September 2023 Influences
Fall has arrived. My co-leader and I kicked off our Building a Second Brain book club. We will cover how we are creating a community of note-takers in five brief meetings. Each of us has unique challenges, but we also share commonalities.
- Email overload.
- Summarizing is difficult.
- There are too many intersections.
It is easier to teach what you learned to someone higher up the chain than to learn from the master. My next step will be to put what I learned from The Art and Business of Online Writing and Snow Leopard: Category Pirates into practice.
Writing Online (X/Twitter) with Data
Write online for faster feedback. We often write in solitude, but there are better ways to do it. Every day, I’m going to write.
There are many things I’ve tried, such as a digital garden, different tools like moving from Notion to Obsidian, and linking everything together.
Here is what really works and has been battle tested with real people. Set up and organize your system first. As a result of my own learning, I have developed the CUE framework.
- Curate.
- Unpack and repack.
- Evaluate and review, regularly.
The point of all this is writing is hard yet we need to learn the fundamentals and notice where the friction is difficult.
- Start with talking with people.
- Hallways conversations, break rooms, and chats are ways to get feedback.
- They will suggest how you should sequence.
Think about topics that are timeless and evergreen when deciding what to share. Slack’s Canvas has received the most views so far, and it is unlikely to last more than a year. The concept of team flow is still evergreen, and I will probably recycle it as technology advances.
Keep writing, organize, so it is not a burden, and the data will reveal what matters.
Books and Media
- Snow Leopard: Category Pirates - How Legendary Writers Create A Category of One
- People want something different.
- Use language to stand out.
- Teeter-totter between obvious problem unobvious solution, then unobvious problem, obvious solution.
- Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment - Decision hygiene.
- Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential - Write and organize as you go.