There are things we avoid looking at too closely. If we looked, really saw what was happening, we’d have to change our minds, admit we were mistaken, refactor our priorities or take action. I…

In many of my posts I share solutions to technical challenges I have come across. In this post there is certainly an element of that, but it is building on some earlier work and is perhaps more about sharing a real view of what I use day to day, as a way of providing a bit of insight or inspiration into how you may be able to employ something similar. Specifically, in this post I am going to share some details of my “general” meeting template in Obsidian. Oh, and that’s “general meeting” template as in a generic template for a general, run of the mill, ad hoc meeting, not a general meeting as in governance (e.g. AGM, EGM).

It’s tempting for a creator. To make a pop hit, a song or a book or a meme that becomes a popular idea and part of the culture. In our lifetimes, it’s become possible to imagine that yo…

Hustle harder. Run more ads. Spam people. Interrupt. Make the logo bigger. Post again. Post again. Add more blurbs. Push the press release to irrelevant people. Do one more ad. Use AI to create fau…

There’s a famous Cherokee myth about good and evil. As it goes.. An old man was teaching his grandson about life. “There’s a battle going on inside every

As we continue to face difficult choices and work to make things better, it’s quite likely that the alternatives being presented aren’t ideal or even appealing. Many organizations and c…

Let's talk about workflows. If you are a white collar worker, chances are that you spend most of your day creating or editing digital files. Whether you are a programmer, sysadmin, accountant, salesman or a CEO, you will be spending considerable part of your day messing with data, grouped as some sort of logical entity: a document, spreadsheet, source code, etc.. Different people have different strategies and approaches for this sort of work. For example,

After 2022, it’s hard to tell for sure. And going forward, public life is going to be even more rumor-driven than it is now. Any video, any voiceover, any photograph–we can’t be s…

Could we change our minds? When was the last time new information caused you to walk away from an idea you were confident in? It gets harder and harder to do, and more and more important.

Obsidian is an amazing tool for developer and developer advocates. You can use it as a second brain, for content creation, and more.

Need a better note-taking app? Learn how Obsidian notes can turn your plain text files into a rich, sophisticated network of linked thoughts.

The secret to boosting your coding skills in just a few minutes a day.

Perhaps your wedding package includes a cake. It’s paid for, better eat it. Even if you’re allergic to wheat. Perhaps the amusement park includes as many rides as you like, even if you&…

Tim Urban has a new book, What’s Our Problem?, whose main thesis is that our minds have two modes, and high and a low mind. The high mind more seeks truth, while the low mind more seeks loyalty via confirming sacred beliefs. The high mind thinks like a scientist, especially in an “idea lab”. It realizes that it might be wrong, avoids bias or idea attachment, is open to stumbling and backtracking, and systematically collects hypotheses and data to carefully compare the two.

Rejection, not acceptance, defines writing life.

We often use words like “beautiful” or “stunning” or “perfect” when we actually mean “popular” or “pleasant.” Every day is beautiful in i…

They say leaders eat last. While this is slowly becoming a pithy, overused catchphrase, it’s also a powerful maxim that reminds leaders of their primary

While Drafts is my ever present information capture app, Obsidian is the destination for a large amount of that information as I build the content into cross-referenced, meaningful notes. Much like Drafts, Obsidian has a framework through which people can develop plug in solutions (literally “plugins” - core and community), which in many ways mimics Drafts’ actions. While some of my own work on Drafts actions has yielded libraries and reusable actions that others can build into workflows, the nature of some of the amazing plugins in Obsidian takes things further and uses plugins to open portals to allow you to interact directly with the underlying Obsidian API. As a result you can build some quite useful commands without having to build your own plugin. In this post I am going to share the construction of some simple ‘path-based’ command examples to illustrate how you can take advantage of this.

How do people lose their spouse, their faith, their grip on their values, goals, and dreams? It doesn’t happen all at once. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens through tiny shifts: a steady accumulation of daily, imperceptible deviations from one’s set course. A little more attention is given to one thing than another. A frame […]

If you came of age in say, the late nineties or sooner, there were two rules you had to know: 1. Google is unstoppable, nobody can take search away from

Years ago, Adam Savage put forward a concept he calls “first order retrievability.” The idea is to put as much of your shop on casters as possible, and then, when working on a specific …

Using wardley mapping to map my skills and focus on career development

The learning curve is familiar to many people. It might be steep, but it’s continuous. Organizations (and people) work their way up it, one step at a time (it’s the black line in the gr…

A well-turned curse can remind you of the power of language.

Creating an unchangeable five-year plan is misguided. But creating a list of personal and professional goals you’d like to achieve can be motivating.

You’ve heard of the seven-year-itch. It’s the sense of restlessness or dissatisfaction that supposedly sets in after you’ve been with someone for seven years of time. It’s most often talked about in the context of romantic relationships but is also applied to one’s “relationship” with something like a job or place. While the seven-year-itch is […]

The alphabet is a miracle, one that is compounded by books. And the lessons we learn from this cornerstone of modern culture apply to organizations, meetings, tech, politics and almost everything w…