Long thinking means sustained, deliberate thought aimed at real new insight. Cal Newport’s Notebook Method assumes that externalizing that thinking is trivial. It isn’t. Here is how the Zettelkasten Method closes the gap.

Our ability to focus is under attack. Remove the harmful stimuli, introduce beneficial ones. Daily deep reading is has a high return on the time invested, and it doubles as the front end of the Zettelkasten Method.

Building real knowledge takes a straining effort. Once external pressure disappears we avoid it by instinct. The way out is to condition ourselves to love the strain, and the Zettelkasten Method is built to be that gym for the mind for you.

The rise of AI threatens to erode our thinking skills. Just as fitness training replaced everyday movement to stay healthy, deliberate mind training keeps the mind sharp, like working a Zettelkasten.

Most people take notes by merely pointing at ideas rather than engaging with them, which produces storage instead of knowledge. The cure is a genuine struggle to capture the complete essence of a single idea, written the way an essayist tries to find their way from A to B. The struggle is not a flaw in the process; it is the process.

Credit: Flickr / Christopher Bowley Just about everyone gets overwhelmed sometimes, and many of us deal with that by working harder. This is a reasonable response to a single unexpected thing, or a…

Stephenson discusses why he writes his books by hand — even …

Learning about static analysis is teaching me about robustness and effectiveness.

To be brutally honest, this (making Claude my social media manager) all started because I felt inadequate about self-promotion. And being an engineer, my response to feeling bad about something is …

Relationship Explorer: an offline-first tool for understanding, prioritizing, and reviewing relationship needs together.

I did not expect this. When I published my article on why emotionally intelligent people struggle most in toxic workplaces, I thought I was writing for a few hundred people in my professional network.

Written by Max Alper Last year, a private student of mine had gotten in touch with me via email at around 3 AM. I had known this student for years prior, as they were in one of the earliest college courses I ever taught when they were an undergraduate at

The Atlantic has pronounced that “The End of Reading is Here,” the latest in a long series of stories, there and elsewhere, that lament that no one -- but specifically no student -- reads anymore. They don’t read; they can’t read. When I say “long series,” I really do mean

Reading is the art of attention.

Every commitment you take on is another border you have to defend

Recently, I dug into the data on exercise and showed that, even if you really hate exercise, you would probably still be better off doing more than you do right now. But, of course, we already know we should exercise. We just don’t always do it. This is problem goes far beyond exercise. Life is […]

A list, in no particular order, of things I think more people should try or know about.

What happens when people stop reading books? We’re starting to see what a postliterate society looks like—and it’s very lame.

How to Feel at Home in the Modern World:

When culture pushes us to measure things that don’t matter to us, our values are captured. Once the metrics turn a profit for corporations and those in power, they are amplified, and almost o…

The Agenda Problem

A practical folder structure for developers and solopreneurs to organize projects, client work, and business documents with less friction.

Steinbeck points out that the stars shine in the sky, regardless of the drama here on Earth. Perspective fools us into believing that our point of view is primary, but it’s not difficult to i…

What’s the structure of your project? Here are three paradigms to consider: Video game development is expensive and risky because you’re on two frontiers at once. The tech frontier, try…

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Here are my terrors: First, monsters. Mostly the deep ocean variety, unfathomable, unseeable, likely lurking beneath me as…

Do you tell people you blog? I was reflecting on this recently, after I inadvertently mentioned to a colleague that I had blogged about a topic

So you want your team to figure out how to use AI for the benefit of your company?

Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it. To expand: Customer delig…