If you get value out of this newsletter consider supporting it by becoming a member. You can either get my weekly thoughts or all my courses and my weekly thoughts. You could also purchase a course if that fits your needs better.

You can get this in your inbox by signing up.

What Do you Optimise Your Notes For?

What is the purpose of the notes you take? Based on the stats I get for popular videos and blog post, every single one of you is optimising for capture.

You’re all looking for the next awesome tool that will make the process easier. Now we’re looking for something that has AI in it so that we can let computers to the hard part of making connections for us.

But is that what you should be optimising for?

I think that your notes, and your whole not process, should be optimised for creation and connection. That after a certain point, you have lots of ideas in there from other people and it’s time to start turning them into your own ideas.

If you’re not sure what you’re notes are optimised for, then pay attention to what you spend time doing. If you’re looking at videos of the latest and greatest tools, or different ways to organise your notes, then you’re not optimised for connection and creation.

Inspired by: Optimize for Delight

Not Everyone Can Have Time To Think

There is a statistically significant portion of the population for whom day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else[1]. I’ve been in that situation before. We had just had our third child so we had 3 kids under 7 and were homeschooling the oldest kid after a terrible kindergarten teacher had induced panic attacks in our oldest. My business wasn’t doing well so even affording rent was a stretch, let alone food and all the other stuff that kids need to survive[2]. My wife was suffering from what we now recognise as post-partum depression.

There was no time for me to think.

Yet I distinctly remember finding some online gurus that had advice for me about how I could get more space in my life. They had some trick I could use to get this space.

No, they didn’t have kids. No, they probably didn’t have massive financial concerns hanging over their heads. No, they didn’t have a boss.

They were successful online gurus that had advice for me that I lapped up.

But the truth is, we don’t all have time to think. We don’t all have time to write and read books and do all the other things in our lives that we’re told make a good person.

Sometimes it’s a major accomplishment to get macaroni on the table and put pants on. To keep the baby’s diaper clean. If at the end of the day you took a nap with a kid, that may be a good day.

If you’re in a time of your life like I was above, ask for some help and give yourself a break. Don’t hold yourself up to the polished version of people you see online, even me. My kids are 7, 9, 13 now. We live in a neighbourhood where they can just play outside. We have neighbours that will take my kids for an afternoon, just like I’ll have an extra kid in the house today because my neighbour needs to have client meetings around town and the kids are off school.

Sometimes you don’t have time to think, and that’s okay. Be a good friend, spouse, partner, parent…and count that as an accomplishment.

Something Interesting

Bottle’s of Amazon Delivery Driver urine becomes big sell as an energy drink on Amazon. The documentary is a great look into the abusive practices that Amazon must use to keep it’s market position. Every time we make a purchase on Amazon, we enable this type of behaviour.

Yup I use affiliate links sometimes to support the newsletter. If it’s on Amazon, it’s an affiliate link for sure.

  • [1] How to Do Nothing Pg 94 – https://curtismchale.ca/book/how-to-do-nothing/
  • [2] How dare they need food regularly.

Related Content

One response to “PKM Weekly Nov 26 2023 – Issue 098”

  1. Tim Bushell Avatar
    Tim Bushell

    “If you’re not sure what you’re notes are optimised for, then pay attention to what you spend time doing. If you’re looking at videos of the latest and greatest tools, or different ways to organise your notes, then you’re not optimised for connection and creation.” – Curtis. Learn the ‘minimum’ of the tool(s) to allow you to create, then expand on that, but not at the expense of prioritising the widening of your knowledge base (which place to read next, synoptical read?) and its depth (i.e. finish the damn book) and making connections.

    The single biggest ‘minimum’ of the learning seems to be quite common – keyboard shortcuts for digital tools at least.

    But… which way does your spiral run?

    “When I optimize for efficiency, I enter a spiral that tightens, becomes more granular, but never ends.” – Annie
https://curtismchale.ca/2023/11/26/pkm-weekly-nov-26-2023-issue-098/
curtismchale.ca
CC-MAIN-2024-10
116491
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:Q76SU2A2YWZLVNBM2MSNJ7GXWMBMXQTA
<urn:uuid:d46cf609-9240-4361-8623-1f36c417461c>
2024-02-25T08:34:14Z
141.193.213.10
text/html
sha1:BHTVGQDRTVDTK6S545TAMTN3V326KKBI
<urn:uuid:c998405a-0795-4ca9-b003-f490265a35e1>
https://curtismchale.ca/2023/11/26/pkm-weekly-nov-26-2023-issue-098/
response
<urn:uuid:bb9fd129-dace-404a-a51b-9257060c7644>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-10
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February/March 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-196
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/