The Column

Motto: This Turned Out to be a Monster I'd like to thank my local library and the various apps ( one ,  two ,  three ) that connect with it for increasing my reading throughput by roughly 95%.  Gillespedia  has 9 book reports now... sooner or later I'll figure out a way to make them  look  good. Right now Gillespedia is basically a link to the public-facing portion of my Notion notes. This Column has been dogging me for weeks. I'm sure it will feel good when it's finished. Mindfulness.  Being present. Intentionality.  Buzzwords. What do they actually  mean ? The concept of "mindfulness"  has been getting more and more popular . I've seen tons  books aimed at mindfulness , telling you it's the solution to all of life's biggest problems - depression, anxiety, dissatisfaction. The use of the term in marketing drove a Buddhist teacher to coin the term "McMindfulness", describing the commercialization ...

Motto: Okay Google... what's your goal here? Intro This post is going to be an expansion on something I wrote about in Column #354 . It will (hopefully) complete the series of posts I've written lately about productivity software, Google, Getting Things Done, and all that.  Specifically today I'm writing about Google products, and my growing disillusionment with them. This post will be thorough, longer than most, and generally more well put together. Setting the Googley Stage I'll caveat this up front by saying they are great on the whole, most of my quibbles are just that, quibbles, and that I have them because I'm a power user. I am in deep with Google. Google Products I Still Use Google Search Gmail YouTube Chrome ChromeOS Chromecast Chrome Remote Desktop Google Assistant Google Home Google Photos Google Maps Google Drive Google One Google News Google Sheets Google Docs Google Slides Google Drawings Google Forms Google Keep Google ...

Motto: Cause Nothing Ever Stays "Good Enough" I left the last post off saying I'd write more about Notion. This is going to be that + me revisiting notetaking platform anxieties, which I've written about a few times before. I'm writing here because it helps me think. Notion is a new-ish entrant into the market of notetaking software - but it's more than that. Notion is a notetaking app, with task-management-like capabilities, project-management-like capabilities, and it looks beautiful while it does it. Notion feels like what would happen if someone sat down and made a wishlist for everything a piece of software would have to do in order to manage  anything , then they systematically worked their way down the list building something that checks all the boxes.  Features in an  anything  management app: Support for text, images, links, and other types of content Support for to-do checkboxes Ability to organize notes and tasks and reference materi...