My blog became my R&D lab: a place to ramble, rant, play, test, dissect, entertain, summarize, explain, argue, advocate, theorize, and generally way overthink all the ideas I was encountering in my work and my life. (Location 50)
Note: Good description of what my brain feels like!
You see, I have to write to know what I think. All my ideas sound brilliant in the echo chamber of my own mind. It is only when I put down my thoughts, letting them stand on their own strength, that I start to see the cracks and imperfections. (Location 58)
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It actually goes beyond this – I have to write to think. Otherwise the same old ideas keep circulating round and round, clogging the synapses. Writing is not a result of thinking – it is thinking itself, scaffolded by the external props of a keyboard and (Location 60)
praxis, a theory of practical action. (Location 71)
The title Design Your Work refers to the overall theme tying together these essays: the idea that one can design their own work. (Location 72)
You don’t have to adopt the same productivity methods as everyone else. You can adapt, tweak, customize, and reframe any aspect of how you work, from how you process emails to how you organize information to how you structure your attention to how you measure your performance. (Location 75)
What exactly are the conditions required for high-performance creativity, and how can we use Evernote (or other note-taking programs) to create these conditions? (Location 1165)
“creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections…” (Location 1173)
Evernote’s ability to capture an extremely diverse range of media formats is a strong hint that this is what it should be used for. It prioritizes this kind of flexibility over speed (it’s not the fastest program around), collaboration (which it doesn’t support very well), and even stability (some features are buggy). (Location 1174)
Research on cognition has shown that our basic mode of thinking is not abstract reasoning and planning, but “interacting via perception and action with the environmental situation.” (Location 1189)
Essentially, it’s easier for us to interact with physical objects in the environment than with abstract ideas in our heads. (Location 1192)