You are walking through a wide-open field far from houses and signs of civilisation. You come across an old, abandoned fence. It is in the way, but you could walk around it. You really can’t see the use of it, should you go ahead and knock it down?

No.

Fences do not pop up left and right on their own. Another person, whoever they might be, built it for a reason. Their reason may be a good one, or it may be a bad one. But it would be reckless to knock it down without knowing for sure.

“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”

Chesterton's fence is a heuristic inspired by the scholar G.K. Chesterton in his 1929 book; The Thing.

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

From G.K Chesterton's The Thing

When we create an institution or structure society a certain way, it is in response to a problem. We humans aren’t in the business of running around, and building fences left and right. We have reasons that drive our behaviour, be they good or bad. The shape that society takes today is the result of many such humans trying to live in this world.

We have structured our society in a way that has lead to numerous social, economic and environmental problems — yet, we did so for a reason. We have moulded the institutions that govern our lives to help address problems we have encountered in the past.

Hello everyone,

I really hope you've been well and indeed that you still are well. I sincerely hope that from this place of wellness you are able to act in such a way that ensures that you and all others are able to continue being well. Finding these ways of being in the world is what I believe, the game of human existence is all about.

I've been busy. I have been learning Japanese slowly and thoroughly and have been enjoying the feeling of making progress of being able to listen to and be able to parse another language — even if only a little bit.

I've also went ahead and made these two tools for helping me learn Kanji. If it just so happens that any of you are learning Japanese you might also find them helpful, or otherwise might be interested in checking them out.

• Learn Kanji Radicals
• Learn Kanji Sounds

I wrote about the how and why I got interested in learning Japanese in my 2020 piece Learning and Language. Not only do I want to learn the language, but I want to learn about how the process of learning a language happens from the inside out — and more broadly how learning happens in the first place (I want to write about my experiences and insights here, but alas today is not that day).

As a part of this I've been getting really interested in memory and the better and worse ways to remember what we want to remember. Have you heard of the Memory Championships? They are events held all over the world where individuals who have trained their memory compete in such feats as memorising and reciting the order entire shuffled decks of cards in the span of a half hour, or memorising extremely long poetry word for word or long strings of numbers. The mental athletes who win out in these competitions all swear that thy aren't savants, that they have no special ability. Rather that there are teachable techniques that anyone can learn and master to rapidly improve how they use they memory. I have been spending a lot of time and energy reading and thinking about these techniques and how more of us can apply and benefit from them in our day-to-day lives. The most famous and most ancient of them is known the Method of Loci. I am assuming that Loci must be Latin for Location. It involves visualising a physical space (often one you are familar with) and associating what you are trying to remember with objects in that space. This allows you to walk around that space in mind's eye and have what you see remind you of what you were trying to remember. You might know this by it's more modern name, a memory palace. A memory palace is a considered the gold standard in mnemonics, it takes advantage of the fact that our spatial memory works better than our conceptual memory. It's even been found that when scanning the brains of memory champions as they remember with FMRI they are using different parts of their brain to encode information into memories — the visual-spatial regions specifically.

I've read the book Moonwalking with Einstien by the former US Memory Champion Josh Foer. His story is amazing as he entered the competition originally as a journalist to write about his experience from the inside, only to win the grand prize.

• You can watch his TED talk where he talks about his story and feats of memory here.

I've currently reading the books Memory Craft by the Australian Academic Lynne Kelly which talks about all manor of mnemonics and how to improve their memory as well as their origins and how they were used in ancient times. She is convinced that what we call memory palaces were used by tribes living all over the world and are much more ancient than their apparant Greek origins.

• You can watch Lynne Kelly TED talk about the ancient methods of memory and how anyone, at any age can adopt them to improve their life here

More recently I have been getting very into programming and software development. Lately I've been commissioned by David Kedmey to build a way to archive and view the Tweets of the Author and Computer Scientist Judea Pearl who would like a way to preserve his tweets offline.

This has been really interesting but building software isn't what I want my main path forward in life to be. I want to be a writer — and so I will write.

I've had a number of different things on the mind over the last few months. As my savings have been dwindling one of them has been how I should make a living doing what I enjoy doing.

What you will read below is a note I typed up just today in my vault. It includes thought I've had about the concept of "lookahead" or spare attention and how I believe it is the precursor to wealth and progress.

Lately I've felt squeezed financially and this has pushed me to doing things I believe would earn me money in the short-term. I haven't felt like I had the free time and attention to really focus on writing. Soon I would like to change it and invest the time not just in writing but in being able to carve a space where I can making a living off what I write.

My plan in the short term is to earn at least a little runway so I have space to breathe, find some ways to make money that are efficient so I can carve out the free time I need to write and then transition my life so I can spend as much of it writing as possible and as little of it "maintaining the business of writing".

I want to think about what I please and act in the world unconcerned about whether it will generate returns. I want to spend my life constantly chasing my curiosity, the questions that I am most interested in at a given time and sharing the answers I find with everyone.

Anyway, here are some thoughts of mine that I've titled: Lookahead and Wealth Creation

A friend mentioned this to me in the context of juggling. Lookahead is all about not being tied up by the task at hand. Lookahead is about having free attention that you can use to predict what will happen next. Juggling is all about lookahead. You need free attention to be able to see the next catch. It’s only at the point that the balls you are tossing in between your hands are totally under your control that you can add more.

I thought about this a little more and concluded that actually everything is about lookahead.

We have a finite amount of time, attention and energy to accomplish whatever we want to accomplish in life. If we want to add something new to our lives, we need to make space for it; we need to not be already fully loaded — we need a kind of lookahead.

To take on more commitments, we can’t have our hands full. Only in juggling, it’s literally the case.

Lookahead may be the fundamental driver of economic growth.

In the note I’ve written on Economic Growth, I gave the classic Robinson Crusoe example:

You’re stuck on an island. Every day you catch ten fish, and then you eat ten fish. One day you realise that you don’t need to eat ten fish, so you eat nine — but you continue to catch ten each day. Ten days later, you realise you don’t have to catch any fish at all. You have nine fish (a whole day’s worth) conveniently saved in a rockpool by the bay. You now have precious resources that you’ve never had before: free time and attention. Your hands are no longer full from catching fish. You have lookahead with which you can do whatever you so please. You decide to build a net. From then on, you can catch your nine fish in only half a day. Every single day you have a half-day with which you can do as you please — what will you do next?

(Full note available here to subscribers of the vault.)

This example was first explained to me by a friend to go through the basics of Austrian Economics and to make the point that wealth isn’t the same as money and is a concept that stands on its own.

Having runway (saved money that you can live off for some time) is like having financial lookahead. If all of your attention is invested in making ends meet and paying the rent, then you simply don’t have the bandwidth to think long-term about the future.

Another way of describing lookahead is as “attentional runway” if all of your attention is bound up with what’s in front of you, then there’s none left to look beyond. This might be why we tend to be more creative when taking breaks when we are away from the context of our work. When we are on a walk or having a shower, we have attention to spare, which often goes towards making breakthroughs on what we are working on.

I am starting to come of the mind that having free attention and lookahead is more fundamental than wealth and material prosperity. I love David Deutsch’s take on wealth as our knowledge of how to make physical transformations in the world that can solve our problems. The knowledge of how to turn what we find in the world into what we need to survive and flourish. We turn soil, water and sunlight into crops. We turn bricks into houses and sand into computers. Our ever-increasing knowledge of how to do this ever more efficiently is the sum of our society’s wealth. What we call material wealth is in fact downstream of our knowledge. Our knowledge is in turn, downstream of our creativity, of what our minds can do when they have the time and space they need — or in other words, when they have lookahead.

Knowing this, what can we do to improve our lives? We can look at what’s eating away at our time and energy moment-to-moment and clear out the archives of our mind. The author David Kedavy wrote a book titled “Mind management, not time management” — I haven’t read it yet, but I really love the title. How we act in the world -- and therefore, fruits that we reap from our actions -- are downstream of the contents of our minds.

Naval Ravikant’s famous twitter thread How to get rich without getting lucky talks about time renting (that is; having a job) as being a mistake. If you are getting paid for your time, then figuring out ways to get more done in an hour will only make someone else richer. It’s better to own a piece of equity, a business that will continue to deliver returns that will eventually be independent of your constant input and activity.

In my mind, the process is about finding a way to live in the world. You need a way of creating value in the world and trading this value for everything that you need to live well. From here, it’s about automating as much as you can to keep the ship of your life afloat, thereby freeing increasingly more time and energy to devote to your interests. Continually finding ways to achieve more with less time and attention and reaping the rewards.

When talking about finance, a good investment pays dividends over time that amount to more than the initial investment. I think we can extend this to more than just money. It is the same with our time and attention. We have to use it on something, and how we use it determines the quality of our continued existence and how much free time and attention we will tend to find ourselves with. A poor investment of time and attention will keep your hands tied and will keep you chained to having to continue in the activity that you despise. A wise investment of time and attention will find you with more time and attention to invest as you please — with more lookahead.

When I started this, the plan was to basically say "hi" paste the note I had written and then say "bye". I ended up writing quite a length intro though. This used to always happen, I used to always plan to be short and succinct and end up spilling thousands of words onto the page. I really miss it to be honest.

I want to write more often. I hope I soon find myself sending more of these letters to you.

By the way, as usual I want to remind you that I'm a real person and you can reply to these emails. I always love hearing from reader. Did you enjoy the piece? Any thoughts that you'd like to share? After all my time not publishing, have I gotten rusty?

Take care everyone!

Sashin

Hello everyone,

As always, now and forever, I hope you are all well.

In the last letter, I explained that I was about to engage in an online course; Linking Your Thinking in order to learn more about how to organise all of my thoughts.

It was essentially a highly advanced note-taking course.

Today, I want to share with you the fruits of this course with two special announcements.

1. I am launching a paid subscription service to gain access to my collection of notes - I am calling this service the Sashin Exists Vault
2. I will be taking the Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge this November. Only, instead of writing a novel, I will aim to write fifty thousand words worth of notes by month’s end.

A Digital Treasure Trove

It was about three years ago when I quit my ordinary and uneventful job at a marketing agency to pursue writing. I feel like I have accomplished a lot since then; I now have a body of work that includes over fifty published pieces on topics spanning philosophy, politics, science, meditation and more.

One thing I have yet to succeed in is this: actually making a living off my work.

I have been facing a dilemma.

I write so that I can be read. I want my words to be as beneficial as possible to as many people as possible. I want to be able to impact the culture-at-large in a meaningful way.

As such, I would want to make sure that my articles and letters are as widely accessible as possible.

And yet, I have long since needed a way to monetise my work.

My current ways haven’t been very successful:

• Setting up a Patreon and a Kofi
• Creating a Merchandise Store
• Temporarily becoming an Amazon Affiliate and getting a cut from book sales from the recommended section of my website
• Adding a tip me button under each piece
• Accepting donations through PayPal, Bitcoin and Ethereum

What I have been looking for is a way to have the entire main body of my work freely available and still be able to offer a service of real value.

With the Vault, I am hoping to do just that.

• All my essays, letters and articles will be free for anyone.
• My organised notes, however, will be accessible as a paid subscription service.

The Vault is:

• A collection of mini-pieces, each on a concept I consider interesting or otherwise valuable
• A non-fiction resource, a text that will grow in value over time (while you pay a fixed price)
• A sneak peek into what will one day become my future letters and articles
• Insight into how I work, what projects I am working on and how I am tackling them
• My attempt to Modernise the Art of Writing and organise ideas in a way that they remain helpful many years after having been written

My writing and thinking are intertwined, and my notes are my second brain. As the years go by, I will continue to write more, and the Vault will grow in size. Imagine buying a book that evolved over time as you owned it, that you could find fresh pages of content whenever you went without looking at it for a few days.

As the Vault appreciates in value over time, so too will the price increase. However, when a person subscribes, they are locked into their original price: the value of the service will increase while the amount they pay remains the same.

And it won’t just be the content that will increase over time. As I learn more about better ways to store, organise and display information, I will improve the Vault creating a more streamlined experience.

I won’t write much more about it here, but rather insist that you have a look for yourselves.

Click here for the full details on what the Vault is, why you should care and how you can gain access by becoming a paid subscriber.

Fifty thousand words

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is an annual challenge that takes place every November. There are people all over the world taking part, so I am not sure why it is “national”.

Well, if it’s possible to take out the “National” part, then I will take the liberty to take out the “Novel” part too.

The NaNoWriMo challenge involves writing fifty-thousand words of your novel within a single month. I will be using it to instead write up fifty thousand words worth of notes and essays - all of which will be published to the Vault.

Over the past few months, I have been fine-tuning the process of writing, from learning a new keyboard layout to designing a keyboard-heavy workflow to getting ever more acquainted with Obsidian.

Now it will be time to put a brake on the never-ending pursuit of optimisation and put it all to use. To only have one main pursuit in life that I will be free to focus on to my heart’s content - to sit down and write.

I hope you all gain value from what I will have to say.

To summarise:

1. I am now offering access to my treasure trove of notes as a subscription service. I am calling it Vault (click here to read more and to purchase a subscription).
2. I will be taking part in the NaNoWriMo challenge and be aiming to write fifty thousand words worth of notes and essays by the end of November.
3. Normal weekly letters will be back from now on; they will be free, now and forever

This piece has been the first one in a long time; I hope you have enjoyed it. To those of you interested in supporting my work by subscribing to the Vault, I am deeply grateful.

But to everyone else, I appreciate that you took the time to read through this letter and sincerely hope you continue to enjoy my writing for a long time to come.

And now back to our regular programming!

Take care everyone,

Sashin

Hello everyone,

I hope you are all doing well.

Here in Sydney, we are in lockdown, so I haven’t been going anywhere.

A few updates on my end:

• I joined the Foster cowriting program with a scholarship
• Learning Japanese is going exceptionally well
• Conversation Culture is still running weekly, but now on Zoom
• I have a piece in the works called “A secular morality” where I try to make a case for the Philosophy of Sentientism
• I have been relearning how to type from scratch, using the colemak-dh layout rather than the familiar QWERTY
• I am soon starting a six-week cohort-based course called Linking Your Thinking

I will be busy for some time and likely will not be sending regular letters again soon. The current plan is to focus on the online course entirely. It will go until mid-October. By then, I feel I will also, as a side effect of using it, have become fully accustomed to the Coiemak-DH keyboard layout…

After that, I will focus entirely on my writing and business. It will involve:

• transitioning to sending out weekly letters once more
• developing a marketing plan to attract a bigger audience
• finding a way to monetise my work while still leaving all my best work available completely for free - that is; without jeopardising my deepest goals

For the rest of this letter, I will elaborate on what I’ve been up to—hopefully only a paragraph or so each. I don’t want to be another three thousand word letter.

—

Foster Cowriting

I have noticed that many of the books I love all begin in the same way; with a long list of thanks and acknowledgments. Looking back, most of what I have written was with the help of others-of my friends, readers, and fellow writers. Many of you have kindly offered to read over my work and offer you criticism and advice, and for this, I will be forever grateful.

• Does this make sense?
• Is this idea crazy?
• Was that fun to read?

Testing my work against the dispositions of others has relieved me of much unnecessary worry and improved the quality of my writing.

The philosophy of Foster is that the best writing is done together.

It is a space for writers to share their work for feedback and give it back to others. I have been using it for a month and have not been as active as I would have liked, but I have received valuable feedback.

In the future, I plan on integrating its use with my workflow.

–

I think I’m turning learning Japanese ♫♪

I have been reading and watching a lot about the most efficient ways to learn a language and testing them out on myself… and I have to say it feels like it is going exceptionally well.

My study method is called “Organic Immersion”, which has been championed by the “android” Youtuber Cure Dolly’s Organic Japanese.

There are two leading schools of thought in language learning:

1. Explicit textbook learning: Learning it all as theory directly. This involves working through textbooks directly and memorising grammar rules, vocabulary lists and common phrases.
2. Learning through immersion or massive input: This involves exposing oneself to a flood of content (books, movies, music, everything) in your target language and allowing your subconscious mind to do the rest. In essence, recreating the conditions of the best language learners; children.

What massive input gets right is that language is largely intuitive. What it gets wrong is the idea that it happens through “osmosis”. To work well, the individual will likely need a level of linguistic intuition - or otherwise, actively looking up what the words mean.

Organic immersion involves learning the structure of the language directly. Then you immerse yourself in content to familiarise yourself with the language and build up a working vocabulary.

My routine looks like this:

• Every day, I watch an episode of anime (currently going through my beloved One Piece)

• I watch with Japanese audio + Japanese subtitles. This means no English. To understand what is happening, I have to parse the language.

• When I run into a word I don’t know, I look up the word’s definition and create a flashcard. I have software that lets me highlight the subtitle and do both of these things automatically.

• Every day, I spend a short time going through my list of vocabulary. I am using the flashcard app Anki, which only shows me cards I haven’t seen in a while or have been having trouble.

• I also take the audio of the episodes and listen to them through the day as I am cleaning, cooking or going on walks

• On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I have Zoom classes with a language school in Japan. They actually teach in Japanese, which has been extremely helpful

The idea here is that you want to expose yourself to content you have already understood constantly, so the language gets in your blood. It feels like it is working!

—

Conversation Culture is still running

This is my effort to improve the quality of our discourse. A culture that allows people to expose their ideas to critique and healthy disagreement. We meet every week to discuss a whole manner of topics, including science, philosophy and politics. The lockdown has effectively thrown a spanner in the works of our in-person conversations.

Happily, we have been able to migrate to zoom.

A happy side effect is that now anyone in the world can join in on our discussions.

Every week. Thursdays, 6 pm, AEST.

Join here: https://conversationculture.net/join/

More about the group, here: https://conversationculture.net/about

If you are interested and have trouble with the link, please hit me up by replying to this email.

—

Upcoming Piece: A Secular Morality

I’m writing a new piece on morality. I am tired of hearing that morality needs a grounding, either from a supernatural god or a terrestrial authority.

Two extreme views as I see them are:

1. Morality comes from the divine, and its justification comes from god
2. There’s no right and wrong, no reason to be moral

I find both of these views ridiculous.

Cause-and-effect is all that’s needed.

Here’s a snippet from the piece

I have already shown drafts to Writers from Foster and received valuable feedback. I also read it out loud at the Zoom event for the Inner West Sydney Writer’s group, who seemed to really enjoy it.

I can’t wait to share it with you all (but it might not happen soon).

Learning how to type all over again

Look down at your keyboard.

Notice how the keys are staggered.

As in, they are not neatly on top of one another, in a grid.

You often have to move your fingers diagonally to type.

Why is this? And while we are at it; what’s the deal with QWERTY?

You’d think there was a deep and considered reason for this…

… and you’d be wrong!

The staggered keys and the QWERTY layout were both designed around the physical hardware of the typewriter. They aren’t there to help you type faster or more ergonomically.

They simply get in the way.

You are moving your hands much more than you need to. It is as if doing parkour with your hands all over the keys.

Learning about this irritated me a little. A close friend told me he had once learned the alternative layout DVORAK within two weeks and remembered distinctly feeling incredibly good as he typed.

DVORAK looks like this.

It was the first serious attempt to create an alternative to QWERTY.

Notice that the vowels are all in the home row?

The idea was that the vowels are more common and that the most common keys should be accessible with less movement. With better design, we can get more done with less effort.

But it gets better: Introducing Colemak!

Colemak was created much more recently than DVORAK in 2010. By then, we knew a lot more about which letters were more commonly used. All of the most frequently used characters are directly under your fingers on the home row. There is a lot less finger movement required, a lot less spidermanning all over your keyboard.

Unlike DVORAK, it gets the maximum efficiency with minimal changes from QWERTY, with only 17 characters moved around. This makes it much easier to learn. Also, the keyboard shortcuts you are used to are largely unchanged.

This very letter was typed in Colemak-DH.

So what’s that DH for, anyway?

It wasn’t just QWERTY that was arbitrary, but the stagger on the keyboard.

I went and bought a very expensive, shiny new keyboard.

Of its many features, one is that it is ortholinear.

All this means is that the keys are not staggered; they are in a neat grid.

As such, there is very little need for diagonal movement of the fingers. They can just slide up and down.

Colemak-DH is a slight mod to Colemak regular that optimises it for ortholinear keyboards. Basically, the D and H keys are moved around.

Here’s a link you can compare with the above picture.

Anyway, I’m having way too much fun typing right now!

—

Online Course: Linking Your Thinking

I am right now, not only typing in Colemak-DH but also in my all-time favourite app: Obsidian.

I have written about this before, but I am in the process of organising everything I know.

I am creating a Zettelkasten, a collection of linked notes written to retain and even increase their value over time.

Linking Your Thinking is a six-week workshop that goes deep into all of this. It will be taught mainly over Zoom and other online platforms.

I have started the induction process and introduced myself to my fellow students.

I intend to immerse myself in the course to try and get the most of it.

This being said, I might not write again for a while.

—
It feels really great to write to you after all this time. A few hours have passed since I started writing this; it’s been a lot of fun. I’d forgotten how joyful it can be to sit down and write for hours.

This letter was a status update and an announcement that I will remain inactive for a while. The six-week course will end in the second half of October, and the plan as-is will be to develop a plan of attack and return to being prolific once more.

I want to take this chance to thank you, dear readers. You who have made it to the end of yet another letter, you who have stayed with me all this time. When I quit my job, I took a calculated risk. I chose to do as I pleased and follow my deepest interests at the expense of a stable income or the usual sense of stability. I am deeply grateful that I was able to find people interested in what I have to say.

It’s been two years since I started this way of living, and while I have yet to have earned a living, I have been able to seriously put pen to paper and transmute much of the mist in my mind into published works. I have learned so much during this time. Despite everything, I feel a strange yet powerful confidence inside me. I can definitely do this.

Please continue to support me in what I do.

By the way, feel free to respond to this letter by replying to this email. I would love to hear from you!

Please take care, everyone,

Sashin

Hello everyone,

I hope you have all been well. This "wellness" thing is pretty serious. We should look into how it works and how we can rig life so that we have as much of it as the laws of nature allow.

I haven't written in a while and thought you might like an update.

I've been getting really into note-taking.

Did you know that you can get really into note-taking?

I'm currently in the middle of reading a book called How to take smart notes by Sönke Ahrens.

Smart notes are notes that make your life and work easier. Your thinking and decision making is outsourced to your note-taking system. As you read, watch and think, you always have a notebook handy taking bite-sized notes. Later you organise them. When you have to sit to write something, the research and thinking phase is already done.

The principles expounded by this book were initially used by the German Academic Niklas Luhmann. It was called "Zettelkasten". "Zettlel" is German for note, and "Kasten" is box. Much like the name, simplicity is key.

Niklas did something simple but extraordinary; he wrote his notes on small cards that he kept in two separate boxes. One was for sources; he would sum up a paper or a book in a few sentences on a single card which he would mark with a reference number. The other was for his original notes, in which turn would reference any source notes that they were inspired by.

The notes were short, written in full sentences and heavily linked to one another. Within the box, they were organised so that they could be accessed easily when he needed them. He considered his main work not to be the writing, but the thinking — writing was simply a way to communicate his thoughts. As he read, studied and thought, he would jot down any interesting ideas that came to mind and later on would transfer them to his note box system.

Have you ever had a thought and felt like you had to hold it in your mind long enough to act on it? Have you ever been on a roll with a project in such a way that you were afraid to stop as it would be hard to get back into it?

A lot of the stress from our minds holding and juggling all the things we are thinking about can be alleviated with an intelligent system.

As noteworthy thoughts came to mind, they were jotted down - wherever he was; he had his notebook. When he got home, he had the ritual of sorting through his scratch — a term for rough notes — filing the useful away in his system and trashing the rest. When it came time to start a project, the research was already done, and in fact, a lot of thinking tended to be done. It often then simply a matter of putting it all together.

When I was sending out letters every week, I would get wrapped up in my writing, but there was a fear in the corner of my mind that if I stopped, I would lose momentum, and I would lose the piece forever. If I didn't finish on Sunday, I'd wake up on Monday and spend another day. Sometimes I'd be writing non-stop like this for five days straight before publishing and sending out a letter. I would even delay eating or going downstairs to drink water out of fear of losing my train of thought. When this started becoming regular, I realised that the way I worked wouldn't be sustainable in the long run.

With smart notes, it is possible to be writing as you are thinking; there's no cost for switching between topics as your mind flutters to and fro. There's no need to pin the mind down to a single stream of thought until you have a piece ready to publish. Simply write down your interesting thoughts as they come, and worry about developing them into pieces later. There's a compounding effect as the more smart notes you write, the more sources you can draw from and the more links between your ideas you can recognise. Through finding the connections that the creative process can begin and having all your ideas organised in front of you is a powerful way to facilitate this.

I want to delve deeper into organising information and developing a note-taking system that can keep track of my ideas and free my mind for creative thought.

For now, however, I want to share with you two useful concepts:

Atomic notes

Coined by Andy Matsuchak, atomic notes follow a simple principle. One note contains one idea. The word Atom, which has greek origins, implies that which cannot be divided further. Every idea you have has its own note and can be linked with others and reused in a myriad of ways.

Evergreen notes

The Cyprus tree stays green all year round. Evergreen notes stay fresh and remain helpful no matter how long they linger. To write an evergreen note, simply write it in full sentences targeted at a general audience unaware of its context. Not only will it be easier to build a published work, but years down the line, when you stumble upon the note, you will be that audience, and the note will remain valuable.

• Andy Matsuchack on evergreen notes

The best text editor of all time

I have replicated Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten system and much of the advice from Sönke Ahrens' smart notes digitally. I am using the knowledge management system and markdown editor Obsidian. It might have been a year ago when I was on the hunt for a new writing tool; I was looking for a clean, minimal, single-function text editor — it was during this time that one of my best friends told me about Obsidian. While I wasn't writing smart notes with it back then — I haven't looked back, it is without a doubt the best text editor I have used (and it is not even a text editor). All of you should seriously check it out.

(Yes, I'm aware I've written about it before!)

Here's a screenshot of this very note in Obsdian:

Free notes

Before I go, I want to share with you some of the treasure I've found sailing these seas; my precious notes. All of these try their best to adhere to the principles above in that they are evergreen and atomic. Short, pithy notes that get to the point and can be the basis of future work.

Please enjoy them!

• A Good Explanation
• Conversation Culture
• Effective Altruism
• Evolution by Natural Selection
• Explanation vs Description
• How we know what we know
• Meditation
• Shamata vs Vipashyana
• The Feedback Loop of Learning
• The Problem of Induction
• The Scientific Method

Each of these notes explains a single idea I believe is worthwhile.

I would love to hear your feedback on these, as these concepts will become the building blocks of future pieces I write.

Also, if you have any questions about the note-taking system, please don't hesitate to ask.

As always, thank you for being interested in my work — all my thinking, note-taking and writing is worthwhile because it has the potential to benefit you.

Stay well,

Sashin