๐ I'll help you...learn faster, manage ideas better, & create inspired work more often. โป๏ธ Worked for: HBO, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, & UCLA. ๐คฟ Trained employees at: MIT, Team USA, Nike & Harvard. โWhat if you could improve how you did your thinking? What effect would that have on everything else you do?
Do you have a session BEFORE the session?
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Have you ever found it difficult to return to a big effort of yours? I have found it's a mistake just to jump back into it. You won't make satisfying progress. Instead, try having a session before the session. This is a priming session to re-absorb it back into your brain. You dust off old questions, reorganize ideas, and plan next actions. Then sleep on it and allow your subconscious to work on it while you sleep. The next day, not only will you be itching to go, you will make satisfying progress. It's as Mary Poppins always said, Well begun is half done. (Word has it she was a big Aristotle fan ;) โ You vote...We start our brand-new workshop intensive in early May. I've been calling it Writing Original Essays. What if we changed it to Writing Original Works? What do you think? โA) I prefer Writing Original Essays, aka WOE.โ โB) I prefer Writing Original Work, aka WOW.โ Thanks for your vote. Also, I'm going to start reading and responding to the hundreds of them soon! If you submit a survey, or have submitted a survey within the past year, you should be hearing from me in the next month or so... โ PKM Summit & LYT Meetup updateFriday, March 22nd, at 7pm. That's when we'll do our informal LYT meetup in Utrecht. The first ever in person LYT meetup! We had 44 people RSVP, which means we'll have 20 show up, haha. I'll lean on the three individuals who graciously replied that they might be able to help in supporting and organizing the get-together. Stephan, Evelyn, Andy: I'll email you three separately. Our meetup is right after Day 1 of the PKM Summit in Utrecht, Netherlands on March 22-23. I'd love it if you were there. I'm excited to meet and hear from my digital friends Nicole van der Hoeven and Zsolt Vicziรกn and David Lohnerโalong with virtually hearing from Anne-Laure Le Cunff and Tiago Forteโalong with learning from 6-7 others who have struck my curiosity. PKM Summit event information is here. Ticket information is here. โ Random LinksHere are three random links to stimulate unique connections in your mind.
โ Thanks Craig!We finished LYT Workshop 13. Wow, I seriously can't unpack the impact of the workshop in a couple sentences. But we are doing something right and students' results are motivating to me. Here I was, feeling stuck on the book proposal and having another existential crisis, when Craig Taylor was the first to share a showcaseโwhere students share a part of their PKMโand I saw in his example and his words the power of the LYT way. He said something that immediately made my day and reinvigorated me. I haven't asked if I can share what he said, but hopefully I will be able to in next week's newsletter. โ Eisenhower Matrix or: How Linking Our Thinking led to Idea EmergenceHere's a story about how ideas emerge. Coming out of the workshop, I always have a mixture of "workshop post-partum depression" and incredible lightness: suddenly, I have more mental bandwidth. I'm like a bull behind the gates at the famous Running of the Bulls event (Encierro) in Pamplona, Spain. It's a bit overwhelming. So I tried to set up an Eisenhower Matrix in Obsidian. I asked if this would interest others...
My version was based on saved searches (queries) and you couldn't drag and drop your tasks. Then, as Ric Raftis mentioned in our community, the PKM community inspires each other and generously shares. One day later, TfT Hacker shared the Eisenhower Matrix as a drag and drop kanban board, along with the code and instructions to make it work!
How cool is that? What TfT Hacker opened up for me, however, went beyond tasks! Finally, I had I way to get beyond the lame 1-row constraint of Trello and other unimaginative kanban emulators. Check out this magic. I fiddled with TfT Hacker's CSS and went beyond the 2x2.
As a gift to you, here is the free downloadable CSS snippet. It's not refined, but it works. Just follow TfT's instructions, along with watching how I change the title to get different matrices. And then wildly creative Malaika Nolde picked up on the vibes of how "seemingly tiny advances in tech can have unexpectedly big unlocks."
And then, in our LYT community, the discussion linked to the showcase of Renรฉ Gyldenlund given the week before! Renรฉ planted the idea in a LYT Workshop showcase, then, without that consciously in my mind, I shared a version of it the following week, then upon seeing that, TFT Hacker shared a version of it. Then I iterated. And Malaika innovated. All this, in days. All because Renรฉ shared a showcase. โ Folks, just share.
Not because you have all the answers.
But by sharing, you'll at least discover a few.
โ Stay Connected, Nick โ P.S...Was this email too long? Well too bad ;) I prioritize curiosity and joy over a by-the-numbers newsletter that someone else probably writes. With this newsletter, you never know what you'll get, because I don't know myself! But it does have a few guiding principles you can find in the Footnote. โ โ โ ๐ฃ Footnotes ๐ต
The noise ๐ฅ is deafening. I promise to focus on the signal ๐ฟ. For me, the signal is high-value, evergreen stuff like:
โข how to think better and with more joy
โข how to be a better notemaker instead of just a notetaker
โข getting past the shiny surface and asking the deep questions
โข spotlighting ๐ฆ people and ideas that have stood the test of time โจ
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Linking Your Thinking
๐ I'll help you...learn faster, manage ideas better, & create inspired work more often. โป๏ธ Worked for: HBO, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, & UCLA. ๐คฟ Trained employees at: MIT, Team USA, Nike & Harvard. โWhat if you could improve how you did your thinking? What effect would that have on everything else you do?
Heads up! Join me for free on Sep 16th for Sensemaking 101. You will leave with 5 original ideas in 55 minutes...or your money back! Please note, this is a free event ;) Tuesday, September 16 at 9:00 AM (Pacific Time). Register here ยป I rarely run these type of live events, but whenever I do, they are a huge hit. Share my Obsidian beginner series with a colleague Countless people have asked me to combine my original Obsidian for Beginners video seriesโwhich has been viewed nearly 4 million...
Obsidian just released Bases. It's insane. It's the most most hyped I've been in over two years. I have a FULL walkthrough for you: Obsidian Bases: The Notion Killer? (Offline, Local, Fast) ยป I am covering everything about Bases, AI, and Bases+AI in the LYT Workshop. Raise your hand to join the workshop waitlist. I'm doing wild things with Bases and Dynamic Links. I've set up a view where any active note I am in with dynamically show me all related links. And not just in a zero-context list,...
I took a week off. I'm sure you noticed, right? I journaled about skipping last week and the need for self-compassion. I shared it in my writer's log for the Writing Original Works 22-day sprint we're doing. I'm glad I'm participating like a student in WOW. I'm writing so much! Here's what to expect in this newsletter: ChatGPT 5, Google Genie 3, Obsidian users, Obsidian Bases, my battle with the train, and what to expect in the LYT Workshop this October... AI ChatGPT 5 just released They are...