Weekly Digest 1
Productivity and Interfaces
Materials:
- Multi-layered calendars: Calendars need multi layer to track different kind of things in our life.
- The case against conversational interfaces: AI as a complement, not as a replacement of current tools.
Very interesting discussion about how the tools should be, and how should we use them.
The author categorize the productivity stack to 4 types of tools:
- Note-taking apps To document and organize our thoughts
- Email To communicate with others
- Task managers To organize the things we need to get done
- Calendars To manage our time
I think this is pretty precise and I want to share my experience using all kinds of these tools.
Tools I used
Note-taking
Notion: ❌, It seems to try to teach me the “proper” way to take note.
OneNote: ✅, easy to use on all platform, no need to worry about sync. Good draw function on mobile.
Obsidian: 👍, the most flexible one that I ever used. You can use it in whatever way you like. It give me the feeling of the master, not just a user. But Obsidian is bad for mobile and sync feature costs you money.
Apple Note: ❌, not cross-platform means death for me.
I mainly use Obsidian. And I start to use OneNote on mobile.
Email, Task Managers and Calendars
Outlook: multi-platform app, multi-mail-account in single window.
Microsoft Todo: multi-platform app.
Native Calendars: I do not use Calendars that much, so I just use the native one. But I use Outlook’s Calendar to sync my event on different platforms.
I think Microsoft’s tools are great because I can use them on any devices and never worry about syncing. And I can use them as apps, not just cheap web pages.
And I think Google Productions’ UI is just 🤮.
Does using these tools worth the effort?
When I started use these tools, I am prone to spend a lot of time and effort to writing, recording. But look back now, I should have just get the things done instead of always focusing on improving my “productivity”.
So, if you do not use these tools, you get messy. If you use them too much, you get distracted from what really matters.
Here are three things I think that are helpful to remind you if you are using them properly:
- What you have written and recorded matters most at the moment when it was written down. As time goes on, its value decayed (fast then slowly).
- Writing down is always good, but you should make it concise.
1
If you do not write it, you just think you are thinking.
- Loose rules are good for recording and writing. This is because what we are doing is mapping the real world into the models that we are trying to define. And the real world is really just complex and chaotic.
BTW, what about interface?
This post is going to be too long to write and read, so I will stop here.
Simply put, I am going to try more audio things with AI, and share my experience in the near future.