I am always struggling with the relationship between aspirations and capacity, something I’ve really only grown aware of in recent years.  In part by blowing far beyond even my substantial capacity for too long with some family crises, and in part by reading the really smart book On Grand Strategy, which is largely focused on the singular point that aspirations must not exceed capacity.

One of the ways I try to get more done inside the time, space, and energy I do have is to try to spend 5 minutes doing a lot of things.  Can I do that thing in five minutes?  Could a five minute version of that thing be good enough?  Very often the answer is yes.

I also turn it around and imagine my future self saying to my present self, “you couldn’t even spend 5 minutes on that??”  I don’t want that to happen.

One of the most productive things I do almost every day is sit and think through a single topic for five minutes, usually with pen and paper.  I will also read a book for 5 minutes if that’s all I can do.

You know the GTD advice that if something can be done in 2 minutes, then you should do it right away? I think this is a related concept.

And that’s five minutes of blogging on that.

David Gurteen talks about truncated “Knowledge Cafes” with five minute talks.  That reminds me that I learned how much could be done in five minutes when I was in high school and won many speech and debate tournaments in Impromptu Speaking.  In that event, you’d be given three philosophical quotes, pick one, take 30 seconds to prep, and then give a 5 minute speech about it.  I would apply the perspectives of 3 different interesting thinkers or other people in history to the quote I’d picked, analyzing it from 3 different perspectives.  That was probably where I learned too about Symphonic Thinking, Daniel Pink’s term for the ability to generate connections between seemingly disconnected things.

And that’s five more minutes.  Cheating? Maybe.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to spend 5 minutes thinking through an important life matter.

A friend asked me recently what some of the core principles are in my note taking and review system. I get a whole lot of value out of my note system and I love talking to notes nerds.  But not notes for notes’ sake! For making an impact on the world, for the better.

When I read Dan Pink’s book A Whole New Mind and learned about what he calls Symphonic Thinking, or the ability to find connections between seemingly disparate entities, as a key thinking pattern for the future of work, I thought “wow, that’s what I’ve been doing already! I’m going to do it more deliberately!”  And so I regularly cite research, reading, things I’ve heard on podcasts and more in my day job and my work outside of work.  It’s one of my superpowers, but I really believe it’s something far more people could help the world with. I recently changed my Twitter bio to read: “Sharing thoughts for growth-oriented people about how information can be synthesized to build power to make the world a better place.”

My notes come from a wide variety of sources, but most commonly from things I’ve stopped and typed up into Roam Research after I’ve heard them read aloud to me either by Pocket, which I feed with links from Twitter using an IFTT applet that sends the links in any tweets I favorite to pocket, as well as a few key RSS feeds. I also read a lot of PDFs by text to speech using hte Voice Aloud PDF to speech iOS app on my phone. I “read” with my ears and clean my kitchen a lot, or jog. I’ve also been experimenting lately with spending 5 minutes scanning through Feedly RSS reader to find things to toss into Pocket and listen to read aloud.

So I read a lot (I also miss a lot, it’s ok) and then I stop when I hear something really good and I write it down in Roam. (Or if I’m jogging, I associate each thing I want to remember with one of my limbs, then I go through them one at a time “left arm, left leg…” when I’m done running and I write them down.)

These are some of the things that came to mind when my friend asked about my note taking and review system.

• Make it easy to take notes when you can. The Roam unofficial mobile interface has been essential for me.
• Failure to cite your sources can be a real pain – finding an easy and repeatable way to cite where a note came from can make a big difference. I have notes from years ago where the insight is good but I didn’t record the source and it’s a real bummer.
• Make it easy to review your notes, Anki flashcards are super helpful. Anki tells me I’ve been adding the equivalent of one card per day to my “lessons being learned” deck since late 2015.
• Make it easy to recall half-remembered flashcards, Roam’s search or my personal wiki control-F have been really helpful. I search in Anki sometimes too.  I regularly have a hazy memory of something but search can bring it up in the background while I’m on a call for work.
• Review as much as you can, as often as you can. It’s just like an athlete practicing. I try to spend 10 or 15 minutes on my flashcards each day. I wish I spent more time, I’d love to double that. Or more.  That’s something I’m actively working on right now.  You can see my scorecard there on the right. Lots of room for improvement, but that’s better than a poke in the eye. If I could consistently review 20 flashcards a day and really integrate the acquired wisdom with my life…that would be amazing.
• As I review the flashcards, I try to think about a real life scenario I could apply that concept to. That makes it far more real and stick in my mind.
• After each review session, there’s often one flashcard in particular that I really dig into. I might spend 5 minutes writing about it. I might just think about it while going about my day.

Those are some of the things I’ve been doing for the past few years. I’d love to hear anyone else’s tips and tricks you use as well. Ultimately, I think a lot of it is just about showing up. Being imperfect, coming back to the path, and applying what you’ve learned and reviewed in the real world.

Below, some examples of 3 of my most recently added flashcards.  These ones Anki is going to show me again in a couple of days, but in time it will space them out over years.  Good luck to you in your studies and their application!

There’s a saying that simple decisions are best made with rational thought alone, but complex decisions benefit from a big dose of gut feeling as well.

I’ve been employing two methods for dealing with both types of decisions that I thought I’d share here.  I think of things like these as tools I can learn, practice with, get better at, and then deploy in my work.  I typically pick them up reading online, record them on my personal wiki page for reading notes, then transfer them monthly into a variable repetition mobile flashcard app where I review and learn them over time.

For simple, but hard, decisions, I’ve been using for several years a method I call “write it all down and pick 6.”  I learned it in a print edition of HBR that I picked up at an airport , I think it was Stanford’s Baba Shiv that suggested it but to be honest I didn’t write that part down!

The idea is: write down all the factors to take into consideration in your decision.  As many as you can possibly think of.  This feels great, like you’ve really given it a good thought.  Then, pick a very small number of those factors that are most important – at most 6.  Now look just at those 6 most important factors and honestly ask yourself what decision they support making.  This may be more powerful than it sounds.  It’s great.

Second, when you’ve got a complex decision, it can be helpful to break it down into simpler considerations first. “Simple is about relationships between individual people, objects, beings, truths,” writes Adrienne Marie Brown in her wonderful recent book Emergent Strategy.  “Part of what can clear a path to making things easier is to name the simple interactions at play in a complex system.”  Brown credits  Rachel Plattus of Beautiful Solutions with that insight.

That’s a new model I’m going to try out. If it’s a simple decision, use Pick 6.  If it’s a complex decision, try to create some simplicity by thinking about constituent relationships, then pick 6, then add gut feeling.  Gut feeling is high-bandwidth, high-context, powerful stuff too.

Related: The Conscious Competence model. When you start learning a new skill you are unconsciously incompetent, then consciously incompetent, then consciously competent with practice, until ultimately you can be unconsciously competent. Competent with far less effort.  That’s from Ed Batista’s blog post on Authenticity and Leadership.  Ed credits Martin Broadwell, a Bible teacher in Decatur, Georgia, who developed the Conscious Competence model in 1969.

Please share any related thoughts.  Thanks!

“We run the risk, with social news algorithms,” Czech media philosopher Vilém Flusser wrote, “of losing our human capacity to select information, an essential part of making decisions, of being free.” (From the Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search)

That’s a powerful  way of saying it.  Making decisions is the essence of freedom, and selecting which information to focus on is a particularly important kind of freedom in an information-dense world.  As is the case with so many other forms of freedom, it’s also overwhelming and frightening.  Exercising it is a skill that we (hopefully) build.  (Mortimer Adler defines a skill as “a habit of following a set of rules,” in his great book How to Read a Book (video summary).)

I like to exercise my information freedom through source selection (following specific people, subscribing to RSS feeds), source categorization (making Twitter lists, folders in my RSS reader), reading the most recent updates from those sources, AND appreciating social news algorithms that bring selected updates to the top.  Today I retweeted my wife for the first time in a long time, because Twitter’s “You may have missed” algorithm made sure I saw her post.  I appreciate that.

Flusser’s exploration of the implications of these algorithms goes into more detail.  “For example,” he says, “redundant info isn’t removed, but highlighted, creating pressure to conform.”

If freedom is important to you, looking outside the boundaries of the algorithmic stream is important.