Blogging more means reading less. For the most part its just a time constraint. There’s work, physical activity, household needs like shopping and cooking. This morning getting some editing time in on the book manuscript was my priority.

I’ve found the most powerful productivity hack is simply routine and having just a few priorities. Then, I just trust that what needs to get done will get done.

I did read this early this morning in a newsletter:

In Novardok (Yeshiva), they repeated a million times: you are not responsible to ‘finish”. Reb Yisroel Salanter (b. 1809 – d. 1883) said: just “do”, don’t ‘complete”

I’ve found that if you release some of that urge to control and step back a bit, you get way more done with lower stress.

Or as Dave Winer says “Keep Digging”.

Capture Everywhere, Read Everywhere, Write Everywhere

Dave and I chatted on Twitter today. You do that and you drive views to your site. But we don’t want views, we want community and conversation.

I’ve been describing my Drafts to WordPress blogging flow for these daily notes.

Dave wants an app for mobile that would be similar but a flat outline that he can edit and deploy as needed.

I think we agree that Markdown is a fine way to structure plain text documents. In most text editors like BBEdit or Atom, Markdown is recognized as a code syntax and it’s easy to fold and move blocks marked off by Markdown headings. Of course FoldingText was designed to do this in a slightly different way. We eventually got TaskPaper which has been updated more recently but with its own todo oriented markup.

The only mobile app I have that does folding based on Markdown is Editorial but its not kept up with current sync methods like Cloudkit or iCloud folders.

That’s creating structure within a file. I see my nested folders as an outline with the bottom layer being individual files. And in general, I’m fine with one file at a time for reference or writing.

But with this resurgent environment of note taking and blogging, I’m hoping for some new solutions besides the big note taking back linking systems of Obsidian and Notion and Craft which seem so closed to me.

Outlines mostly live on in the form of mindmaps. From David Allen:

I f you’re concerned about your ‘work-life balance’ I’d encourage you to grab a pen and paper and draw a mind map or a list of your Areas of Focus, both personal and professional. Then you may see which parts of your world you have been too focussed on and which deserve more attention. Whenever I feel a sense of imbalance I ‘pop up’ to visit this horizon

Another category that died was the Reader like Pocket and Instapaper. I use Safari’s Reading List now or quick capture to drafts, but that’s bookmarking. What I’d like is an app to open on my iPad that would be like the Kindle app but give me webpages, PDFs, email newsletters and RSS feed articles all integrated. While the ways these reads get to me are different, in the end its all reading. You know we used to have books and we used to have magazines and we used to have newspapers. Now it a torrent from every direction leaking through every crack it can find in the information environment.

Time to read a book now.