Scree

noun : an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff.

What can hand writing actually do? →

Published 6 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 9  ·  

I’ve been keeping a personal journal and tinkering with notebooks, lists, prompts, and reminders for decades. The longer I’ve done it, the more convinced I am that hand-writing isn’t a quaint preference — it’s a different way of thinking. The pen slows you down. The page absorbs what your head keeps re-running. You stop having to remember things you’ve already worked through. It’s not magic. It’s just paper. But over years I believe it has changed what my mind does in any given hour.

This thread runs through how the practice actually works for me — what hand-writing changes about attention, what the daily routines look like, why the lists matter, what reflection adds, and what shows up years later when you rummage through an old notebook. The book Hand-Write. Think Better. is the one-place compression of all of that and this thread is the longer conversation behind it.

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What About Digital Tools? →

Published 11 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 3  ·  

People ask about digital note-taking tools. Notion, Obsidian, Roam, whatever the current favorite is.

Those tools are fine. They solve different problems.

The notebook works because:

  • Writing by hand is slower, which forces clearer thinking
  • It’s always available (no boot time, no battery, no “let me find the right app”)
  • There’s no temptation to organize before you write
  • You can’t accidentally delete it
  • It works the same way in 20 years

Digital tools work because:

  • They’re searchable
  • They’re backed up
  • You can reorganize
  • You can share
  • They integrate with other systems

Different trade-offs.

For thinking through problems and capturing thoughts in the moment, I’ll take paper. For building reference systems or collaborative work, digital makes sense.

You can use both. They’re not competing. They’re solving different problems.

The question isn’t “paper or digital?” It’s “what are you trying to do right now?”

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This is part of a series about Hand-Write. Think Better.—a method for using paper to think more clearly. Get the book →

Fasting — what I’ve actually learned →

Published 12 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 2  ·  , ,

I started in 2008-ish by cutting refined carbs. Intermittent fasting — 16:8 — came later. I’m still over-weight. I’m not selling anything. The pieces below are the ones I keep pointing to when someone asks me what I think.

This thread is sequenced for someone wondering whether to be more intentional about when they eat. None of it answers that question for you. It just tells you what an honest version of the n=1 looks like over a long timeline, and suggests things you might want to try.

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Aiming is the secret →

Published 16 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 30

You don’t get ready and then aim high. You aim high, and the aiming makes you ready.

~ Nini Nguyen, from The Moon was Never the Point

That’s something which took me many years to understand.

I’m fond of saying that ideas are worthless. What matters is what you do with your ideas. Share them freely. Engage with others. Make a plan and see it through.

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There’s just life time →

Published 16 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 29

Figuring out how to have sustainable, fulfilling existence seems like it should be the goal, no?

~ John Warner, from Produce or Perish?

Somewhere there’s a quote about how we don’t have “work time” and “play time” but rather there is only life time. Warner’s article gets it.

I hope you have gotten it too.

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Dismantling our creative potential →

Published 17 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 28

And then the newest erosion – the AI rabbit hole. Everyone deep in their own individual loop. Getting more productive. Getting more fluent. And getting, incrementally, more disconnected from the people around them. The half-formed question that used to get asked out loud – I’m stuck on this, has anyone dealt with something like this? – now goes to a chatbot. The same technology that was supposed to unlock creative potential is, in its default form, dismantling the sidewalk ballet entirely.

~ Zoe Scaman, from Creative Mycelium

Yes. But, see also Schizoid Kairos for a view of the situations where it’s also a novel new paradigm.

As with every technology—every tool—humankind has ever picked up, it matters what you do with it. Sure, I want to live in that “sidewalk city” where my ideas mix with others’. If only those scenes still existed.

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Incomplete. Forever. →

Published 19 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 26  ·  

For most of human history, you bought a thing, and it was yours, and it was finished.

That word is nearly extinct.

Nothing you own is finished. Everything exists in a state of permanent incompletion, permanently needing. Your phone needs updates, needs charging, needs storage cleared, needs passwords rotated.

~ Terry Godier, from The Last Quiet Thing

That’s exactly it. I’m often talking about calm technology and that’s one key issue with stuff these days. But this point about finished makes my heart sink.

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What’s actually happening when conversation works? →

Published 19 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 26  ·  ,

I’ve recorded a lot of conversations over the past decade — and started my Open + Curious project to explicitly write down what I think I’ve learned. The advice everyone gets about conversation — be warm, follow up, build rapport — doesn’t fully describe what I’ve actually seen happen in the conversations that worked.

This thread is a path through pieces I’ve written and conversations I’ve distilled, sequenced for someone who’s wondering why so many attempts at meaningful conversation fall flat. As usual for my writing, none of them answer the question. Instead, they name some of the gaps between what we usually mean by good conversation and what’s happening when a conversation is actually good.

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Who controls the terms →

Published 21 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 24

But the real Luddites weren’t afraid of machines; they were afraid of the social and economic impacts of the new technology on people—and of who controlled the terms of technological change.

~ Courtney C. Radsch, from We should all be Luddites

I don’t see what else I can really add to this…

The more things change, the more they stay the same? History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes? Do you think your individual choices about current technology trends are going to be enough? At why point do you feel coordinated effort is going to be necessary? Luddites.

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temenos.place →

Published 23 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 23  ·  ,

A small marked enclosure where a different kind of attention is kept.

A temenos, in ancient Greek, was a piece of ground set apart from ordinary use — bounded, dedicated to something larger than daily life, and respected as such. Not a temple, necessarily; just a marked enclosure where a different kind of attention was kept. People went there to do something they couldn’t quite do anywhere else — pay attention to what was hard to see in the noise of regular life. The marker around the place mattered as much as anything that happened inside it.

Temenos.place is an instance of one. A small daily instance. Each day, one thing appears on a page behind this one — a sentence, a question, a quote. Anyone who’s joined can sit with it. They can leave a short reply, where the others can see it but no one responds to it. Tomorrow the post is gone, the replies are gone, a new one is there. Nothing accumulates; there’s no archive, no body of work being built, no count of anything. People can show up today, or not, and either is fine. There is nothing to fall behind on.

The thing worth taking from this page is the temenos itself, which is yours to mark out wherever you are. A notebook, a chair, a corner of a morning, a daily walk — anywhere you decide that a particular kind of attention will be kept. If reading this gives you the word for something you’ve been doing already, or the permission to start, that’s enough.

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