🌌 Weekly Wondering 2023-W27
The ultimate guide to using AI for your second brain, realistic productivity, using caffeine for unlocking flow state
Publishing Copy
Welcome to another edition of Weekly Wondering, a sacred time where I share the resonating links, reflections and learnings from my past week to influence your next one ;)
This newsletter is my version of learning and thinking in public, giving me time to expand on ideas that may turn into more refined content in the future. If you want to see more of my ideas (or to learn about who I am if you're new here), you can head to my digital notes garden.
✨ In My Life
Personal update
My parents will be coming on the 13th to visit for a month, so I won't have as much time for content creation.
I am already committed to making weekly videos and shorts to promote my student-oriented product Obsidian University, but fingers crossed that I can still at least find time for the newsletter 🤞
The Ultimate Guide to Using AI for Personal Knowledge Management
The wait is finally over ;)
The goalpost kept moving for my objectives with this video and series on using AI for PKM, but I'm glad to say that it's now ready for use and download! The guide includes:
Tutorials on using apps for AI (ChatGPT, Obsidian MD, Readwise Reader)
17+ TESTED prompts for enhancing your PKM workflow with use-case examples
Further resources for ChatGPT and AI mastery
The video won't be uploaded until next week, but as a token of gratitude for sticking with me, you can see what's inside and get it for free at https://free.johnmavrick.com/ai-pkm/
I would love to hear your feedback about the overall usefulness, and I'm open to any suggestions for further improvements!
🔗 Links to Thinks
A realistic and fulfilling perspective on productivity
For the past few weeks, working on my passion projects has been effortful.
It's weird how you can be so fascinated by something, but still struggle to spend time and make progress on it.
But this week, I've recalibrated my motivation and values, allowing me to wake up in the morning with a sense of intention and meaning.
So, what did I do?
Before I would always listen to a certain playlist on Spotify that would empower me and literally wake me up from its upbeat essence.
But that would be short-lived, as once I take my earbuds out and the music stops, I'll have to face reality
Instead, I've been filling my attention in the morning with the podcast "Deep Questions with Cal Newport", and right now it's tied for my favourite ongoing series to the point where he has grown to become my favourite content creator and role model.
I resonate with his values, being engrossed with the ideas he brings forward, and take inspiration from his ability to meaningfully balance all his different identities like being a professor, content creator, husband, father, and reader.
And best of all, he challenges the common trends of modern productivity, like optimizing time, fixating on financial freedom, and even the PKM space to offer more realistic solutions.
Just take a look at the titles of his past few episodes and some of the ideas inside:
Ep. 255 - The failure of cybernetic productivity
These productivity apps are supposed to allow us to get more done in less time, but as these tools become normalized, we are expected to be capable of more (this is mostly a concern for employee-based work, but this work-life balance can still be a personal struggle as outlined by the book Four Thousand Weeks)
An example is how with access to ChatGPT, students may now be asked to triple their page counts for submitted essays.
The solution is to focus on attention-based productivity, as this restlessness is caused by a lack of goals. By being intentional with your attention and what you do, you have set boundaries beyond what you do.
Ep. 254- The laws of less
Simultaneousness breeds stress - do things sequentially instead
The slower pace is deeply fulfilling
You have to personally trust that your tasks are helping you make progress toward your goals or else you won't do them
The norm is so incredibly inefficient that if you can become calm you can push back on capitalism
Ep. 253 - Making time for what matters
People who spend time with friends and family feel life is richer and more abundant, lives look more interesting, and more memories
Ep. 252 - The deep life stack
A framework for designing a fulfilling life:
Establish discipline
Build a foundation of values
Create calm through control
Plan for the remarkable overhaul
Ep. 251 - The efficiency trap
There are three benefits of systems or tools: they add capabilities, remove pain points, or speed up common tasks.
Since the knowledge worker's biggest bottleneck is the thinking process, speeding up common tasks only speeds up small margins of the work.
Unfortunately, this is the majority of what takes of productivity YouTube - automation, life hacks, etc.
Ep. 250 - In defence of thinking
The greater historical thinkers like Von Neumann did not require a second brain, they just had a really good primary one due to constant use.
Ep. 249 - The good enough job
If you diversify your identity beyond just your job, you won't feel pressured to overwork yourself and preserve energy and passion in the other parts of your life.
If you relate what you are doing to your values, you are more willing to endure suffering.
Being in a capitalist city and content creator where it's so easy to sacrifice balance and fulfillment in life for external metrics like money and status, it's inspiring to hear the other side so I can personally find my sweet spot in between the ideologies.
If you want to see Cal's ideas grow and become connected over time, I'll probably continue listening to a podcast or two a day to add more notes to my digital notes garden. You can check out my published notes for the series.
Using caffeine to unlock the flow state
I always thought drinking caffeine regularly would only make you a reliant zombie, but this research-backed video by Flow Research Collective changed my mind on the topic.
In reality, caffeine helps promote a flow state by:
Enhancing dopamine (feel-good pursuit of more) and cortisol (main stress hormone)
Promotes fight or flight via the release of epinephrine and norepinephrine hormones
Inhibits adenosine a natural depressant
Conditioning ourselves to associate caffeine with flow via habit (as long as we actually partake in deep work after caffeine consumption)
To use caffeine effectively:
Don't have 10 hours before bed
Calibrate the dose - when tired from poor sleep, ramp up to 50%
Time the half-life of caffeine (every 6 hours) to when you want to wind down
Experiment with different intake methods (caffeine and antioxidants, tea and L-theanine, )
Fast in the morning and just have coffee
Prevent caffeine tolerance by skipping out once a week, one full week per quarter year
Of course, people have different caffeine tolerances and processing times - from my 23AndMe test I found out I metabolize caffeine quicker than the average person, so I might have to experiment with doses and protocols that work best for me.
🚀 Actionable Tingz
Organizing your input notes
If you have an input system in your second brain, you might be consuming content from sources like:
A consecutive series of episode notes on a podcast
Multiple lectures or lessons from a course you're taking
Weekly newsletters from your favourite creator
But with the nature of literature/input notes being separated per consumable input, I didn't really have an easy way to look for notes only from a specific input.
I was hesitant about making different note types to organize each of them since right now I only have two major series I'm paying attention to (Deep Questions with Cal Newport and Awakening from the meaning crisis).
Until I realized, I could just create a more abstract organization system for them.
And so, the collection note was born 🗄
Is it really worth having a separate note?
You can take a look at my one on Deep Questions with Cal Newport and judge whether it's needed for you.
By organizing the inputs based on status, I can just head straight to this note whenever I want to process my captured highlights, free of getting distracted from other inputs.
To accommodate for this change, I've updated my input template to also include a field for the Collection it is in.
If I make a generic link from an unrelated input note to [[🗄 Deep Questions with Cal Newport]], it will not show up on the list since the link was not categorized as a Collection type.
The best way to spend money for happiness
Humans believe that money will make us happier in the long run, but it's actually backwards.
Instead, having more time makes us happy, especially if that time is spent on things that align with our goals and values.
In the capitalist world, we live in, we over-trade money for time, so to reclaim our happiness, one of the best ways to extract happiness from our money is to trade it back for saving time. We really do live in a society.
According to Harvard researcher Ashley Whillans, spending money on time-saving purchases grants us more happiness than materialistic purchases.
She ran an experiment where people were given $40 on the weekend to save time or materialism and were asked about their mood at the end of the day. Unsurprisingly, saving time was associated with more happiness.
This is because although materialism can fill the insecurity of certain things (appearance, economic status, etc.), saving time reduces stress, a more biologically important inhibitor to happiness.
People felt less end-of-day time pressure when they purchased time-saving services, which explained their improved mood that day. According to the broaden-and-build theory (20), improvements in daily mood should promote greater life satisfaction over time.
If you want to learn more about what research recommends for optimizing your time, you can check out her book or her research paper I have yet to finish reading 😁
My Tools and Resources for Learning and Growth
I write and collect my newsletter content all inside Obsidian, my favourite note-taking and productivity app. If you want to try using it for yourself, you can get my free beginner templates and 4-day email course.
If you want to further enhance your system, you can also check out my ultimate guide to using AI for PKM.
If you want to aggregate the valuable gems from your week like this or need a place to store and grow your own ideas, you can start building your second brain.
Alternatively, if you're a student and want a note-taking system for both good grades and personal enjoyment, you can check out Obsidian University.
If you want an efficient content consumption system, I HIGHLY recommend Readwise Reader. You can learn about how I use it every day to save and read articles, books, and newsletters here.