I’ve been online twenty years, and blogging for ten of them. This is the story and lessons learned of blogging online for a decade. It goes beyond blogging topics and includes note-taking (workflow), how to write well as well as the medium in which writing works best, and also the format in which writing works long-term such as writing in open formats and methods such as vim motions to navigate and edit like a surgeon.

My prediction, and hope, is that the Future of Blogging is more connected. Not only one dimensional, like a single sheet of paper, but think of a maze, where you can go in, explore new things to learn.

This is how I built up my Second Brain, and you can see the interactive graph at the end of this blog, connecting all notes and blogs that are related.

This article is based on a recent interview about “Write that Blog”. This triggered me to finally write this piece after collecting 100s of notes related to writing online and blogging in my second brain.

Why I Started Blogging: Learning OSS Tools

A quick note on how I got started. Mainly it was out of curiosity. As a business intelligence specialist with a Microsoft licence, I was more curious about open-source tools that had similar abilities as SSAS, SSRS that were used at work, even more so, the programmatic first approach to automate things, instead of clicking myself through the UI of older GUI first approaches.

I had some when I lived in Copenhagen, Denmark, which I used to explore and document what I learned. As I already had a domain (sspaeti.com) and experience in web development with weekly party pictures that I ran for many years, but wasn’t active anymore as Facebook and other portals got created, I decided to pivot it to a personal blog - which was very popular back then.

So I started with my WordPress blog and uploaded some scripts and learnings around Microsoft and related automation I learned, and was re-using often. Then I did a deep dive and a series on data warehouse automation tools, which got very good feedback after the initial blogs didn’t go anywhere.

I found myself enjoying the process of distilling knowledge in a compact format, so others, and mainly myself, could learn new topics. The Feedback Loop was another amazing feeling that I didn’t know beforehand, along the principle The more you share the more you get - as people were giving me suggestions, new ideas, sometimes criticism. But all to find even more open source tools and interesting approaches.

What Started as a Hobby Turned into a Full-time Job and Business

Writing became one of my favorite hobbies, and I got lots of fulfillment, not the short term dopamine hit, but the long-term Deep Happiness of learning, getting appreciated by readers, and the process of turning my long taken notes into something more usable for people to share. Learning in Public as some called it later on.

I reserved Friday nights in my favorite library in Copenhagen, bought my favorite coffee at Espresso House, mostly a nice cookie or something sweet, and then off for 2-4 hours. Sometimes nothing really good came out, it was hard. Other times I was just trying new tools like Dagster, Delta Lake etc., and others I was in deep flow of writing, almost like trance.

The breakthrough came much later, three years in, when I wrote about a new upcoming topic, and how the transition from data warehouse I see, called Data Engineering, the future of Data Warehousing?. This was the first viral post, and popular figures like Dan Linstedt commented on it. It was surreal back then, why would these people read my article?

But it gave me the motivation to continue. Sure I love writing and sharing in public, but not sure if I wouldn’t have people reading it, if I would have continued until today.

How Did I Manage to Continue to This Day?

Writing is hard as anyone will tell who does it. So why do I torture myself to do it to this day? Even made it my full time work, as I’m currently self-employed and work as a full time author.

The answer is not straightforward, but to say the truth, I still love it to this day. Writing words is my canvas as an artist, where I can let out my thoughts, be creative, bring something complex into simple terms. Into something that anyone might want to read.

How Has Blogging Changed over the Last 10 Years?

During my start, where I created a WordPress personal blog website, to today, there have been different evolutions, but overall, not much has changed in terms of personal blogs.

These are still the same, except that we changed the technology a couple of times, from using Flash websites to hand writing PHP/HTML/MySQL to using WordPress to Medium and Static Site Generators (SSG) to Substack today, the main change is social media. Before, personal blogs had more authority. Everyone was linking to other blogs, currently a couple of social media tech giants have the monopoly and you almost need to share there to be discovered.

When I started, I used Twitter and LinkedIn already too, but “the game” of distribution has changed. But again, the sole purpose of personal blogs is the same.

Today with AI we are even in a new era, with all the “AI Slop” generated and shared all over the place. I believe, and see it as my work as a professional writer, that the craft of writing, and Writing Manually, gets even more important.

Writing is communication, and we can’t communicate through a filter, which at the moment many are doing with converting bullets into prose and the reader summarizes from prose to bullet points - watering down the actual points and wording the original author has made. To the point where most people, me included, would rather read the prompt.

Blogs vs. Second Brain Notes

One approach that I like to push, and many are doing locally with Obsidian, is connected note taking. I shared my Obsidian notes that are worth sharing on my public second brain (find my process at Public Second Brain with Quartz of adding #publish and it will be on my site, no conversion needed, the code and utilities are shared on GitHub, too)

Bringing back connected personal notes, but also internally on your website - using synergies between your blog and second brain. The way I think as of now about Sharing as Second Brain Note vs a Blog Post:

The second brain helps me to share whatever is in my mind, and the blog helps me to refine. Notes compound and always evolving. Blog posts capture a moment in time.

There’s also the difference between long-term, always updated, and compounding notes vs. the one time distilled blog article. They work so well together. As you might notice, most of my links in this article, with much more information, are long-term notes that I’m collecting and refining over the years, linked to my second brain.

This way, I can bring all notes into one storyline, the way I’m currently thinking, sharing it in the form of a blog, as this one, while continually updating the related notes all linked here on long-term strategy for blogging, and with its different Type of Notes.

Connects Knowledge: Helping Learning the Same way as Our Brain Does

I’m thinking of Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann), where he added maps to his book, that correlated similar terms:

I see the connected, interactive graph on my second brain, and on my book (just recently added) the same way. It helps learning.

It’s proven that we learn much better if we can associate to an existing term or something we know, versus something new that is orphaned in our brain, without a connection and synapse to another thought (or note in our case). It’s hard to remember and learn from it.

In a Second Brain and Digital Garden approach, you connect every note at least to one existing term. I also like to add its origin so I always know where it came from. More on My Obsidian Note-Taking Workflow if that interests you more.

For example the below note about Functional Data Engineering (← click here to see the graph and backlinks in action) shows how besides the written text, you can glance connected notes through the interactive graph or through backlinks.

We can visually see things that are otherwise almost impossible to grasp or see. Like a map of a city can convey information density that no chat or explanation can do by explaining to someone on the phone or in written text. It’s the same with the graph.

And the best part, it’s additional, so you don’t need to look at it at all. But most helpful when you want to learn or might not know the space that well yet, you can see a term or connection you know, and immediately connect your brain, that these belong together, probably remember forever, or much longer.

E.g. in the above example, we might see that functional data engineering is linked to clarity, and to Code Is Still the Best Abstraction, which might be non-obvious, but really helpful to know.

Again, linked notes are the best way to organize knowledge, especially optimized for learning. Knowledge doesn’t grow linearly. It expands as a network over different seasons. I write more about that phenomenon and continue to update at Future of Blogging.

The Process - And the Difference between Long-Term and Short-Term

My process is essentially:

1. idea occurred by reading a book, listening to a podcast, talking to someone or else
2. writing it down in my private second brain
3. connect to existing notes, refine the note, add new thoughts and notes
4. eventually add #publish and publish online on my public second brain
5. eventually distill that note with many others and write a blog post about a specific and related topic of that note
6. continue updating and refining the note
7. eventually writing another blog that relates to it, using that improved note
8. using the note for my book topics
9. refining note

I think you get the gist. The initial one liner, the note that just existed based on a real insight, is the actual most important information of the whole process, in my opinion.

Not to say that the blog articles are not, but they both need each other. With writing the blog, I distill and connect multiple notes at a current timestamp into a frozen article. During that process, notes also get updated. And while sharing the blog post, I get a lot of feedback, Feedback Loop, which I then instead of adding to the blog, which I can’t as it’s a snapshot in time, add to the existing note.

So feedback is actively processed, and massaged into my private or public second brain, improving my overall approach. I think this process of connected notes from private, to public note to blog and continued note, is even more powerful than Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, that revolutionized the Smart Note Taking approach based on zettels, small unique ideas that he connected to others.

The Form of Writing: long Form or short

My writing usually tends to be very long-form. Because I take lots of notes that I try to connect and write in an interesting way, I tend to get very long. Same as this writing already is, but I still have 3000+ notes collected to go.

Also, long-form writing evokes a deeper relationship and trust that is hard to captivate with a couple of words. That’s also why a book can connect you to the author like no other medium can.

It’s also a question of long term game and writing for it to stay relevant for many years to come, or just capturing a quick trend and harshly (fast?) putting out a blog. These are totally different forms of content, and strategies. The latter usually also used on social media, to create big attention to go viral for a short term.

But what I always ask myself, what’s the gain from it? Ultimately, likes and followers are just a Vanity Metric, and to me at least, don’t count as much as a real human reading these words. Not leaving a like or comment, but just having made a connection or an impact on someone in another part of the world I don’t know (yet? I’m always happy to get introduction emails from my readers! :)). Or just inspiring or making you think about something related, or just learning something new.

That’s at least my main goal. There’s no hidden goal or message behind my writing. Obviously if I write for my clients, it’s a bit different, as I want them to succeed, whereas I write for myself, I just want to let out my thoughts. But what I learned over the years is that Writing from The heart, being genuine, is also helping for work related topics, as at the end of the day, it’s still a human being reading it - and therefore the same principle applies as if it were just a random blog post.

My Writing Process

I’d like now to switch gears a bit as we went through the differentiation of compounding, refined notes and in-time blog posts, and talk about my writing process that I have mastered or improved over the years.

This is my unique writing approach and even more so, note-taking approach. This is not how you have to do it, and probably won’t work for you. As I learned on the How I Write (Podcast) by David Perell, each author has a totally different approach. And this here is mine.

But here I want to share a little bit more about my strategies, my approach to writing, and my tips and tricks I have learned and noted down over the years.

I Spend Many Hours, Weeks and Months on Single Blog Posts

But even before that, a quick prefix: I spend many hours, weeks, sometimes months on a single blog post. Why Are We Here on Earth? for example, I wrote over the course of two years - but if you include my note taking, it sometimes is obviously even longer, because some notes of mine are ten years and older.

There’s also the longer I work on it, the more learning, and sometimes struggles I can put into a piece, which helps the piece to not get outdated the next months too. Something that I’m grappling with over months and years most probably won’t be gone tomorrow.

This is one reason why I don’t like to write too much about AI at the current pace, everything I write, and would spend lots of hours might be outdated the moment I publish.

That’s why my approach is just collecting and refining my thoughts on a second brain note, for example in this case on Will AI replace Humans and related notes - which made it already on the frontpage of Hackernews - but I’m sure at some point I will take that note and all its relevant related notes, and will distill into a single blog post. But the time hasn’t come yet, as so much is changing.

But it’s not that I don’t do it at all, sometimes I will write something quick, something maybe less long-term, but usually, it’s just less fun for me to write, and maybe less challenging? Although, some topics and articles that I have slept over too long just poured out of me in one go, no sophisticated linking in my second brain or other approach, just a blank page and writing it down. But usually these are topics that I have read extensively about, I’m discussing with people or are just dear to my heart, that my subconscious is just working on it until it’s telling me it’s ready, and then I must not miss the opportunity and just write it down.

A little similar to this piece and topic. It’s so dear to my heart, and something I wanted to write for so long, that I have never done it, and now with the “write that blog” interview, it triggered so many questions that I just went on and wrote until now in one flow. No breaks, just free flow and combining different notes I have in my Obsidian vault.

This is how my vault and process looks right now, with:

1. The current note
2. Is the long long outline (you can’t even see half of it),
3. Is related notes through smart connections
4. Is the initial write that blog interview I answered
5. Is another connected note I have written just above about
6. These are more related notes
7. And you see word counts on the lower right and Vim Motions I write the article in

Ultimate Goal: Good Storytelling

If I had to summarize my writing process, or the goal of it, then it crystallized to me lately that the goal is to have the ultimate storytelling. I want to write about a topic that has an intro that catches the attention, then has a great body, and finishes with a hook and ties everything together.

Storytelling like in the movies, it’s true for writing too, where they have the main act, second act, the villain etc. But with the difference, you can’t use fancy show effects, you are left with simple words.

That’s why it’s very important to use what you have as a writer. In writing a blog like this, one of the most important and one I like to use most, it’s the length of a paragraph, making them look good, break at the right timing when re-reading. End on a high, start the next that connects but with a new insight. The paragraphs should be of different lengths, they should be interesting, and change over time.

Mix it up with images, with some quotes or what I like a lot, callouts. The reason why I like callouts is I can add an additional story, a side note in a way to not distract from the main storyline, but I can serve some readers who like some behind the scenes or more information. Plus they look beautiful in my eyes, adding different colors to the blog post as each of my different types of callout has a different color. It makes it more interesting aesthetically, and that also helps to want to read something more in my opinion, the aesthetic can help big time.

Leave with a Spark✨. Making it Interesting

Besides the ultimate goal of having a good storyline, having a common thread, a nice reading flow and outline is key to keep you, the reader, engaged. I like to jump a bit around.

Not only cutting some topics short, moving on to something else, maybe coming back, maybe not, leaving the reader in the blank, making it more interesting. The key of good writing is leaving out what needs to be left out. It’s an artform, because I could ramble forever on this topic, as I’m super passionate about it - as you might have noticed - but I need to always keep in mind to not bore you. To give you new insights.

That’s why I’m switching now to making it interesting. Besides switching from topic to topic, I also like to go very deep in a topic, and then zooming out very high-level, only to go very deep again in the next sentence.

Zooming in and out helps the reader to not lose the overview, but also learning something new. I usually don’t spend too much time in the middle “zooming level”, this section is boring to me as it’s too vague (not detailed and concrete, and not guiding with not enough overview).

Switching all the time might feel a little like a rollercoaster, but rollercoasters are fun, so do I envision my articles. Writing and its process boils down to me to:

Writing from The heart is the best. True, honest, and genuine human-to-human communication.

Writing from Curiosity

My best writing comes from my own curiosity. I want to answer a question for myself, even better if I don’t know the answer beforehand. Not knowing where I’m heading to.

I usually set a title, and then go with the flow, see where it leads me—these are the best writings of mine. If I have to write about a certain topic, or outline, it couldn’t be more boring, and that’s usually reflected in my writing too.

The exception is if I know the space very well, I can write a leadership thought piece, bringing together 20 years into one blog. The challenge is again in nailing the storytelling part to make twenty years coherent from start to end.

My Writing Style

Finding your writing style and writing voice is something that was very hard for me. But I think is key to become a writer, especially a professional writer.

It takes time. What helped me for sure, was to read many books, finding my favorite authors and identify their writing style. This helped me to find that I liked Derek Sivers books. Initially, I didn’t know why, until I found more about his writing style, his personality in interviews, read more from him, and analyzed his work.

I found that his minimalistic style, to scrap each unneeded word, straight to the point and providing value while inspiring with different takes that you haven’t heard already a hundred times. He writes genuinely, he also journals 3-4 hours almost daily, thinking and brainstorming a lot in his head and second brain.

That’s also what led me to journal and write in my second brain, like a physician, experiment with different formulas and ideas, to see what comes out. That’s my second brain idea creation. I have the two phases, the idea creation and finishing part. Again, the second brain is where I start with a one-liner, a note from a friend, listing interesting things, linking to existing notes.

Later when distilling into a blog post, or sharing a public second brain note, I will tackle the deeper meaning, the connection with other ideas and areas of my life or things I’m currently learning or have learned a long time ago.

I try not to force it. How many times have I tried to force it, only to go to bed early, and the next day wake up and just have it flow out of my fingers.

Writing is Rewriting

Most of it is also just rewriting. When you write something 3-4 times, when you sleep over it, your subconscious has worked on it while you walk, it always gets better.

It’s a way of personal editing process. It’s also a way of writing style. Jason Fried and Haruki Murakami from Novelist as a Vocation (an amazing book for writers), are constantly re-writing. Sometimes based on feedback of readers, sometimes based on a Gut Feeling.

Finding Your Voice, but How?

So, how do you find your voice?

After all the different ways I wrote, I read from other authors, there is no one way, and I can’t tell you how yours will be, other than you start writing, and trusting in the process.

For me, my writing voice I defined as written in personal first person voice. Something I have experienced I can easily explain or write about. But making up a fake story, something they let you do in school, is something I was never good at.

I try to be authentic, friendly and succinct, with the goal of adding value to the readers.
I’m trying to give clues and tools concrete and extremely specific but also leave things out. Because I’m not an academic and I can only make suggestions about what I learned but cannot solve all the problems I write about. I also try not to overly copy others’ ideas, but make them my own through connecting and my own unique life experience. Including hardship and daily struggle and just life.

Key is also that you share in public. Keep writing until you find your voice. From there on, it will be much easier.

How I Found My Writing Voice: Through the English Language

I did live abroad for almost three years in a foreign country, learning Danish, but even more so English. And what happened there is what I would never have predicted.

The more I learned the language of English (I wasn’t fluent before), I started to read more books. I noticed that there are so many more books that weren’t available before, when I only read in German.

Also, I found out that I really liked the English language, the simpler grammar compared to High German as we like to call it in Switzerland. I found that I can express myself much better, more precisely as English has so many words for almost the same meaning, so you can choose and pick one that exactly describes what you want to say. Whereas in German I felt I always need to write a full novel to explain a simple thing very specifically. This might be good for fiction, but not for my technical writing, or also what I write here.

All of a sudden I was reading books all my free time, listening to Tim Ferriss and all his guests on his podcasts, and learning every day. Also, that was the time when I went to the library in Copenhagen and started writing, in English, a secondary language I was just about to learn properly (I had English in school before) and could converse and have small talk. I wrote more about my journey and about Finding My Pathless Path if you are curious to know more about that.

Simple English

As you know now, and might get from my grammatical errors here and there, my English isn’t my mother tongue.

For a long time I saw that as a disadvantage, but lately I figured that it might even be a strength of my writing. With my somewhat limited English vocabulary and language skills, leading to my articles and writing being much simpler English.

And one thing I learned over the years, the easier you can explain complex topics, and make it approachable, the easier for my reader to follow along. Also it makes the writer more approachable, less “snobbish” maybe?

And this is an advantage. My writing is much more approachable this way. It adds a natural constraint to my writing and makes my writing process potentially easier, that I am not even aware of during the writing, but helps me in a certain way I do write.

Let’s come to the last bigger part of this already long article, the tools and methods I use.

My main tool is writing in an open format, that is just Markdown and then using Obsidian as the editor to connect these simple notes together in a meaningful way.

The Different Modes of My Writings with ‘Vim Motions’

Apart from that, the way I write is with something called Vim Motions. I have written extensively about it, and you might think these matter not so much.

I hope, if you write online, or program for a living, that you learned touch typing at some point in your life. If you have, you’d agree that it tremendously helped you with everything working on the computer, right? Not needing to see each key before you press.

Vim motions go a step further, essentially making each key on your keyboard a tool. In the default mode, when opening vim, each key press is doing a function. E.g. g is for jumping around (gg is jumping to the top of the document, ctrl + o jumps back where you left before. G jumps to the end of the document. $ jumps to the end of a line. And so on, I could go on forever, but if you want to actually write something, you’d need to switch to “insert-mode” with i (there’s also a for append or o), but you have different modes. I wrote in Four Modes of Writing I have four modes with vim motions at all times:

1. NORMAL mode: jumping around, reading, learning
2. INSERT mode: writing, thinking, making connections
3. VISUAL mode: copying, highlighting, format, designing
4. COMMAND mode: automate, fix, macros.

These vim motions, which are different from vim or Neovim, the editor, are also available in Obsidian and almost any editor you know. Even Gmail has shortcuts like j to go down or k to go up, two common ways of navigation in vim motions. Even more, vim has a language, the vim language. This is super helpful as you don’t need to memorize 1000s of commands by heart, but can combine them. Almost like Streetfighter where you can do a combo.

Besides vim motions, which I write much more on Why Vim Is More than Just an Editor, you can edit at the precision of a surgeon. If interested, also check out my video on Vim Motions for Writers, where I made a timelapse of how that looks:

The Medium

Different mediums to publish, to write on, to take notes are out there, when to use which?

The Medium to Publish

Which medium, which platform do you use? Nowadays you have many options, Substack, Medium, Ghost or other Open Subscription Platforms.

I would always recommend having your own domain. If you like web design and tinkering a bit, even more now with AI Agents Tools, you should start with a Static Site Generators (SSG).

These allow you to use Markdown as the format, and owning your content, not losing backlinks when switching platform, and building the domain ranking over time, leading to more authority when searching for a job, or your own business or side projects. Or also just a hobby where you share learnings and topics of interest to you.

Tools: Laptops, (distraction-free) Typewriter, Unitaskers!

An important part is also to make it fun! I do that with different devices. Recently I even used the old typewriter of my grandfather. It showed me the power of Uni-taskers.

The typewriter can only write, not like a laptop where you can surf the internet, or play games or get distracted by social media. Just typing ahead. So refreshing.

That’s where I went down the rabbit hole of Distraction-Free Typewriter and bought myself a small Micro Journal. A digital device solely for typing. Obviously it can connect to the internet and could do much more - as I installed Linux on it - but the resources are so limited that already running Neovim that I remodeled to a Wordprocessor struggles to open. So there’s no danger of doing anything else.

Also because of the limited screen real-estate, it lets you really focus on the writing, and less so editing an article. So it’s really a joy to use to exercise my Creative Writing vein. Just for the joy of writing.

The Future-Proof Format: Markdown

As mentioned already, Markdown is the format of choice for me. Especially after I was trapped in Microsoft OneNote and its proprietary format, I couldn’t get my own notes out of it. It was super key to have something that will surpass the test of time. And there’s nothing more than Plain Text Files with Markdown.

I gave a full talk about this topic at Knowledge Management in the Digital Age: From Zettelkasten to Startup Owner, check that out if you want to know more why Markdown, its advantages over Rich Text, and how you can build a note taking setup that works with Obsidian - and even setting the foundation for a solo business like mine.

Markdown has many more advantages. The format has been proven to be the best for agents. I can easily share my public second brain in Markdown with Quartz with no conversion or manually copying notes between rich-text editors and website.

Markdown has all the advantages of simply writing with minimal formatting sugar. It has the advantage that the formatting lives as part of the text, which makes copy pasting not lose all the links or bold/italic etc, which we put for a reason.

Markdown is declarative, meaning you can automate things, you can have the same text, but different engines to present. E.g. I use HackMD for collaboration (Google Docs for Markdown), and I use Markdown to publish on my website. It’s the same file, the same format, there is no conversion needed.

Compare this to your typical Google Docs, WordPress, Webflow, or other Open Subscription Platforms such as Substack and Medium. These tend to enforce constraints, you need to always copy your text back and forth, creating copies of your text, potentially losing important formats.

The other big advantage, Markdown files are just Plaintext Files, meaning we own the files - no big tech or company can forbid access for us or take them away, they work offline when we don’t have internet, and they are super fast as it’s just tiny files that are locally stored, no round trips to the server.

Wrapping up

I wanted to write much more about the art of writing, how to write, How to Write Well, and generally more the technique and art of writing. But as this article is already very long, I will save that for another long, distilled blog post in the future. You can follow the above links already, where I wrote a lot, but not in this distilled blog format.

Maybe one day I will write a book about it, I have so much more to say and tell 🙂. What do you think, would you read it? 🙃

Now I want to leave you with some unexpected impacts that writing had on me, and how to get started with blogging:

• My articles and website focus on data engineering, but my most successful posts (in views and virality) are topics about Obsidian, vim, and philosophy
• That was a surprise — but now I get it: these were where I had something on my heart, something I poured many years into and put into a single writing
• Career impact: got higher salaries because I was considered known “world-wide” through my blog
• People knew my writing, and typically tend to like you as you give the writing for free
• When I started my own company, I basically didn’t have to sell — being online for so long, people know my writing, my principles, and even my life through my Second Brain
• The total set of articles is what matters: when people come back to you, that’s the compounding effect

I have so much more to say, which a lot of it is in my second brain, so feel free just to browse and explore my second brain. Use the backlinks and the graph to explore more. I even added a semantic search, so you can find hidden connections on my public brain, on topics that might interest you, or on this very topic you just read.

A good book recommendation that is related (I share more on Book Recommendations and Notes), that helped me a ton, which I also wrote about finding mine, is The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd. This is the Tim Ferriss 4-Hour Workweek book, updated for today, and it inspired me to take the step of going full-time as a freelance technical writer and making writing my job.

What if you want to get started yourself? Read my interview on “Write that Blog” where I share more suggestions about starting your own blog. But generally, writing is hard, just get started.

Have a note taking app (one only, based on an open format, available offline too), and write things down. Save important moments in your life, blessings of people telling you, insights from books you read, etc.

Follow the mantra of Learning in Public. Use the feedback loop, let’s share and learn together. And know that over time, all your notes and personal knowledge will compound, like money does if you invest it cleverly.

I’m leaving some links to tips and tricks for unblocking and finding a good rhythm.

• Coffee Break Rhythm: Using location pressure as a productivity forcing function. For me, in summer, it’s moving every 1.5-2 hours from coffee shop to coffee shop, creating a pressure to finish up before leaving. It tricks the brain into not thinking: “Oh, I have still all day long time” and then procrastinate, the opposite of Productive Procrastination, where we let go on purpose to get some insights we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
• Use the doubts, the signs that you can’t write today. Take a walk instead, best would be to walk everyday. I call it the Productive Procrastination. Many see it as a bad thing, but it’s unavoidable, and me, and also others, believe it’s our body, gut telling us something. E.g. Tim Urban from Wait But Why is also big on procrastination. He says the same. He hates to procrastinate sometimes, but that’s how his brain works, and where he gets some insights he wouldn’t have gotten without.
• Ultradian Rhythm: Know that the first 10 minutes of a 90-minute deep work block are always going to be hard. That’s okay. Remind yourself of this when starting is hard.
• Embrace the New Luxury of Boredom: I feel we are at a turning point. We, the people, want to own things, want distraction-free experiences, and above all, want tools that benefit us, not the pockets of large companies. There are more stories that people use old iPods for music, buying the music. Typing on a typewriter solely for writing (like I did distraction-free typewriter), leaving the cloud, or just using local first products like Obsidian, DuckDB. Devices that are uni-taskers, doing one thing well.