The humble journal is a valuable tool. The journal, and its pragmatic cousin the ‘Commonplace Book’, have been used for millennia – the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his now famous ‘Meditations’ as a personal journal, rather than a treatise to be published, and inside it is buried countless insights he had collected over his […]
The Journal as a Tool for Thought Read More »
I’m a really big fan of Notion’s various database features – to the extent that I often go overboard with trying to connect all my information using Notion’s Relationships property. In this tutorial I’m going to go over the advantages of databases and relating them to one another, but I’m also going to talk about
Connecting your thinking in Notion – Relations and Backlinks Read More »
“I could do that.” It’s a short phrase that has been spoken by many a naive novice, looking at something that seems terribly simple, not yet wise enough to understand the menacing, underlying complexity. A fetching but simple looking oil painting seems so easy to emulate. It’s a misty blue ocean at sunset, blue and
I’m not particularly superstitious, but recently everyone in my house has been having fun drawing a random tarot card from a deck as a ‘mood check’. It can be pretty entertaining, and confirmation bias has a great way of making your draw seem prophetic. On a lark I wondered if I could create a Notion
Notion random generator tutorial – Tarot card picker! Read More »
Picking up a new hobby is always an interesting experience. It’s not usually very fun being bad at something, and most worthwhile pursuits have an investment of time and effort required to get the hang of them. Around a year ago I made the spontaneous decision to buy a few hundred bucks worth of leather-working
What I Learned Leather-Working for a Year Read More »
I recently moved my ‘Second Brain’ out of Obsidian and into Notion. It was a hard decision, because Obsidian has a multitude of strengths and some really cool features. What I’m going to be talking about today is functional in either – I started using the system in Obsidian, and then when I moved to
The Key to Smarter Note-Taking Read More »
In our modern, secular society, the word ‘ritual’ can at times come across as antiquated. Many of us are divorced from religion in our daily lives, and ritual certainly smacks of a certain religiosity. In fact, a google search on the definition of ritual returns this: “Ritual – noun – a religious or solemn ceremony
The power of ritual – why your morning coffee is sacred. Read More »
It’s easy to take for granted that we have a time machine in our brain. We humans, as a species, are uniquely capable of looking forward into the future and predicting potential outcomes, as well as reflecting on the past and extrapolating it. The world is chaotic, of course, and our powers of prediction are
The Power of the Promise Read More »
In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins published a seminal book on evolutionary gene-theory, the Selfish Gene. Now a household name, Dawkins explored how our DNA’s ultimate drive is to replicate itself, and sometimes this drive for replication outweighs the desires of the ‘vehicle’ – us. Many of us intuitively understand now that some of our
1984 and the Runaway meme Read More »
There’s something I really love about stealing words from other languages. Of course there’s nothing new about that – much of the English language consists of pilfered Greek, Latin, French and German, with a dash of the more exotic for occasional flavour. Some words, however, aren’t in the common parlance but really should be, as
