Note-taking "software can’t automate your thinking. But I do think it can create the conditions for improved thinking: making new connections between ideas"helping reduce distraction"organizing your reading and making it more useful"Casey then intros a few apps he's started using since his last post, starting with "Ca…
Note-taking apps are "designed for storage, not sparking insights. Can AI change that?".Casey's info overload is worse then ever: "As a journalist, I’ve never collected as much data as I do now ... browsing four or five social feeds ... arXiv and pre-prints ... [leaves] a stack of research that I will never get through. Book ga…
"There are now several Obsidian plugins available that allow you to use local LLMs instead of a commercial LLM provider", so PKM explorer tries Copilot for Obsidian plugin on his Windows laptop, because this plugin "not only offers the possibility to have a question and answer dialogue ... but also lets you [index your vault]... you…
"The problem is not that AI is smarter than us, the problem is that it’s becoming increasingly easy for us to outsource our skills to AI... If we outsource our writing skills, we lose our writing ability... If we depend on AI to analyze information and make decisions, we lose our ability to think critically and analyze complex situations ours…
"Good tools can ... corral the daily deluge of research, interviews and half-formed thoughts into something coherent" - Westenberg's (Mac-focused) productivity stack consists of "Butter for drafting, Linear for managing projects and to-dos, and Readwise for wrangling research material".Reading up on her use of Readwise, in…
"I had just finished recording the final video of my personal productivity mini-course when I turned on the camera and ad-libbed from the heart. I was unprepared for what came out."
A quick to learn framework to build your own personal productivity system without falling into the "productivity porn" trap.
"NotebookLM is powered by Google’s latest Gemini language model which supports up to 1 million context window... [you can]:upload documents, create multiple notebooks based on specific topics, and query notes...up to 50 sources per notebook, with each source supporting up to 500,000 words...type questions in the search box, and the AI pulls r…
consilience is "the aspiration that the cross-pollination of ... perhaps initially unrelated snippets [of knowledge] can lead to spontaneous and unforeseen breakthroughs", but just downloading a notetaking app is not enough. "Folio is a system to accomplish that aspiration in Obsidian... a consolidation of many aspects of Obsidian’s…
"what causes the flow state, and what happens in the brain... a new study claims to have answers".There were 2 theories:"Hyperfocus... two brain networks unlock the flow state: the default mode network (DMN)... involved in things like daydreaming... spikes the most when we’re not engaged in any tasks" and "the executive co…
Like me, the author has "been taking notes for over a decade ...ended up with thousands of notes that I never revisited. So I decided to train ChatGPT on my 3,743 Obsidian notes", which were created for "one purpose: content creation. So I use an improved version of the Zettelkasten".Apparently there are just 3 ways to use AI i…
Google's AI-powered assistant: "Duet AI is a powerful collaborator that can act as a coach, thought partner, source of inspiration, and productivity booster — all while ensuring every user and organization has control over their data... you must first have an eligible Google Workspace plan."Via this post on "creating the perfec…
Short video. Pretty mindblowing.
"My advice: Jump headfirst into AI with everything you’ve got."
insights into the complex relationship between AI and knowledge work, emphasizing the need for a nuanced understanding of AI's role in enhancing productivity and quality in different task domains - Harpa
Borrowing heavily from an article "about social media platform saturation inspired by the craze to sign up on Threads (only to sign out a week later).", Alberto Romero does the same for generative AI to explain "why it isn’t worth getting generative AI fatigue.After providing a potted timeline of the release of the major LLMs for th…
"AI-generated advice represents a huge shift"convenience: whereas a google search inundates you with results mixed with spam, splog and ads, "ChatGPT streamline this process... people choose convenience over almost anything else... [cf]Fogg’s behavior model: Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt". With AI, it's finally …
First of 3 posts on managing tasks with Obsidian, which I need to invest in as I'm creating tasks as I write my notes and then never looking for them again. This post starts with installing Calendar and Obsidian Tasks plugins.As always, to follow this advice I then needed to set up another plugin. Journaling Using Daily Questions in Obsidian …
"I wanted a way to add any bookmarks I make there into a 'Read later' category in my RSS reader ... I create a PHP file that gets the latest 20 bookmarks... and takes an access token from your mastodon 'development' admin page. Then I can give this URL to my RSS reader: https://neil.mckillop.org/stuff/mastodon_bookmarks.rs…
Summarising Clive Thompson's How I Take Notes When I’m Doing Research: "It’s the reframing of material into summaries or marginalia that adds value and meaning for the researcher", which is precisely why I'm paraphrasing and describing what I curate, and how it relates to my own experience and plans, rather than just simply co…
I do like a challenge."We live in the most distracted time in human history. Can we reclaim our attention spans?... A new book by the British journalist Johann Hari, called Stolen Focus, takes a close look at what’s happening — and what’s happened — to our collective attention... we’re all becoming lost in our own lives, which feel more and …
I've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). My chapter will encompass each user’s PKG, the Social Knowledge Graph created by networking them together via the Fediverse, Solid hosting, AI writing tools and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.This post provides a first draft of its Introducti…
A short experiment on getting the most out of podcasts by using speech-to-text engines to create rtanscripts. TL:DR:Welder’s excellent and free; Otter.ai’s got some amazing features, but it’s pricey; just forget Google.
"Feeling stuck?" This YANSS podcast is with "professor, author, therapist, and speaker Britt Frank, a trauma specialist who ... helps clients to get out of the feeling of being stuck."This was well-timed, because stuck is something I've been feeling for a while now. Perhaps unjustifiably, but nevertheless her book's d…
Really good but short piece on how most "Note-taking apps have ways they want you to work, a grain you should follow. Except Obsidian... an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for text files ... [not] a note-taking app... an integrated thinking environment. ".Hence you have to set it up to support the way you want to work, rather …
A "How I use it" from Ivo. "Roam changed the game [by] ... treating the data as a graph ... [and] allowing blocks to quickly be nested, referred to, embedded, created from a piece of text in a block, appear in the sidebar, being searched and queried".Ivo developed a way of ontologising his Roam graph: "In the context of a…
"the underlying problem is stubbornly intractable"Great piece, although I'm unsure that "a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic", it is true that:productivity geeks exist, develop their system and then try to sell it.speaking from experience, it is really, r…
An overview by Coda, with 20 more resources, on Coda & Notion, which both take "a modular approach to digital documentation. You can do traditional docs ... but you never have to leave the tool to build more complex workflows and processes".
Interesting colection of notes from Andy Matuschak:Peripheral vision: "My physical workspace is full of subtle cues... together give me a kind of “peripheral vision”: when I’m doing one thing, it’s easy for me to fluidly notice other nearby things... Software systems, by contrast, often lack this kind of peripheral vision.". I started he…
Andy Matuschak's daily routine and content strategy appear similar, but much more complex, than my own. It starts with something we share: "When my days don’t go well, it’s often because something derailed me in the morning, and I never really got back on track", and manages his day so that he spends the first two hours of the day f…
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