I was taking a stroll in the park next to my home yesterday. There were about half a dozen people in the entire area, mostly playing with their dogs or babies. Although everything seemed normal, it didn’t feel normal. Every time someone passed by me, I would share a brief moment of eye contact with them. In that moment, a dozen question would be asked: is this person infected? what if I’m infected? how are they doing? did they lose a loved one? what are they thinking right now? can they sense what I’m thinking?
Although this pandemic has made us more wary of each other, the pace at which it is spreading exemplifies the interconnectedness of our species. About 10,000 years ago, when people began venturing into agriculture and settled down in one location, this could not have happened. We didn’t have trade, or air travel, or the internet. Every invention along those subsequent 10,000 years greatly improved our chance of survival as an entire species, although not always favorable to individuals. Right now we’re in the valley of that curve, experiencing the few downsides of this globalization that has otherwise proven to work. As I mentioned before, the way to do that would be the right balance between rationality and compassion. I hope you’re safe and well.
Click on the image above for 3 minutes of pure design brilliance.
All this brings us to today’s newsletter: how to set up your personal knowledge management system as you are stuck in a 10x10 ft room looking out the window wondering if the silhouettes in those windows are watching you.
Notion
I was introduced to Notion by a friend back in February, 2019. Notion calls itself the all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. I fell in love soon after I began using it because of its minimalistic design and flexibility. In fact, a feedback that I gave to the team through Intercom turned into an email conversation that lead to me visiting their HQ in San Francisco to write an article on them back in July, 2019.
In Notion, every single piece of content is considered a block. You can convert a word into a new page and condense pages into tables. When you open it for the first time, all you see is a white screen before you waiting to be populated with Kanban boards, toggle lists, all sorts of media and databases. While the flexibility can sometimes be overwhelming, it has led to a flurry of use cases ranging from a cafe guide in San Francisco to being used by startups for their roadmaps. ‘I know it wasn’t made for this purpose, but Notion is the perfect tool to track and organize a Dungeons and Dragons campaign,’ says Dave Snider, a web designer, on Twitter.
We want to break away from today’s tools — and bring back some of the ideas of the early pioneers [such as Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart]. As a first step, we are blending much of your workflow into an all-in-one workspace. Want a task list? A product roadmap? A design repository? They are now all in one place. You can even customize your own workspace from dozens of LEGO-style building blocks. Solve your problems your way, bounded only by your imagination. — About Notion
If you have been struggling with following through on your new year’s resolutions or keep falling back on the goals you set for the week, here is a guide where I show you how to set up GTD + Weekly planner in Notion that looks delightful.
If you’re new to Notion, consider
signing up through this referral invite link so we both get credits
. :)
Roam Research
I came across Roam Research about two months ago through a newsletter. After navigating through a slightly clunky on-boarding process, I was instantly captivated because of the pithy one-liner: A note-taking tool for networked thought.Â
Roam is an online workspace for organizing and evaluating knowledge. The system is built on a directed graph, which frees it from the constraints of the classic file tree. Users can remix and connect ideas in multiple overlapping hierarchies, with each unit of information becoming a node in a dynamic network. — The Roam White Paper
Yep, that’s a mouthful. Let me break it down: the fundamental feature that separates Roam from all the other note-taking apps is its ability to create nodes that can be surfaced at any point in time with all its related context. This mirrors the way humans think. When you think of the word apple, you don’t simply add that under the category of fruits. You might also think about an apple for the categories things that are red, things I like eating for breakfast, things I do not want in a pie, and so on. When our brain stores a piece of information, it can retrieve that in more than one way (and through more than one of our senses).
Assume I created a new page in Roam titled Indian History and pasted a bunch of paragraphs I found in an article. Now, when I’m writing an article on Indian history and want to reference something from this page, all I need to do is choose the option Block Reference (‘/’ brings up a list of commands) and start typing a few words for it to auto-populate. Once I reference it, I can also check the content from that page by shift-clicking on it so it pops up on the right.
If you have a lot of aha moments throughout the day but wish you would write that down somewhere or if you want to add your own thoughts to an article or book that you read, Roam is where your home is, as I detail in this guide.
If you haven’t checked out this tool called
Readwise
yet that can be used to transfer Kindle highlights in one click, consider
signing up through this referral invite link so we both get a free month
. :)
This is a bonus newsletter aside from the bi-weekly one. Let me know if you would like to receive more such actionable content when it comes to personal knowledge management. I’m always on the lookout for experimenting with new topics.
Hi there! If you’re feeling generous, can you like this post on Substack? It would greatly improve the visibility so more people can enjoy. You can follow me on Instagram for fun life stories and LinkedIn for not-so-fun life stories. Email ask@bsoundarya.com for questions.
Aaand.. you’re awesome. Don’t forget that. :)