You can search this site using the Duck Duck Go search bar below.
2021 Word of the Year: ENGAGE 🎬
Every year I sit down and reflect on the new year with the following topics:
- IDEAS
- NEW PERSPECTIVES
- What would I like to change about myself?
- What would I like to change about my lifestyle?
- What would I like to change about the way I work?
- What can I do to challenge myself?
- Goals: What do I want to achieve this year?
- Projects to continue working on this year
- Books to Read
I also choose a word/topic focus for the year.
I don’t have big goals or big changes for 2021. I want to consolidate the discoveries I made in 2020. I learned a lot about myself last year. It was a good time to reflect about my habits and now I want to ENGAGE 🎬.
I want to build my Knowledge Database. I’ve been studying Zettelkasten for that. Engage more, do more. Spend less time setting up apps and changing methods. Stick with the established routines. Get into the flow. Make small adjustments only when and IF necessary. Continue to go out on long walks (something I started doing regularly in 2020). Spend less time on my phone. Be less distracted, (re)train my focus. Consume less information. Quality > Quantity.
Hoping the world is a better place in 2021!
Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email
By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.
My Reader Goals 2021 🎯
Happy New Year!
Every year I like to list books I plan on reading. It's a starting point, a list that I look at every month to pick what to read next. It's not meant to be a “must read” list, just suggestions for my future me.
This year I'm not being too ambitious. I want to slow down and savour the moment. No big goals really, just sailing in cruise control.
I mainly want to keep on reading the books I already own, so I will try to pick from the following list:
- Embrace Your Weird: Face Your Fears and Unleash Creativity by Felicia Day
- The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
- Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5) by Martha Wells
- Dragons of Winter Night Margaret Weis
- Extend Your Mind: Praxis Volume 2 by Tiago Forte
- Nemesis Games (The Expanse, #5) by James S.A. Corey
- A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers, #2) by Becky Chambers
- The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O'Meara
- Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben R. Rich
- Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance | AUDIBLE
- LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P.W. Singer
- Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything by B.J. Fogg
- Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening by Joseph Goldstein
- How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil | AUDIBLE
- The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency, #1) by John Scalzi
- Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
- Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
- Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Ghost Brigades (Old Man's War, #2) by John Scalzi
- The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
- The Secret Lives of Introverts: Inside Our Hidden World by Jenn Granneman
- To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov
- Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher
- How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley
- Let It Shine by Alyssa Cole
- Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam by Yasmine Mohammed
- The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder Carroll
- Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris
- The Blade Itself (The First Law, #1) by Joe Abercrombie
- Before They Are Hanged (The First Law, #2) by Joe Abercrombie
- Silicon States: The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What It Means for Our Future by Lucie Greene
- An Extraordinary Union (The Loyal League #1) by Alyssa Cole
- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
- Is This Anything? by Jerry Seinfeld
Books I want to buy next:
I have a few that are on my radar for me to acquire at some point: (mostly related to technology/digital information)
- A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age: Scientific Habits of Mind by David J. Helfand
- Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil
- A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport
- The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac
Take care in 2021!
Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email
By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.
What I read in December 2020
Exporting notes from Evernote to Markdown: mission accomplished!
I'm moving all my notes out of Evernote. And I have a notebook there with all my e-books notes and highlights for the past 7+ years. A total of 276 notes. One note per book.
I've always used this free service my.clippings.io to export my Kindle highlights to Evernote. It also exports to .txt, .pdf and .doc. But, the only way to have separate files (one note per book) is when I use the Evernote option.
My issue here is: how can I convert all these Evernote notes to markdown??😕
GTD Journey: Is my System too complicated?
I have never asked that question before. But suddenly I felt like I was overwhelmed and that I was spending too much time and energy to manage my lists. So this year I decided to sit down and write a description of my GTD system to understand what was going on.
The inspiration came from a post from Cal Newport in which he describes his “Rooted Productivity“ document. For him, it's a one page document that he keeps in a plastic sleeve on his desk. The idea is to have a “root commitment” that includes all your productivity habits.
GTD is based on 5 steps, which are:
CAPTURE: Collect (Inbox)
CLARIFY: What is it?
ORGANIZE: Put it where it belongs
REFLECT: Review and Update
ENGAGE: What is the next action? Do it!
Based on Cal Newport's idea, I came up with a description of my system based on the following questions:
- Which tools do I use for each of the 5 GTD Phases?
- What are my Inboxes? Where are they?
- What are my list managers? (including tasks and project lists)
- How do I organize the stuff that comes into my inbox?
- What is on my Calendar?
- What is my reference system? How do I file non-actionable things?
- Core habits and routines: what are the habits that are important to me?
- Periodic Reviews: what are the reviews I have scheduled to keep the system up-to-date?
It's December, what a relief!
Yes, tmo, I've been thinking about this. I moved some of my project to the “someday/maybe” list because of COVID. These are one of the things I want to get back to after the pandemic is under control:
- Trip to Brazil (who knows when that will happen now...)
- Renew passports
- Various quick trips to nearby cities
- Get back to swimming
- Visit Museums
- Borrow graphic novels from the Public Library
It's December and I feel a kind of relief 2020 is coming to an end! I know things are not going to magically be resolved on Jan 01, 2021, but leaving this year behind makes me feel good. What a year!
This month I'll focus on self-reflection, being calm and getting back to simplicity: Less consumption, more creation. And rest.
Yeah!
Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email
By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.
What I read in November 2020
Re-Discovering Write.as, Markdown and good old Plain Text
I'm re-discovering this universe of Plain Text and Markdown enthusiasts. It's fascinating!
I discovered Write.as in 2018 and that was the first time I saw Markdown. I used to have my blog on Medium at that time because I loved the writing experience there (I used Tumblr before that). Then I moved all my writing to Write.as. I love the minimalist interface and distraction-free environment.
I used Write.as for about a year and something happened in my life that made me look for complex solutions. Go figure... Or maybe I just wanted to try WordPress to see what it was all about.
WordPress was... overwhelming! Bloated with stuff I didn't need or wanted...
And then they changed to this new editor. I didn't want to write there anymore. It was cumbersome! So I started using Evernote, Word, OneNote to write. Then I would copy-paste into WordPress. What a mess! I made lots of experimentation. None of them pleased me. Formatting issues were endlessly annoying!
And now I'm back at Write.as 💜. Re-learning Markdown, and loving it!
Do we really need a note taking app?
Photo by MESSALA CIULLA from Pexels
I'm bummed about note taking apps now. I've been thinking that they've become much more than “note taking” tools.
I've always been a “files/folders” person. I like to own my files, and move them around, and copy them for back-ups. So, I have my main reference system on my hard drive, but also synced to the cloud. I now have the Office 365 subscription, so all my files are synced in OneDrive. At one point I had Google Drive, then I tried Dropbox and ended up with Microsoft because of the Office suite included.
When note taking apps became a thing, I wanted to try it. I started using Evernote in 2010 (oh, geez, 10 years !?) and I've been on and off it many times. It's always been confusing to me what belonged to Evernote and what belonged to my OneDrive.