Recent statistics show that an average person consumes about 10.5 hours of media per day - watching movies, shows, surfing the internet, social media, listening to the radio/podcasts, playing with an app & much more.In a world where zillions of bytes of content is created every single day, we are bombarded with options screaming for our attention.The world’s consumption engine is led by - Youtube, Netflix, Tiktok, Instagram…

Consumption Engines

Consumption is convenient - streaming your favorite shows with no commercials, and on your own timetable - what could be better.Creation is stopped before it could even get started because it is hard and it requires effort, focus, motivation & determination.When you create you have to fear failure, ridicule, or criticism, you hold yourself back as that could leave you feeling bad about yourself.Creation = Work & Work = something to be avoided.

Consumption vs Creation

There are only two main reasons we consume1. It is useful &2. It makes you happyAfter a certain point the more you consume the lower the returns from the new content - less fun, less enjoyment, no happiness & not useful eitherI call this the “Blue Dot” level

Blue Dot level

- don’t feel +ve after consuming more- Seen/heard/tasted all of this before- Cribbing & complaining about creators- Missing the “good old days”- Losing curiosity- Feeling downIf you have lost interest in what you are consuming, you have reached the “Blue Dot”.

Indicators that you have reached the blue dot

What do the most successful & intellectual people have in common? Do we look up to people who are constant consumers or passionate creators?Coincidentally wealth also needs to be created!

It is time to create 💪

<ul><li>Recognise Consumerism - marketing is oriented towards one thing – making you believe that consumption will make you happy & successful. No iPhone, movie, book, car, dress, bag or shoes can make you happy/successful. </li><li>Track your time - Watch where you you spend time and track it like you track you expense, understand the spend patterns & budget for important things</li><li> Rule of 10 - When starting a new activity/project, commit to 10 attempts and don’t analyze the results of these first 10 attempts - That’s your buffer to iterate, learn & begin.</li></ul>

How to make the switch? 1/2

<ul><li>You Vs. You - You don’t need another productivity app, another book, another video, the only thing that ruined your plans in the past was your own resistance.</li><li>Short-term planning - Plane the progress in short sprints, here’s a frame works that can be used. Create Something – Ship it – See the Real Feedback – Adapt – Repeat</li><li>Time & Place - This really helped me - Schedule some time time and decide a space for constructive deliberate reading. The combination of fixed time & space helps overcome the resistance and helps in building a habit.</li></ul>

How to make the switch? 2/2

Understanding when to make the switch from consumption to creation.

Productivity

Creation To Consumption Ratio

If your business is a bucket, you can keep pouring as much water (customers) as you want into it, but if you have a lot of leaks, you’ll never fill the bucket. Without filling the bucket, you’ll never achieve growth.

<ul><li>Customer churn refers to how many individual customers have deleted their accounts, cancelled their subscriptions, or not logged in for X amount of time.</li></ul> <ul><li>Revenue churn focuses on the value of these customers, and measures the monetary loss of the future transactions rather than the loss of relationship.</li></ul>

Customer Churn vs Revenue Churn

<ul><li>Competitors. If a new competitor has appeared in your industry and is making some serious waves, it’s natural to expect a peak in your churn rate as customers shift.</li><li>False advertising/disingenuous marketing. This is why marketing teams deserve a lot of credit for customer retention. Bad marketing leads to churned customers, who may arrive at your product with the wrong expectations.</li><li>Usability/accessibility issues. An interface that isn’t easy to use, appealing to look at, or adaptable for those with special needs, will be dropped like a hot potato.</li></ul>

Identifying The Source of the Churn 1/2

<ul><li>Bloated price point. If the price isn’t justified by the value the product provides, customers will likely search for an alternative.</li><li>Reduced functionality. Did you scrap a feature that you thought no one liked? If you then see floods of users abandoning your product, it’s probably missed!</li><li>Unmet needs. Quite simply, your product doesn’t meet the need or solve the problem the way the customer thought it would.</li><li>Poor customer service. Word of mouth is a powerful thing, and a bad customer service experience can ruin a customer relationship for life.</li></ul>

Identifying The Source of the Churn 2/2

<h3>Damage control</h3>Recovering from a loss of trust is hard, but not impossible. The key is not to shy away from the conflict, but to lean into it. Pretending that the controversy doesn’t exist will only deepen the distrust between you and your customers. <h3>Rewarding loyalty</h3>While many companies focus heavily on providing discounts and freebies to new customers, it’s a grave mistake to ignore your existing customers. They should be rewarded for their loyalty just as much as you reward new customers for taking a chance on you.

How to Reduce Churn 1/2

<h3>Re-brand</h3>While not a step that should be taken lightly, if your product/service is one of the older ones on the market, it could have fallen out of fashion. <a href="https://productschool.com/blog/product-management-2/branding-builders-netflix-vp-product/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=WeeklyArticles">Branding is a very powerful thing</a>, and customers are paying attention to design now more than ever! <h3>Talk to your customers</h3>If you’ve ever cancelled a subscription before, you’ve most likely been on the receiving end of a ‘we’re sorry to see you go’ message, along with a short survey about why you’ve decided to cancel.

The first step in getting your churn rates under control is to understand them. Here's everything a Product Manager needs to know...

Customer Success 

What To Do With a High Churn Rate

Different times call for optimizing different things.Learning - You might be trying to learn something specific about engagement, interest among a certain target audience, monetization, etc. Learning is typically the priority when your startup is a pre-product-market fit or when you are expanding to a new target audience. Volume - There will be a time in your business when you will want to prove that you can go from a certain base amount of customers to moving the needle in a meaningful way. Cost - Optimizing your CPA to get more out of your budget.

Step 1:   What Are You Optimizing For?

Your constraints will differ depending on the product, stage, funding, industry, etc. The most common constraints will be:<ul><li>Time - Do you have a specific optimal window to reach your audience? Do you only have 3 months of cash left? </li><li>Money - Are you well funded, or bootstrapping? Do you need to extend your runway?</li><li>Target Audience - Do you need to reach someone really specific? </li><li>Legal - Are you taking on an old industry with litigious stalwarts? </li></ul>

Step 2: What are your constraints?

Building a channel matrix helps give you three things:1. A methodical process to evaluate each channel2. A way to compare each channel on the same attributes3. A visual organization of the information for each channelStep 3.1 - Open your favourite spreadsheet tool (google docs, excel, numbers)Step 3.2 - List Out All Potential Channels In The Header ColumnCertain channels can be broken down into more detailed tactics. For example, content marketing could be broken down into blogging, guest blogging, infographics, webinars, ebook, etc

Step 3: Setup Your Channel Matrix

In the header row fill in the attributes of each channel that you are comparing. At a minimum, there are 6 attributes you should have: <ol><li>Targeting - The depth of ability to target different audiences. </li><li>Cost - The upfront and ongoing cost to acquire users in this channel. </li><li>Input Time - The upfront time required to start running experiments with this channel.</li><li>Output Time  - The time it takes to start getting data around your experiments. </li><li>Control - The control you have over turning the channel on/off at will.</li><li>Scale - The size/reach of the channel.  </li></ol>

3.3  List Out Channel Defining Attributes In The Header Row

The next step is to research each channel so you can fill in each cell with “low”, “med”, or “high” values. You aren’t trying to predict exact values.  Get enough information to make educated comparisons of each channel relative to each other.   The matrix looks very different for different companies. For example, “Low” will mean different things to different companies (i.e. A enterprise SaaS company with a high LTV vs a consumer mobile app monetizing with ads).

Step 4:  Fill In Values Of Channel Matrix With Low, Med, High 

Targeting: Does the channel have the type of targeting you need? How close to your exact target audience can you get with this channel?Cost: Are there upfront costs? Minimum spends? Input Time: How much time is required to get to the first experiment? How much time to run each additional experiment? Output Time: How much time will it take to start getting results? How many experiments do we have to run to get meaningful data?  Control: Can you turn the channel on and off at will? Is there a middleman between you and the knobs you turn?Scale: How large is the channel in overall volume?

Explore the value for each channel

In a perfect world you want channels with the following values:Targeting - High, Cost - Low, Input Time - Low, Output Time - Low, Control - High, Scale - HighYou will rarely get a channel that fits those values perfectly so the question is how do you prioritize? This is where the work you put into Step 1 and Step 2 come in. Sort your channels using your constraints as a guide. If your biggest constraint is money, then look at channels that have a low cost as the first priority and come closest to the ideal values for the other attributes.

Step 5:  Choose 1 - 2 Channels As Hypotheses

SEO, SEM, Facebook Ads, content marketing, affiliates, partnerships, email 
marketing, app stores…the list goes on. With so many marketing channels to 
choose from, a common question is “where do I start?” or “what channel 
should we use next?”  I get it.  The information is overwhelming but there 
is a better way than picking pieces of paper out of a hat.  Here is a step 
by step guide that should help you go through the exercise of comparing, 
contrasting, and choosing the right marketing channel for your company. 

Business Development

5 Steps To Choose Your Customer Acquisition Channel

Introversion and a poor ability to recognize people make networking an absolute minefield for introverts. You’re going to have a somewhat painful conversation with someone you don’t know, groping for some sort of common ground, or you’re going to have an even more awkward conversation with someone you’ve already talked to.

Networking doesn't work well for introverts

When famous, You lose the ability to filter out who you want to talk to, but at least everyone starts the conversation with some context; you’re outsourcing the extroversion to them.Fame is hard, and it has other costs. But there’s a second alternative: be micro-famous. Microfame is the best kind of fame because it combines an easier task (be famous to fewer people) with a better outcome (be famous to the right people).

Micro-Famous > Famous

Focus on the micro, not the fame. Micro-fame just means your friends-of-friends have a nonzero chance of knowing who you are and striking up a conversation with you about something mutually interesting.To an introvert, this is nirvana:<ul><li>You don’t have to introduce yourself to anyone.</li><li>You don’t have to conversationally grope around for something to talk about.</li><li>Your conversational partners are pre-selected for having shared obscure interests.</li></ul>

How to be micro-famous ?

There are a couple of problems with this, one of which is that plenty of normal people do this, too, just for broader interests: there’s a difference of kind, not degree, between someone who only wants to talk about weather, sports, and national politics on the one hand, and someone who only wants to talk about computational biology.But a side effect of the writing-as-networking strategy is that writing about your other interests gets other people interested.

We’re pretentiously writing off social interactions with people who don’t share our nerdy interests

You’re not just identifying neighbors in your intellectual ghetto; you’re recruiting more

Networking is painful, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to enjoy it. Unfortunately for me, networking is effective: most good opportunities come from personal connections. We can see all kinds…

Writing is Networking for Introverts | by Byrne Hobart

<ul><li>Readability - While Buzzfeed does actually offer some in-depth, quality journalism, the site is widely known for its easy-to-digest “clickbait” style content.</li><li>Headline style - A great article may never get read if it has a terrible headline. Conversely, a poorly written, even spammy article can get tons of traffic if it has a clickbait headline.</li><li>Article length - The average first page search result in Google contains 1,890 words. On the other hand, humans now have a <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-smart/">shorter attention span</a> than goldfish. Many people simply don’t have the patience to read long-form content on the web.</li></ul>

The Magic Formula

Despite its push in recent years to move beyond listicles featuring cute cat pictures and 90s nostalgia and into legitimate journalism, Buzzfeed’s most popular articles are still mostly written at a level that a 9-year-old can easily understand them.For comparison, both Huffington Post and CNN are written at a higher average reading level than Buzzfeed, but, of course, the sites have different audiences and different types of content.The lesson here is that you have to know who your audience is, what they’re looking for, and how to adapt your content to best appeal to them.

The average Buzzfeed article is written at a 4th grade reading level

List posts are inherently shareable and are typically quick and easy to read or scan over. Does it mean that listicles are the magic bullet for viral success? Of course not. It does serve as a reminder that catchy headlines get clicks and easily scannable content is ideal for the web.

65% of Buzzfeed’s viral articles are listicles

At Buzzfeed, the average headline of a viral post is right around 10 words and just under 60 characters.There is some importance to those numbers. At 59 characters, the title won’t get cut off in search engine results (Google typically cuts off titles that are longer than 70 characters) and won’t exceed Twitter’s character limits when shared.

The average headline length of a Buzzfeed article is 10.47 words and 59.28 characters

The average Buzzfeed article we analyzed was just 155 words long.To put that into context, the average 3rd grade student can read 150 words per minute. An 8th grade student can read 250 words per minute.In other words, Buzzfeed’s articles are designed so you can read them quickly and easily, share them, and get on with your life. They’re often heavy on the images and GIFs, and light on written content.

Buzzfeed keeps its articles short and easy to read

Buzzfeed clearly has a formula which they follow that helps their articles get more social media shares, more traffic, and more buzz.

The Science Behind Buzzfeed's Viral Content

Ed and Neil are in the top 0.000001% of their fields. They're among, say, 25 people in the world who repeatedly generate blockbusters.They both share the exact same creative process The creativity faucet.

Ed Sheeran and Neil Gaiman

Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile is packed with wastewater.This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives.Because your pipe has only one faucet, there's no shortcut to achieving clarity other than first emptying the wastewater.

The Creativity Faucet

At the beginning of a writing session, write out every bad idea that unavoidably comes to mind. Instead of being self-critical and resisting them, recognize bad ideas as progress.Once the bad ideas are emptied, strong ideas begin to arrive.

Applying to creativity

Once you've generated enough bad output, your mind reflexively identifies which elements caused the badness. Then it becomes good at avoiding them. You start pattern-matching interesting and novel ideas with greater intuition.Most creators resist their bad ideas and never reach the clear water. If you've opened a blank document, scribbled a few thoughts, then walked away because you weren't struck with gold, then you too never got past it.

Why does this work ?

Mozart had 600 musical compositions and Edison had 1093 patents. Only a few are remembered today, and that's the point.

A blog post explains how the greatest minds generate creative ideas. Neil Gaiman and Ed Sheeran share this approach.

How to be more creative

The opportunity in search is not to attack Google head-on with a massive, one-size-fits-all horizontal aggregator, but rather to build boutique search engines that index, curate, and organize things in new ways.The problem, now is not what to read/buy/eat/watch/etc., but figuring out the best thing to read/buy/eat/watch/etc. with my limited time and attention.

In a world of infinite information, it becomes important to organize the world's trustworthy information.

Vertical search players like Yelp, Expedia, Zillow, and Behance fill functionality and relevancy gaps using structured data specific to their industriesRelevance depends on the sociology of the current momentA combination of irrelevant filters, ad-based business models, and unconstrained supply has overwhelmed consumers and made it hard to find signalsVertical search aggregators work when you know exactly what you want. But knowing what you want isn’t usually the starting point, which creates an opportunity to help the overwhelmed consumer with better discovery and curation along the funnel.

Vertical search aggregators

The conversation around curation has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure. Curation, when thought of in the context of sharing bite-sized, isolated bits in feed-like architectures, is predominantly about entertainment, not utility.﻿The opportunity is in moving curated content feeds away from their never-ending-now orientation and toward more goal-oriented interfaces. People should be able to find whatever content they want on their terms and not be beholden to when the curator decides to publish.

Curators, curators

All curation grows until it requires search, and all search grows until it requires curation.

<ul><li>Searchable, curated interfaces will help us move away from ephemeral, time-bound feeds into contextual, high-signal, trustworthy knowledge spaces.</li><li>Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like the Yellow Pages and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommendation. They have constrained supply, which is the foundation for their biggest moat: trust.</li></ul>

Boutique search engines are next-level curation

Over and over again, curation sites fall into an existential trap. They start with high-quality, curated recommendations.As they grow, they scale with crowdsourcing, often filling the gap with scraping. The line between curator, compiler, and cataloguer is thin.A natural invisible asymptote - diminishing returns on more data over time

If the value proposition is signal over noise, how do you scale the signal?

<ul><li>Platforms like Twitter delegate this responsibility to their users, who have to go through a long and arduous process of following a huge number of people to ultimately arrive at a self-curated timeline that mimics their interests.</li><li>Some centralize their curation, while others stay away from curation in favor of more traditional crowdsourcing.</li></ul>

Who curates the curators?

The project of human knowledge, as it stands today, is a vast ocean of fragmented information and ideas, with the best sources near-impossible to find. We need more interfaces with a point of view on what information is missing, how it needs to be organized, and at what point of the value chain the curation has to happen.

Until you can build habitual recall into your product, Google will be how your engine gets discovered.

The way to improve search is not to mimic Google, but instead to build boutique search engines that index, curate, and organize things in new ways.

The Future of Search Is Boutique

1RM is the maximum weight you can lift if you only have to do one repetition of an exercise.It's considered the “gold standard” test of strength. When you lift your 1RM weight, you shouldn't be able to complete a second repetition. The idea is that you give everything you have in that first rep that's where the name comes from.Knowing your 1RM enables you to choose the correct weight for each exercise, ensuring that you maximise your training benefits and build strength systematically. It can also help you to overcome a training plateau.

What is 1RM? 

Weight x reps x 0.0333 + weight = estimated 1RM  For example, if you can usually bench 60kg for 6 reps, your 1RM calculation will look like this:60 x 6 x 0.0333 + 60 = 71.988. Round it up to 72kg, and you have your estimated 1RM

How do you calculate your 1RM?

When doing a 1RM remember that form comes first.To improve your endurance, use a weight that’s 70% of your 1RM for sets of 12-20 reps.To stress your muscle fibres, use a weight that’s 80% of your 1RM for sets of 7-12 reps.To teach your muscles power and speed, use a weight that’s 90% of your 1RM for 3-4 sets of 3-4 reps. Make sure you take enough rest and recovery time in between each set.To push past your limits and focus on strength, use a weight that’s 95% of your 1RM for sets of just 1-3 reps. This will feel heavy, so make sure you have a spotter to keep you safe during each lift.

How do you use 1RM in a workout?

A simple 🏋🏻‍♂️ trick to avoid hitting the plateau. 

Learn how to test your 1RM, how often you should test it, and how to apply it in your training to effectively increase your strength over time.

Muscle Growth and nutrition

How One-Rep Max (1RM) Can Enhance Your Training

A nudge… is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.

<ul><li>Loss Aversion: We prefer not to lose rather than gain</li><li>Myopia: We make choices based on short term gain, often at long-term costs</li><li>Conformity: We tend to make choices to conform with the behaviour and expectations of others</li><li>Anchoring Bias: Choosing by relying too heavily on the first piece of information offered. </li><li>Availability Bias: Choosing by overestimating the likelihood something will happen because you can imagine it (e.g. being in a plane crash)</li><li>Representativity Bias: Choosing by overestimating the likelihood something will happen because it fits (is representative of) your expectations</li></ul>

Biases and fallacies in how we choose

A choice architect is one who indirectly influences the choices other people make. They are entitled to the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions. If you design the ballot the voters use it to choose candidates or design the form that employees fill out to enroll in the company health care plan you are a choice architect. People will need nudges for rare and difficult decisions, for which they do not get prompt feedback and when they have trouble translating aspects of the situation into terms that they can easily understand.

Who is a Choice Architect and why do we need nudges?

The authorities at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal in the men's room. Men usually don't pay much attention to where they aim but if they see a target, their attention and accuracy increases.The natural urge is to aim (and drown the fly) resulted in 80% less splash. Cleaner restrooms lead to less cleaning leading to less harmful chemicals being used and also it doesn't hurt to make people laugh.

The Fly in the Urinal

iNcentives - The right incentives for the right people enable good decision-making processes.Understand Mappings is how people can better relate to the consequences of different decision pathwaysDefaults - People often leave the default decision on if they are too lazy to make a decision.Give Feedback - A good way to help humans improve their performance is to provide feedback.Expect Error - To err is human and designs should be made such that people are forewarned before a more disastrous outcome happens.Structure complex choices - having too many choices can cause choice overload, simplify.

6 Principles of good choice architecture

Insights from the architecture of choice reveal two opportunities for the innovator based on basic psychology and the fact that people have two distinctive thinking styles that they flip between;<ul><li>Reflective thinking (aka “Systematic”, “Central”, “System 2” thought) that is temporary, slow, considered, effortful and deliberate</li><li>Automatic thinking (aka “Heuristic”, Peripheral, System 1″ thought) which is our default style – quick, instinctive, impulsive and, critically, highly error-prone)</li></ul>

Two Opportunities

For a given choice there is a default option, an option that will obtain if the chooser does nothing, then we can expect a large number of people to end up with that option. Automatic renewal for magazine subscriptions is a classic example.If the choice architect forces to choose then keep 2 points in mind:<ul><li>Humans will often consider the required choice to be a nuisance or worse.</li><li>It should often be considered for simple yes or no decisions than for more complex decisions.</li></ul>

Defaults are ubiquitous and powerful

A good system of choice architecture helps people to improve their ability to map and select options that will make them better off.One way to do this is to make the information about various options more comprehensible, by transforming numerical information into units that translate more readily into actual use.If I am buying apples to make into apple cider, it helps to know the rule of thumb that it takes three apples to make one glass of cider.

Understand Mapping

<ol><li>Either play on the fallacies and biases that pattern our automatic (lazy) thinking (see list further down),</li><li>Or jolt people into reflective thinking by providing them with a new way of thinking about something </li></ol>

How to Change the World

Although this book is focused more on policy innovation, I liked the parts which show that any consumer-focused innovation should begin with understanding how consumers choose. 

Every day we make decisions: about the things that we buy or the meals we eat; about the investments we make or our children's health and education; even the causes that we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. We are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions that make us poorer, less healthy and less happy. And, as Thaler and Sunstein show, no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way. By knowing how people think, we can make it easier for them to choose what is best for them, their families and society. Using dozens of eye-opening examples the authors demonstrate how to nudge us in the right directions, without restricting our freedom of choice. Nudge offers a unique new way of looking at the world for individuals and governments alike.This is one of the most engaging, provocative and important books you will ever read.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

<a href="https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/">Building A Second Brain</a> is a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience. It expands our memory and our intellect using the modern tools of technology and networks.This methodology is not only for preserving those ideas, but turning them into reality. It provides a clear, actionable path to creating a “second brain” – an external, centralized, digital repository for the things you learn and the resources from which they come.

What is it ?

We spend a significant portion of our careers creating snippets of text, outlines, photos, videos, sketches, diagrams, webpages, notes, or documents. Yet without a little extra care to preserve these valuable resources, our precious knowledge remains siloed and scattered across dozens of different locations. We fail to build a collection of knowledge that both appreciates in value and can be reused again and again.By offloading our thinking onto a “second brain,” we free our biological brain to imagine, create, and simply be present.

Why adopt this methodology?

Your second brain will serve as an extension of your mind, not only protecting you from the ravages of forgetfulness but also amplifying your efforts as you take on creative challenges.

<ol><li>Uncover unexpected patterns and connections between ideas.</li><li>Reduce stress and “information overload” by expertly curating and managing your personal information stream.</li><li>Develop valuable expertise, specialized knowledge, and the skills to deploy it in a new job, career, or business</li><li>Cultivate a collection of valuable knowledge and insights over time without having to follow rigid, time-consuming rules</li><li>Unlock the full value of the wealth of learning resources all around you, such as online courses, webinars, books, articles, forums, and podcasts</li></ol>

Benefits of building a 2nd brain

The first step in building a second brain is “capturing” the ideas and insights you think are worth saving. How do you do that?Think like a curator - Make conscious, strategic decisions about what you consume. As you come across social media updates, online articles, and podcasts throughout your day, instead of diving in immediately, save them for future consideration. As you begin to collect content, you’ll be able to choose which sources to consume in a deliberate way.

Capturing - Part 1|Remember

Instead of organizing your files primarily by topic (for example, web design or psychology), which is time-consuming and mentally taxing, organize them according to the projects you are actively working on. This ensures that you are consuming information with a purpose – to advance your projects and goals – and only at a time and place where you’ll be able to put it to use.

Organize by project - Part 2|Remember

Save anything that “resonates” with you on an intuitive levelThis is often because it connects to something you care about, wonder about, or find inherently intriguing. By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us at a deeper level, we improve not only our ability to see opportunities, but also our understanding of ourselves and how we work.

Keep what resonates - Part 3|Remember

Every time we create a note or make an edit, we can make it just a little easier to find and make use of next time.This can include:<ul><li>Defining key terms in parentheses in case we forget what they mean</li><li>Inserting placeholders when we leave off summarizing a source so we know where to pick back up</li><li>Adding links to related websites, files, or emails that we’re likely to forget over time</li></ul>saving packets of knowledge in a format that our future self can easily consume, we follow a “pay it forward” strategy that we get to benefit from in the future!

Design notes for your future self - Connect|Part 1

<a href="https://fortelabs.co/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes-3459b257d3eb/">Progressive Summarization</a> is a technique that relies on summarizing a note in multiple stages over time. You save only the best excerpts from whatever you’re reading, and then create a summary of those excerpts, and then a summary of that summary, distilling the essence of the content at each stage. These “layers” are like a digital map that can be zoomed in or out to any level of detail you need.It allows you to read the note in different ways for different purposes: in depth if you want to glean every detail, or at a high level if you just need the main takeaway.

Summarize progressively -Connect|Part 2

Add value to a note every time you touch itThis could include adding an informative title the first time you come across a note, highlighting the most important points the next time you see it, and adding a link to a related note sometime later. By spreading out the heavy work of organizing your notes over time, you not only save time and effort, but ensure that the most frequently used (and thus most valuable) notes surface organically, like a ski slope where the most popular routes naturally end up with deeper grooves.

Organize opportunistically- Connect|Part 3

A common challenge for people who love to learn is that they constantly force feed themselves more and more information, but never actually put it to use. But information only becomes knowledge – something personal, embodied, grounded – when we put it to use. That’s why we should shift as much of our effort as possible from consuming information, to creating new things. The things we create – whether they are writing pieces, websites, photographs, videos, or live performances – embody and express the knowledge we’ve gained from personal experience.

Don’t just consume - Create|Part 1

Begin to think of your projects as made up of discrete parts. I call them “intermediate packets,” which can include any kind of content we’ve already mentioned: a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings,etcInstead of trying to sit down and move the entire project forward all at once, a more effective approach is to end each work session – whether it is 15 minutes or 3 hours – by completing just one intermediate packet. This allows you to work in smaller increments, making use of any available span of time, while getting lots of feedback and taking frequent breaks

Create smaller, reusable units of work - Create|Part 2

By consistently sharing your work with others – whether that is your family, friends, colleagues, or externally on social media – all sorts of benefits will start to materialize. You’ll connect with new collaborators who you never would have imagined would find your work compelling. You’ll find clients or customers, in some cases even when you weren’t seeking them. Others will reflect back to you their reactions and comments and appreciation (and occasionally criticism). You’ll find that you are part of a community that shares your interests and values.

Share your work with the world - Create|Part 3

Each note in your second brain is a record of something you’ve experienced in your life – whether that is from reading a book, having an interesting conversation, or completing a project at work. With all your most valuable ideas at your fingertips at all times, you never need to struggle and strain to remember everything you’ve learned.Because you know how to capture and make use of anything, every experience you have becomes an opportunity to learn and to grow.

Conclusion

Amazing ideas which can not just help you stash mindfully but also how to connect with them again and put those ideas to use.

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