Speculation, Inquiry, and a Quest for Purpose
The cognitive costs of context-switching are all about the brain work of choosing to ignore certain elements of your environment to focus on different ones. It's like having to go through everything in your field of view and review it for relevance whenever you change tasks without changing location. An immersive environment—be it for reading, writing, watching movies, making music—could reduce...
I used to think that a childhood spent reading books, an adolescence spent watching movies, and an undergraduate education spent discussing great works of philosophy and literature meant I had a pretty robust "hypothetical simulator" kicking around inside my brain. It took taking a job at Apple fixing computers for me to start to understand that everything I thought I knew was wrong. That's the...
Trying to be productive, efficient, and organized is an Achilles’ Heel like no other—it suckers you into endless procrastination in the pursuit of a method to end procrastination once and for all, creating a vicious cycle of identifying a system for getting things done, implementing it to the best of your ability, then discovering a different potentially better system that requires you to...
This post is for the majority of people who agree that climate change is real, it's affected by human activity, and they want to do something about it. Included are real solutions that range from individual lifestyle changes and systemic changes to a comprehensive plan to reverse global warming.
In one year, my son will be old enough to start kindergarten, and I will have to decide what to do with myself. I could get a job, go back to school, double down on writing, or just curl into a ball and cry about how we're all doomed. What should I do?
This is part 5 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post reviews the process I use to turn my ideas into prose for both short- and long-form fiction.
This is part 3 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post reviews my workflow for collecting and acting upon story ideas, turning premises into polished prose.
This is part 3 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post details how I make use of plugins like Periodic Notes, Templater, QuickAdd, and dataview to manage my Daily Notes Page and Morning Pages writing practice.
This is Part 2 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post reviews my history with journaling and digital note-taking tools, accounting for how I arrived at Obsidian from my first digital database, Evernote.
This is Part 1 of a series about how I write and reflect using Obsidian, an extensible digital note-taking interface with some surprising and unexpectedly useful features. This post serves as an overview and index for the rest of the series, which will explore in depth how I use Obsidian for note-taking, journaling, and creative writing.
Speculation, Inquiry, and a Quest for Purpose