Hi All! Welcome to the first of the month, and hence, this newsletter! Hope everyone continues to stay safe. Feel free to reply with feedback and to forward this along to friends and family! As always, thanks for reading.
I discovered the Zettelkasten method of organizing in the Superorganizers newsletter.
Zettelkasten is the German word for “slip box." It is a knowledge management technique for gathering and connecting ideas. Zettelkasten focuses on collecting excerpts as content is consumed, and centralizing the content with sources, tags, and thoughts on each piece of information. At some point, it is important to review the content and connect the dots to uncover insights.
This month, I finally decided to review my Zettelkasten, which I started in March. I found I focused on three primary areas: thinking, work, and product & technology. Below, I pull out my favorite tidbits from the last four months of Zettelkasten-ing, and provide some commentary.
Thinking
I have always been interested in ways to optimize thinking and workflow. Over the years I have spent copious amounts of time determining how to best organize my thoughts and to-dos. Currently, it is a mix of Notion, Microsoft Office suite, and my purple softcover Moleskine. Process improvement has always compelled me. As you might imagine, years ago, I was definitely the kid that read Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens, but that aside, I'll share some major learnings from my recent readings on process improvement below.
I loved this Memo from 2pm, On Optimism and Big Ideas, which includes the below points:
No. 1: Optimism is a talent.
No. 2: Dynamism is required because inaction is failure.
No. 3: Calmness is a valuable tool.
No. 4: The job is to seek out opportunity in everything.
No. 5: Deep generalism provides clarity. Deep generalists are sufficient in the art of information synthesis, not just analysis
The last point is at odds with something a colleague recently said to me, "the most successful people in this world are working on one particular problem." I believe that focus is key to excellence, yet I do not focus well. I want to be working on a million different things. There are different schools of thought on specialists versus generalists. Fast Company's 8 Habits of People Who Always Have Great Ideas, mentions the idea of a “tortoise mind." This is the idea that great ideas bubble up when you slow down decision-making. This concept is aligned more with the generalist point of view, but perhaps the true successes are "T-shaped." There is plenty of literature on this, and the jury still appears to be out regarding which disposition is most effective.
Work
I recently read High Output Management, by Andy Grove, former President, CEO, and Chairman of Intel. I was able to gather numerous process and workflow improvements from the book, which has a collection of assignments at the end. Some of the best include:
Conduct work simplification on your most tedious, time-consuming task. Eliminate at least 30% of the total number of steps involved.
Analyze your information and knowledge gathering system. Is it properly balanced among headlines, newspaper articles, and weekly news magazines? Is redundancy built in? (I counted my Zettelkasten analysis for this)!
Look at your calendar for the last week. Classify your activities as low/medium/high leverage. Generate a plan of action to do more with the high leverage category (what activities will you reduce)?
For a book written in 1983, these principles still ring true. Now, shifting to advice from the here and now, Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator Tweeted,
"Something I explained to my 11 yo: The biggest division in work may be between jobs that involve making new stuff (science, engineering) and those that don't (administration, sales), and you'll be a lot happier if you end up on the side you're suited for."
I don't have Twitter, for fear of true information overload, but what struck me was the fact that the content in Grove's book was relevant today, and Graham's Tweet could have been relevant at the time Grove wrote High Output Management.
Product & Tech
“If you think of audio as the way you think of, say, film, like we’re still in the black-and-white period of podcasting. What’s color going to look like? What’s 3-D going to look like?” - Sean Rameswaram (via a16z's Investing in the Podcast Ecosystem in 2019).
Lately, I’ve spent a larger proportion of time thinking hard about the future (as opposed to getting caught up in existing trends). I have identified a few areas of interest and am building conviction behind what I believe will happen next. I really liked Josh Wolfe's idea of "directional arrows of progress." In the Knowledge Project Podcast, he explained the concept as follows [lightly edited for clarity]:
"When you discover a directional arrow of progress, it is like identifying universal principle trending in a certain way regardless of who the actors are. For example, there is a trend called "the half-life of technology intimacy." This is a trend about how we interact with our computers…"
Listen to the excellent podcast if you would like to learn more. At the core, Wolfe describes an amazing paradigm for thinking about the future - technology continues to encroach on us, and soon it will be embedded in all that we do. When reading Alchemy by Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman and Creative Director of Ogilvy, he includes a quote by Upton Sinclair:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it."
The job of an investor is to understand the five segments of technology adoption, which include innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards, and move as close to the innovators as possible. This requires knowledge of how people behave, and an ability to overcome, and sometimes reject, preconceived notions of how success is achieved.
Will I continue to Zettelkasten? Definitely. My learning is that the world is moving quickly, but the ability to adapt and innovate while executing according to personal core principles is key to success.
Great Content of the Month:
It seems certain Apple will add touch to the Mac. It's merging iOS into the Mac: in the future almost all Mac apps will be iOS or Catalyst... The Mac becomes an iPad Pro - an iPad with files and overlapping windows. - Benedict Evans