine. Plus, you can manifest it on any screen in any context using the global keyboard shortcut CMD + SPACE. It's amazing. But it's limited.

Introducing Raycast

Raycast follows a similar concept, but it goes way beyond search and actually incorporates functionality from across your machine's app ecosystem. It's an API for your whole Mac.

You can effectively replace Spotlight search by pointing the global shortcut to Raycast instead. Once that’s done, you’ll have access to a slew of built-in extensions developed directly by Raycast. The real magic, though, is found in their store. 

Raycast’s extension ecosystem is open. And by that I mean that anyone can submit extensions for consideration in their store. At the time of this writing, they have over 1,500 extensions available! If you can think of something you’d like Raycast to support, there’s a good chance someone has already built an extension for it.

Use Cases

I think the best way to convey just how valuable this tool can be is to show you. The rest of this post will walk you through the top ways I use Raycast every day. Hopefully, if you do give it a try, this post will spark some ideas on how to make your day a little better.

Mini Calendar

I just looked at my toolbar to see that my next meeting starts at 1pm. That gives me three hours to wrap up the things I’m working on this morning.

To accomplish this, I’m using an extension called “My Schedule”. This feature alone has made Raycast my favorite thing ever. I have this configured to pull from both my personal and work calendars, so I never miss what’s coming. But more importantly, it helps me keep an eye on how much time I have to keep working in my current context. 

“I have 55 minutes left to finish this focus work.”

“I need to wrap this meeting up in the next 7 minutes.”

I can also look ahead at the rest of my day with the click of a button. I’m in love.

Clipboard History

I find myself constantly needing to copy various snippets across one page and paste them all into my notes. Here’s an example. Yesterday I had an architectural review meeting with my development team and we ended up talking about two very specific snippets of code in GitHub. For posterity, I wanted the permalink for both snippets (so we could all find them quickly later) as well as the snippets themselves (so I could document what we were considering changing).

Normally, I would have copied and pasted four times from my browser over to my note taking app. Instead, I stayed on the page and copied all four snippets and then went over to my notes and used Raycast to paste them in.

Magic!

What’s also great about this is that I need to go back and grab something I copied yesterday, I can do that. I can even pin certain entries if I find myself going back for them over and over.

iTerm / Terminal / CLI

I occasionally use iTerm to run command line-y things. I’m not a programmer, so I don’t spend a ton of time doing this and haven’t learn all the little tricks to become a hacker. Because of this, I often use Raycast to open iTerm from the Finder directory I’m currently viewing. 

Window Management

This one’s fun because it leverages Raycast’s global shortcuts configurations. I always use two monitors during the day and often find myself switching which monitor I’m running an app from or manipulating the sizes of my app windows for multitasking. Raycast has a robust system of commands for manipulating the size and position of your windows. Raycast also allows you to configure global shortcuts for any command across your setup. These are the ones I currently use the most and have shortcuts for, but there are loads more options to choose from

Snippets

This one is something I’ve only just started using. This is because I’ve already built a pretty extensive list of text replacements in MacOS itself. 

If you didn’t already know, you can actually set up a series of automated text replacements that get associated with your Apple ID and shared across your devices (click here for more info).

This is great for when you want to…

• Prevent autocorrect from replacing your colorful texts with the word “ducking”

• Automate repetitive typing for things like your address, email address, and phone number

• Quickly find that calendar emoji you use in all of your task lists

• Type the actual ⌘ or ⌥ symbols instead of Googling, copying, and pasting them

As you can see, I’m all in on this feature. However, Raycast again goes a step further with this idea by adding Dynamic Text. And this shit is wild! Check out all the different hooks you can use:

The way I’m using it right now is for note templating. I’m in a lot of meetings and it’s helpful for me to start my meeting notes with a few things to help me scan my notes later:

• An Emoji

• This is for visual scanning

• Meeting notes start with 📆

• Ad hoc notes start with 📌

• A Title

• The Date

Here’s my snippet in Raycast:

GIF Search

This one is probably the most important on this entire list. I have mine configured with a global shortcut: ⌥ + G. This way I have the quickest draw when posting that dank meme on the team Slack.

Links, Links, Links!

Finding links is also made easier by Raycast. Arc is my current browser of choice and their extension exposes a TON of info for searching:

• Favorites

• Bookmarks

• History

• Suggestions

• Open Tabs

I also use Raindrop.io pretty extensively and I can search those links as well.

Conclusion

This post is getting kinda long, so I’m going to cap it here. There’s tons more to explore in Raycast so definitely check it out. And if you’re interested more posts like this in the future, please let me know in the comments and I’ll write about more fun stuff you can do with this tool.

Until then, have a fun, productive, and fulfilling week!

Funny story: I started writing this post with a completely different set of links. However, as I started writing down my thoughts a much bigger concept began to take shape. More on that to come ;)

This Week's Finds

Romano Tours

This is an older sketch, but it makes me giggle every time.

If you are sad where you are and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before, just in a new place. Does that make sense?

There's a lot a vacation can do. Help you unwind. See some different looking squirrels. But it cannot fix deeper issues like how you behave in group settings or your general baseline mood. That's a job for incremental lifestyle changes sustained over time.

You Don’t Need to Work on Hard Problems

Ben Kuhn is amazing. He puts out some really great content and his essays just hit different.

He's a Harvard grad who most notably worked with a company called Wave, building "ways for unbanked people in sub-Saharan Africa to send and save money"; and Anthropic, a really cool AI company whose latest model Claude 3 is breaking all kinds of records.

More info on Ben below:

• https://www.benkuhn.net/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/benskuhn/

But I digress - back to the article!

This particular article is really shaping how I work. His primary point is to make sure your heuristic for prioritizing work is dialed in.

It can be tempting (for so many reasons!) to chase after "hard problems". For me these might be problems that are high-visibility, complicated, or exciting. Or maybe it's that problem that would just seem really impressive if someone fixed it.

Here's the problem Ben points out: there is rarely a direct correlation between the difficulty of solving a problem and the value derived from solving said problem. He encourages us instead to pursue important problems - what are the levers you can pull that would have the greatest impact?

For me, this is playing out in learning to delegate better. I'm a product manager at an insurance software company. I'm realizing I spend too much time on the tiny details of our projects - tiny details that other members of my team are much more qualified and positioned to solve.

My levers are elsewhere and oftentimes less visible, so I'm learning to listen more to Ben's advice and less to the screams of my superego 🙃

Attention is Your Scarcest Resource

Another gold nugget from Ben. In a nutshell: focus leads to productivity!

Here's the note I wrote to myself after reading this:

What are the handful of things that will actually lead to you meeting your goals?

1. Find ways to get emotionally invested in them

2. Stay focused on them even when other things seem like they would FEEL more fulfilling

3. Cut out, contain, or prioritize all the other bullshit competing for your focus

Ben Kuhn's Blog Recommendations

Since I'm apparently crushing on Ben today, I'll go all out here. I got giddy when I found this page. It's just a stack of super solid content. Dig in and get smart, y'all.

Closing Remarks

• Please reply with any comments, links, puns, or wit you think adds to the conversation!

• I'm using Readwise Reader to power this series and I put all my articles/highlights/notes in this feed.

That's all for this weekend - I hope you all enjoy this as much I did in preparing it 😘

This Week's Finds

Positive Affirmations for Site Reliability Engineers

A video by KRAZAM

Mindfulness is important for everyone! LOL, I nearly peed the first time I watched this parody clip. Maybe take a potty break before watching 😜

A morte devagar

A poem by Martha Medeiros

So, I actually read this poem some time ago in the product description for a kick-ass t-shirt. The shirt has a snail version of the grim reaper with text that reads "COMFORT IS A SLOW DEATH" (it's amazing 🐌💀).

The point? Take risks. Try new things.

Live.
Your.
LIFE.

Anyway, the poem came to mind again this week during a conversation with two very close friends of mine. One of them was sharing the fear and doubt he had been dealing with lately since founding his new tech startup.

"Did I make the wrong decision?"

"Was this a bad move for my family?"

"Can I handle this???"

This guy is such an inspiration to me and I'm always so proud of him, so it tore me up to hear the pain and doubt in his voice. That's when I remembered the poem.

He was doing the hard work of pursuing his dream, making something from nothing, trying something no one else had. His life is beautiful! I got the chance to remind him of that.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I want to live that kind of life. I want to surround myself with folks that live like that. I want to live my life open and raw enough that those beautiful people I've surrounded myself with can see good in me when I can't.

I refuse to die slowly. How about you?

So, this week I'll keep things a little shorter and see how that feels. Let dig in...

This Week's Finds

Only in Monroe

A video with Stephen Colbert

This is an older interview I stumbled across. Stephen and his guest talk about rap music, whether the artist has even been "feat-ed", and Stephen evens encourages the man to consider pursuing a "real" career.

The interviewee's name is Marshall Mathers.

Sharing Slow Ideas

An article by Atul Gawande

This New Yorker article had many stories that were powerful and compelling, but here's the rub: real change doesn't happen until we change people's norms, and those norms don't change outside of the context of relationships.

Technology in and of itself will never replace the power of social connection and trust.

Read Something Wonderful

This site is run by the folks behind the Matter read-it-later app. Those guys are doing a bunch of really great stuff, but this project is just so different and refreshing that I had to share.

Here's how they describe the site:

We spend most of our time building reading software, but we made this site because we felt something was off in the modern media environment. You probably feel it too.

We're referring to novelty bias, the way our feeds and headlines are tuned to show us what's new, not what's best.

Most of the best writing was not created in the past year. Yet most of what we get served is from the past 24 hours. We're stuck in a cycle of ephemeral content consumption, what David Perell calls the "Never-Ending Now."

This site is intended to be a counterweight to the Never-Ending Now, an access point to writing that has stood the test of time.

That’s all for this weekend - I hope you all enjoy this as much I did in preparing it 😘

Also, if you ever want to get a sneak peak on future editions, I’m using Readwise Reader to power this and I put all my articles/highlights/notes in this feed for you all to access whenever you want!

Bookmark "The Stack"

I ❤️ My 🧠

I’ve noticed a pattern in my life and I’m not sure where it came from or how I came to develop it, but I’ve genuinely benefitted from it tremendously. It’s not some checklist I go through - half the time I’m not even sure I’m conscious that I’m doing it! I think it’s just how my brain works:

1. I shift my perspective to be a conscious observer of my life

2. This makes me curious and I ask lots of questions

   1. “I completely reverted my previously positive tone about this project when sharing it with this specific person. How come?”

   2. “Weird, I kept pulling on my hair during that meeting. It was like I couldn’t stop. A nervous tick, maybe? What’s that about?”

   3. “Why did I get so frustrated that my child wanted three kisses for bedtime?”

3. As I think through the answers to those questions I begin to piece together new “draft” mental models to help

   1. “I respect that person and want them to respect me, but I’m an imposter so I have to be someone else in order to get that from them”

   2. “When I build up emotional energy, whether it’s ‘positive’ (excitement) or ‘negative’ (stress), I need a physical outlet or it can turn to depression”

   3. “Bedtime routines are boring and I’m in a hurry to get back to the ‘meaningful’ tasks of my life - any ‘interruptions’ could make me ‘unproductive’ and therefore ‘worthless’”

4. I do a cursory review of any memories I can think of from similar past scenarios, running them through the context of the new mental model to see if it “fits”

5. If it does fit, I make a note in my head and keep an eye out for future opportunities to test the theory

6. As I test, the theory evolves and I begin little experiments to tweak things

   1. Experiment: Add More Vulnerability
      “Hey, I really think this is a good idea and I’m excited about it, but I feel like maybe you won't - can we talk about this?”

   2. Experiment: Treat This Behavior Like a Phone Reminder
      “Ahh, I’m pulling on my hair - time to stand up and take some whiteboard notes!”

Journaling Suuuuuuucks

I’m looking over the list above and I’m smiling - its so organized. So linear. But I have to admit - this isn’t always real and the biggest hangup I have is with bullet #1. Being mindful on a consistent basis feels nearly impossible…unless I’m journaling regularly.

But journaling is hard, too!!!

1. My thoughts move fast and slow writing (or typing) speeds create a ton of friction that kills my flow state

2. I grok things better when I can “think out loud” - connecting different ideas as the words come out of my head

3. I can read way faster than I can talk, so I don’t want to have to listen to audio recordings to review past journal entries

One Simple Trick to Fix My Whole Life and Solve All My Problems

So instead of beating myself up for not being able to think and process and journal like that guy on YouTube that makes it sound so easy, I decided to do the hard thing: I made someone else do it for me 😜

Check out the video below to learn about the script I built for my iPhone that let’s me:

• Record my thoughts verbally

• Consume my thoughts visually, and

• Use AI to bridge the gap so I don’t have to

Wanna try it???

Click the button below to download my shortcut and you’ll be guided through the setup process automatically.

Here’s how I use it:

1. Record a stream of consciousness journal entry in the Voice Memos app

2. Use the share sheet to send that memo to the journal shortcut

3. The shortcut does its thing and then shows me the parsed journal entry in the iOS Journal app to confirm before saving

4. Periodically skim the Journal app to remind myself of the positive takeaways and introspective questions

Download the Shortcut

Further Reading

• To learn more about Apple Shortcuts, check this page out: https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios

• To find or share other cool shortcuts, check these platforms out:

  • https://routinehub.co/

  • https://shareshortcuts.com/

  • https://github.com/MikeBeas/switchblade

Closing Remarks from ChatGPT

I wanted to give me faithful digital assistant a chance to say a few words since he’s the real star of this show! 🫶🏻

Happy weekend, friends!

I’m still working to build this newsletter out (thanks for your patience!), but one of the things I’m ready to introduce now is “The Stack”.

Every weekend I’ll share a few articles or hidden internet gems that caught my eye in recent weeks. While I plan to focus my regular programming on cool software, workflows, and productivity, I’ll use this segment to share what often amount to more mindfulness-focused content I’ve uncovered.

While I LOVE playing with new stuff to help me with my work, I also need to acknowledge how easy it is for these things to take over my life. If you’re anything like me, you have some crisis at least once a year where you just “HAVE” to find a new note-taking app 🫠

So this feature is actually super intentional. It’s a chance to keep me balanced in the kind of content I’m delivering, to keep us balanced in the culture we’re creating together, and it’s a chance to keep you balanced too if you need it.

And if you don’t need it then I think you’ll still really enjoy it - I’ve got some really great authors I want to introduce you to 🫶🏻

🥞
THIS WEEK’S FINDS

It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly

An article by Cal Newport

My Thoughts

Cal wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work. If you haven’t read these yet, please stop reading this and go read those now.

Cal’s big thing is that the key to a killer career is FOCUS. Cut out distractions → do deep work → get really good at your craft → get noticed by folks that can see the difference in your quality of output → dictate the life you want. (That’s a crass summary, please read the books.)

This article is actually a follow-up to this 2016 article where he suggested that maybe social media wasn’t the best thing ever. It’s a little funny to look back on it now, but back then folks lost their shit at the notion. His point is that now our society is starting to realize, “Oh, hey. Maybe we should think for ourselves and not just assume all new technology is good for me.”

My Takeaways

Technology excites me. I love “the new”. But reading this is making me realize I want to ensure my life is not dictated by the latest shiny thing.

I’m asking myself,

• How can I make it routine to conduct small experiments with new tools and toys instead of diving in head-first?

• What’s my rubric for determining the “good” or the “bad” in the tech I do invest my time in?

Further Reading

Cal references You Are Not a Gadget and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier and I immediately bought them (hope to start them soon!). Jaron is known as the “grandfather of VR” and his website is so crappy that you just know he’s got to be a tech genius.

For further evidence of this crap/genius correlation, see Paul Graham’s site. He’s the co-founder of Y Combinator, started Hacker News, and is easily one of the most influential voices in tech today. Plus, his essays are worth their weight in gold.

Energy Makes Time

An article by Mandy Brown

So I honesty don’t know how I stumbled upon this little nugget, but fuck me if it hasn’t completely changed the way I think about…well, everything!

Just check out this quote 🤯

I feel like I’ve heard SO much about how time is our most precious resource because once it’s gone, it’s gone. But this article blew my mind with this concept that time isn’t linear. That’s probably not the scientifically accurate way of describing this idea, but realizing that time can slip through my fingers faster or slower depending on the energy I bring has really given me pause.

My Takeaways

I’ve really started intentionally exploring ways of harnessing time better. I’m asking myself, as Mandy does at the end of this piece, “How does doing what I need make time for everything else?”

Some of the things I’m trying:

• Yoga
  I’ve never tried this before and I am fantastically terrible at it, but I feel so relaxed and simultaneously alive when I’m done.

• Fiction reading
  So I realized the other day that the last piece of fiction I read was back in college! Luckily, I had ChatGPT to graciously guide me 🤣

Further Reading

So I knew very little about Mandy even after reading this article for the first time, but her CV is crazy!

The thing that really got me excited about her experience though was when I realized she’s the co-founder of A Book Apart. I cut my teeth on web design stuff back in high school with their stuff and nearly worshipped their other co-founder, Jeffrey Zeldman. Jeffrey basically built the internet as we know it today.

She also runs A Working Library that is just a treasure trove of great reading, like this beautiful snippet:

“Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for.” Ashley Shew’s brisk and funny treatise provides a clear framework for assessing and interrupting the ways that technology and ableism conspire against human flourishing. Shew centers the lived experience of disabled people (including herself) and is unflinching in her predictions for all our futures: not only is disability a natural and unavoidable part of our own small lives, it’s also the state of the planet we live in. Rather than trying to abolish disability—an impossibility—Shew argues that we need to adapt to live with and alongside it. And she shows how much richer our lives will be when we do.

That’s all for this weekend - I hope you all enjoy this as much I did in preparing it 😘

Also, if you ever want to get a sneak peak on future editions, I’m using Readwise Reader to power this and I put all my articles/highlights/notes in this feed for you all to access whenever you want!

Bookmark "The Stack"

Lots of questions, right? I’m not alone in this. Many search engines have started scraping the answers to these types of questions from their top results.

A better way…

This workflow can feel tedious and I wondered if AI could provide a better alternative. Here’s what it looks like in Claude and ChatGPT 3.5.

Pretty cool, right? It's quick, it's fun, and it's AI so you just automatically feel sexier as a person. Win, win, win.

After using these flows for a while I found myself wanting to see the sources and double check things. Unfortunately, these tools don't really support that.

Sources

But I knew of another manifestation of ChatGPT that does: Bing Chat! I've played with this tool in the past, but mainly because Microsoft has it plastered all over anything Bing-related online. It's a cool idea, but it's a constant distraction on the Bing search results pages and I've found myself hating it merely on principle. That's not a good reason and I admit I have a problem. I'm working with my therapist on it.

Here's a better reason: as I was testing it I ran out of thread messages and I didn’t want to have to use a tool that regularly purged my history.

Enter Perplexity

It was around this time that I found Perplexity and this is where it gets good, guys!

According to their site:

Perplexity is your AI-powered Swiss Army Knife for information discovery and curiosity.

Let’s try our previous example:

"Wuuuuut??? This shit is so cool!"

It was love at first sight, folks:

• Solid summary of multiple sources to answer my question

• Links to all those sources

• Relevant images that came up as part of Perplexity's search

• Plus, I get a list of follow up questions I can ask within the context of this thread

Walkthrough

Check out this quick demo video for a better look:

TL;DR

If you're looking for a solid tool to help you find answers online, check Perplexity out. It can help you with:

• Answering questions

• Doing business or academic research

• Planning a trip

• Keeping up with the news in a fun, new way

I was fresh out of college, excited to be signed on to a permanent role at AAA where I had been interning the year prior. I was working with a great team making an impact on the lives of young drivers.

Mine was a marketing role. At least initially. Within a few months though, I had found pretty creative ways to solve a series of problems across departments and with little to no overhead. My boss started using a phrase with me: "All I have to do is present you with a problem to solve and give you time to think on it. I know you'll figure it out."

A Pattern Emerges

Six years later, after launching a slew of successful web-based products, I was contacted by a recruiter who got me my next gig. This time I was to support an app-development team with their implementation efforts across a large healthcare organization. Again, that job description didn't last long.

As I got more involved with the release cycle of the development teams, I found it difficult to communicate what features were coming next. We lacked a release manager and coordination across a growing number of teams with competing priorities became unbearable.

I asked my boss if I could help with the process and soon I was the official release manager. I developed an online hub of sorts using a non-linear note-taking app that helped me track our progress and collaborate with the various feature teams. Soon we were successfully running monthly releases and the teams were freed up to develop more features and faster.

My Lightbulb Moment

As I've continued my career, these one-off workflows and niche tool-building scenarios have become the norm for me. This has never struck me as unique or helpful until a recent conversation with one of my lead developers. This brilliant computer vision PhD and full-stack mobile developer looked me in the eyes and said, "I love how scrappy you are. No matter what problems or constraints we run into as a team, you always have a specialized tool or develop a unique workflow that perfectly fulfills our needs. You've made my life much easier!"

This was genuinely one of the most satisfying and humbling moments in my entire career. For one, his comments reflect one of the highest callings I see for myself as a PM - to support him and enable him to do his best work. That validation was pure magic for me on a personal level. Secondly, it made me wonder if I could help others through my "scrappy" approach. I can't do this in as direct a way as I do with my co-workers, but the thought eventually brought me here. To this post. To this newsletter. To this mission: I want to see more folks feeling enabled and empowered to solve problems for themselves AND their peers.

YOUR Lightbulb Moment...?

If you're wondering if this newsletter is for you, ask yourself:

• Do you obsess over the latest productivity apps and yearn for a safe community to share the burden of your addiction with?

• Do you like solving hard problems under great pressure and making your team look like rockstars?

• Do you like cool shit???

If you said "yes" to any of the above then please subscribe - we're gonna have a ton of fun together.

If you said "no" to any of the above, that's ok. Denial is a normal part of the growth process and I'm here for you.

Zack Nolette