There will be ebbs and flows. As you change, your note taking practice is likely to change. Some things might fall into disrepair. Others become important. Your note taking system might fall dormant for a while. It happens.

Is this good? Bad? Otherwise? Reflect upon why you want to do it, if evidence tells a different story. Be kind.

Why would you do that work? Do you want to do that work? Why? A note taking system can only be good if you are motivated to work on it. And the question that will drive you is this: Why?

Reflection is one of the most important tools here. Be attentive to what actually keeps you engaged with your notes. And then figure out the why behind the why. The notes will flow by themselves in this way.

In order to connect notes you first have to write them. If you have notes you can start to link them.¹ Why linking? Why indeed! Have a reason. Maybe you have concepts that are connected in some way? Maybe you track gift ideas for the different people in your life and need an overview? Maybe you have a journal and you’d like to link yesterday’s page with today’s page and today’s page with tomorrow’s page?

Connecting notes helps to organize and structure your notes in a way that only ever requires a “local fit”. In comparison to tags/categories that have to work for the whole of your notes, a link only needs to make sense for the linking note.

If it is not obvious why the link exists, make the reason explicit. You want to explain links more often than you might think.

A note-taking system without notes doesn’t make much sense. You have to accumulate notes. Do they need to be good? Do they need to be perfect? No. They won’t be. Not on the first try.

But they do have to be written. What gets them written? In order for them to be written by choice, they have to be interesting enough - or the process of creating them has to be. You might be forced to write them, then maybe find a way to make it interesting.

In any case: Do start by writing notes.

(One of my favorite internet people is Merlin Mann who writes this on the first page of all his paper notebooks. This is the right approach to digital notes as well. Get it down first. Make something out of it later. This is a flickr-embed of Merlin’s photo. No copyright intended. See his Album for more.)

AirPods stress reality

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The week of teething.

Due is a wonderful reminders and timers app for the Mac and iPhone/iPad that syncs via iCloud. Due has been around for ages (maybe a decade?) and it is still a great app that gives me a lot of functionality.

What makes Due so special is twofold: Firstly if a reminder is due in Due it is annoyingly persistent. This means that you won’t ignore the reminder ever which is great. Secondly Due has a great snooze system which allows you to quickly postpone a Due reminder to a later time. Taken together these two features mean, that you won’t mark reminders completed that aren’t really completed and you won’t ignore the nudge that an overdue reminder gives you. It narrows down your options to: “I’m going to do this now!” or “I’m going to this later. I imagine I will do it at this time.”

Due is great for things that wouldn’t fit well on a calendar or would clog it up. It’s great for repeating tasks that need to be done on a specific time but don’t have a clear duration (feeding the dog at specific times a day, for example). It’s great for one-offs as well, where you want to or need to do something later but might forget about it. Due has some natural language parsing built-in so creating new reminders or snoozing them is easy and fast. Due has shortcuts integration, too. It’s a surprisingly versatile app.

One other thing I love is its subscription model. Before you throw your hands up, read these paragraphs:

When your year of free feature upgrades is up, you get to keep every feature that you already have access to, and you’ll continue to receive free app updates for as long as I’m in business.

You’ll also start seeing features that you have no access to. If you want these features, you can subscribe to the Due Upgrade Pass, which gives you another year of paid feature upgrades.

And like those you have unlocked earlier, you get to keep everything you have unlocked during your subscription period—permanently—even after the subscription expires, even if you choose to unsubscribe right after subscribing. —Due Blog - The Future of Paid Upgrades

Due is one of my greatest productivity boons. One of my absolute faves. Please give it a try if you haven’t already. And if you had done so in the past: maybe give it another try. Due has only gotten better over the years.

Using time in bed effectively.

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Missing an hour of sleep.

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Standing up right away is key.

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Daytum is a simple web app to track all the little things in your life. Think of it as an app that lets you create counters that can be named, categorized and - if you are a plus member - specified by using attributes. Finally they can be displayed in a variety of ways. An example: I track my dog’s pees and poops in Daytum. The items are called pees and poops respectively. The category for both of them is dog in this case. And each have an entry attribute - to be filled - every time you add an entry, called: where, which has two options (inside and outside). Here is a couple of example displays for the last day:

The plus membership is dirt cheap: Only USD18 a year. The best thing is that Daytum also has a full-featured iPhone app, which makes entering new data super easy.

Happy with the progress.

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Albums is a music app for iOS that will use your Apple Music library and is focused on playing full albums. Why is this great? Apart from being a joy to use, listening to full albums instead of just a song from this album and then that album, contextualizes the experience of the song. A bigger “unit of music” means less choices to make (either for me or an AI): And having to make less choices is a good thing for me.

Albums has many interesting features like an upcoming release feed and tools to rediscover albums you haven’t listened to in a while. The app either requires a subscription or a one-time unlock which cost here around 25€. Instabuy for me.

The dissimilarity of similar days.

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Power Outage!

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A totally different morning. A little late to bed.

Still oftentimes just skimming the Micro.blog timeline instead of catching up with it because there doesn’t seem to be a pair of mac/iPhoneOs apps that does timeline syncing.

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