Brené Brown, in her book Daring Greatly:

We live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Not only is this wrong, but it’s dangerous. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying. Researchers don’t find shame correlated with positive outcomes at all—there are no data to support that shame is a helpful compass for good behavior. In fact, shame is much more likely to be the cause of destructive and hurtful behaviors than it is to be the solution.

Just in case you were wondering if post-tragedy Twitter dog piles were having any positive social effects.

Bigger picture, I would say that shame is the single biggest threat to national security and civil liberties that we face today.

In the last year I’ve had a huge renewed interest in both journaling and thought capture. I’ve also been moving out of Evernote for all-purpose information storage.

My current system can be broadly split into two conceptual components:

1. Plain text notes and writing
2. Everything else with reference or research value

The apps and tools I primarily use are:

• The Mac file system
• Alfred and Spotlight for Mac search
• Dropbox
• Drafts, nvALT, and 1Writer for thought capture and plain text writing
• DEVONthink for non-plain-text media organization and search
• Apple Notes for certain reference information mainly accessed from my phone

The rest of this post is how I got here.

The elephant that ate too much

For ages (in internet time), Evernote was my searchable junk drawer—a place for the digital debris of my life with a low but importantly non-zero information density. Evernote makes it so easy to put everything in. It even OCRs images, making their text searchable without any additional effort on my part. It’s so great at what it does. And I’m leaving it.¹

As I’ve aged with Evernote, I’ve become more aware of its self-spamming effect. Just like email spam requires infinitesimal effort on the part of the spammer to affect infinite inboxes, Evernote puts no gating at all on self-storage. It’s a 24-hour digital hoarding rave, and there’s no bouncer at the door.

I’ve got gigs and gigs of HTML, PDF, images, and other debris inside my Evernote database. Ten years from now, it’s likely to be terabytes and terabytes.

I know that a lot of people wouldn’t see this as a problem. I mean, disk space is cheap, and search is great. All true.

What digs at me is that I don’t end up creating enough with my accumulated junk. Sure, it’s useful to be able to locate the serial number of an obscure dishwasher part on page 61 of a PDF manual I stored five years ago, but that’s purely a reference kind of value. It’s not creative.

Creativity doesn’t lend itself to automation

Before the concept of “information capture” was such an internet-ism, people captured information mainly through journaling and manually filing paper—newspapers, magazines, books, etc.

And history shows that people managed to do some really amazing things with these archaic systems. I mean, anyone who wrote a book, produced a movie, delivered a historic speech, or published anything before the year 2000, probably used a lot of paper and not much else.

Some people still do use paper, including my friend Ryan Irelan, who uses an index card system for filing and organizing his ideas (YouTube)

Non-digital systems probably seem like all disadvantage today because of the effort they require of the filer. But one person’s wasted time is another person’s opportunity to impose creative order. When you have to physically touch your information to review and search it, you interact with it differently. You impose friction and constraint—necessary conditions for all forms of creativity.

The more manual and active your system, the more you become embedded in the system itself rather than a passive observer of it.

I don’t think that I will ever adopt a pure paper index card system like Ryan uses. But I really love the essence of it, and I think it should serve as a check on any digital system I use.

As I’ve been moving out of Evernote, I’ve been paying much more attention to the types of notes and information that I’ve collected and stored. It’s a bit like peeling back geological layers and seeing the things I was especially interested in at various points in the past. I’ve deleted a lot of things that I never should’ve stored in the first place, and I’ve also come across really interesting things that I had forgotten I stored—things that have triggered ideas and things that have revealed important patterns.

Key lesson learned: stored information should be reviewed regularly. Otherwise, it stays in a frozen state.

Designing a better capture system

For thought capture, I’ve mostly moved back to an all-plain-text approach—a truth I guess I had to rediscover after being lured briefly back into the seductive proprietary rich text universe that exists in the App Store.

99 percent of all rich-text-like needs in a plain text environment were solved by John Gruber’s last update to Markdown over ten years ago, and countless Mac and iOS text editors make it even easier.

Today, I capture most thoughts and notes in Drafts simply because my iPhone is with me most often. On my Mac, nvALT is still the king of all note-taking apps. Drafts and nvALT fundamentally have the same benefit in common: they impose zero friction on capturing thoughts, and they force me to translate thoughts into unformatted ASCII. The beauty of plain text will forever be its simplicity and mobility. It is usable and retrievable anywhere when stored in a place like Dropbox.

Plain text also puts a common denominator on all notes I create myself. Plain text is easy to combine, delete, rephrase, and search. Text files are extremely versatile. At one extreme, just the filename itself could represent a short note without any content in the body of the file. At the other extreme, a single plain text file can serve as a filing cabinet for years of journaling without creating any material file size problems.

In fact, the concept of individual text files is really quite arbitrary. A collection of text files is more of a liquid medium in itself—a uniform cloud of elements that can range from low to high entropy depending on the whims of their puppeteer.

For bulk text editing and advanced filtering, I’ve found nothing better than Sublime Text, especially for very large multi-file writing projects involving Markdown and LaTeX.

Designing a better system for everything else

All information can’t (and shouldn’t) be stored in plain text. Virtually all of my non-plain-text information is some form of reference information—files that are less likely to be edited and have more read-only value. This is an enormous category containing PDFs, photos, web clippings, and more. PDFs are easily the largest group within the non-plain-text category, and I’ve found that the best way to retrieve PDFs is to thoughtfully and verbosely name them so they can be searched by file name. The longer the file name (complete with yyyy-mm-dd date), the more easily it can be found later with even basic searches using OS X Spotlight or the iOS Dropbox app.

In fact, in my experience, long file names are vastly superior to tags or folders. I have folders with hundreds of PDFs that I can easily navigate with file filters using Alfred file filters or Path Finder. File names also don’t rely on a meta data layer like tags.

For deeper content searches, I use DEVONthink. Even before I made a firm commitment to leave Evernote, I had largely replaced Evernote as a PDF repository with DEVONthink. There are so many reasons to love DEVONthink, which in my opinion is truly the best all around content management system for the Mac beyond the OS X file system itself.

Like Evernote, you can put virtually any media type into DEVONthink. Unlike Evernote, you aren’t limited to keeping everything inside a proprietary database, and you aren’t forced to store all of your data on Evernote’s servers. DEVONthink lets you index folders in the Mac file system outside of DEVONthink, and I use this a lot to do keyword content searches across multiple folders of PDFs—often mixtures of PDFs stored in research folders and PDFs I’ve created myself for my work. In an instant, I can see sorted results and the incidence of keywords and phrases—and I can open the PDFs in Preview and work with them with any tool on the Mac.

In its simplest form, DEVONthink is a very powerful search tool—and more accurate at searching inside PDFs than Evernote in experiments I’ve conducted. But DEVONthink Pro Office (DTPO) offers so much more, including the most accurate OCR engine I’ve ever used. DTPO comes with built-in ABBYY Fine Reader technology for OCR. Not only is it extremely accurate, I can queue up hundreds of files at once. In fact, one of the first things I did after letting DTPO import my Evernote notebooks (something else DTPO does flawlessly), was to have DTPO OCR all PDF scans and images containing text, which DTPO turns into searchable PDF.

With Evernote, I have to rely on their cloud-based OCR and the text indexing Evernote does within the app. If I export an image or PDF scan from Evernote, the OCR layer does not go with it. With DTPO, the OCR layer is saved into the file allowing me to use the searchable PDF anywhere else I want, not just DTPO.

DTPO is also very inbox-centric. Every DTPO database has an inbox, and DTPO even has a global inbox from which files can be moved anywhere. The inbox approach makes a lot of sense to me because it causes me to take at least one additional look at everything going in before filing it away.

When the new DEVONthink for iOS comes out later this year, DEVONthink will really be the undisputed winner in the all-purpose information storage category.

8/5/2016 Update: DEVONthink To Go 2 is now in the App Store.

The more I use DTPO, the more I really use it. I can even integrate the plain text notes I described earlier into DEVONthink by simply indexing the folder where I store my plain text notes, and it even recognizes OS X file colors / tags. It is the ideal companion to the already powerful file system that ships with every Mac.

Apple Notes is pretty good too

As of iOS 9, Apple Notes became much more robust. While I don’t see myself ever using it to the extent that David Sparks does, I have started using Notes for a special category of information that I need fast access to from my phone. Things like insurance cards, notes about my kids’ medicine doses, and other personal information are really useful to have stored locally on my phone—only a quick iOS Spotlight search away. The notes I create in Apple Notes tend to be more like mini-documents. It’s not a place I dump thoughts or disorganized text. It’s a mostly read-only place for light rich-text reference notes with small attachments.

As of iOS 10, Apple Notes has become even stronger with the ability to share notes. Even though Evernote allows paying customers to share notebooks with non-paying customers, the non-paying person still has to use and maintain Evernote for it to matter. In my experience, most of my friends and family members don’t keep Evernote up to date and don’t use it regularly. Apple Notes is on every Apple device by default, making it more reliable for note sharing.

In summary

My information systems will always be in a state of flux, but I feel like I’ve become much more aware of key patterns in how I save and use information. I also want to prioritize creativity in the design of my information systems and minimize “data hoarding” just because an app makes it easy. I want to be more of a filter on both incoming information and information I’ve already stored—emulating a paper filing system using digital tools. In doing this, I hope to discover even more patterns, connections, and aesthetics.

Pursuing a “perfect” information system is mostly a waste of time. There’s no such thing. Like any aspect of knowledge work, the goal for redesigning a note-taking or reference system should be betterment and awareness.

My information storage needs have naturally evolved with my interests and life. They will change again. Storage systems are also a private illusion—a meta layer of organization that only my eyes will see and appreciate. I think understanding the illusory aspect of organization is critical because it helps maintain a sense of humility and avoids prioritizing a system itself over the value that a system creates in the world.

The aesthetics of an information system matter only to the extent that they inspire an urge to create new connections and bring new combinations into the world. This is not to say that the beauty of a system does not matter. It matters very much. But no more than the information that a system can ultimately release into the world.

No matter how far you zoom into or out of the universe, you will see networks of information. From subatomic particles to cells within our bodies to human civilizations to the arrangements of galaxies, every thing we can perceive in our universe is a component of some network layer. The value of any component can only be measured by how it affects other components in its network. A network’s value only arises when it enables higher order networks. Everything ultimately affects everything else, but the effects of organization are more beautiful to behold because they have intent.

In the most universal sense, our unique role as conscious components of the universe is to organize, impose meaning on, and transmit information. This is deep in our innate programming, and it’s probably why we prefer order to chaos and why we seek and perceive meaning even where a hypothetical higher order being would confirm chaos.

So yes. The aesthetics and hedonistic experience of information matters very much. To take delight in taking notes is to create more notes. To enjoy reviewing notes is to review notes more often. And to derive pleasure from fusing notes into greater statements of meaning is to also do that more often.

Two (very close to) universal truths:

1. We all know the best way to support app developers is by rating and reviewing their apps in the App Store.
2. We all hate being bothered by in-app prompts to rate apps.

Like so many other unsolicited annoyances, I put off app reviews for a “later” that rarely ever arrives unless out of some unpredictable, random mood-strike—usually while I’m poking around in the App Store, not actually using the app.

And that’s the key: I’m more likely to rate an app when I’m not trying to get something done with the app.

I’m planning to try an experiment. I’m setting a weekly reminder to review an app—any app that I use all the time but haven’t yet reviewed. It doesn’t have to be a dissertation—just a (mostly) five-star rating and a couple of lines.

It seems like a small service cost to pay for great app development and frees me to continue canceling out of any rating prompts I get while using apps.

It would be cool if there was an “app review day,” too: a day for just saying thanks to your favorite app developers.

The double edged sword wielded by the post-survivor knowledge worker: macro laws.

… there is very little, and perhaps no difference, between a genuine nugget of self-knowledge and what’s known as a “limiting belief.” A constraint that one minute helps you focus, in the next minute blinds you to an opportunity. A constraint that in one situation saves you from risk, in another situation limits your possibilities. This is why the skill of constantly formulating, discarding, testing, and refining macro-laws may be the most “meta” productivity skill of all.

A great article that essentially says work will always remain essential in the human experience, but once work is no longer being done to survive, the rest is a mind game.

In fact, I think the most sane view of modern “work” is that it’s simply a means for channeling thought, both for producers and consumers. Work occupies a worker’s mind, and the product of most knowledge work serves fundamentally to affect consumers’ states of mind: services, experiences, etc.

Work keeps us busy—a necessary condition for a sane western mind. No amount of technological progress or economic growth can change this. If anything, the need to stay busy increases with technological progress because the value of our time approaches infinity.

These imaginary problems are extraordinarily difficult to solve.

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, writing for HBR on “Rethinking What Masculinity Means at the Office”:

Women have spent the past century expanding the definition of “feminine” in almost every country on the planet. For the past half-century, the LGBT community has been engaging each other and the world in a conversation about what it means to live outside gender stereotypes. Remarkably, despite these decades-long conversations, for a cis-gender man, the definition of what it means to be a “man” is still quite narrow.

I think we will see much written on this in the next few decades. I think the evolution of male identity is one of the most fascinating sociological shifts taking place right now in the First World.

Also, somewhat related: The anxiety of Father’s Day cards.

Lena Groeger:

Chances are, you probably think your mind works pretty well. It might lead you astray now and then, but usually it helps you make good decisions and remember things reliably. At the very least, you’re probably confident that it doesn’t change depending on the time of day or what you had to eat.

But you’d be wrong. Our brains fool us all the time. And we typically have no idea that it’s happening.

We want so badly to believe we are rational—as though we reflect the unemotional machinery in the technology we gaze into all day. But we will forever be much more orange than clockwork. We are as precise as the chemicals sloshing around between our ears.

I’ve been surprised at the lack of posts on the new ScreenFlow 6. Version 6 adds several new features, most of which I have not had a chance to explore yet. The biggest “feature” I’ve notice in ScreenFlow 6 is that it brings back the stability that versions 4 and before had. Version 5 was still good, but it crashed a lot on me, especially with larger projects containing 30 minutes or more of raw recording.

ScreenFlow 6 is butter-smooth when it comes to zooming in and out on the timeline, even for very large projects. Wave forms also seem to draw much more reliably.

The only thing I’d nitpick is that they changed the behavior of the spacebar key, which will play/pause the scrubber during editing. Before version 6, pressing spacebar instantly paused the scrubber. Now, the scrubber pauses on release of the spacebar, which can cause a slight delay. Of course, K will still instantly pause (and L will play). You can also “hold and release” the spacebar to get more precise pausing. Like I said, nitpicking—but that’s what happens when you spend half your week in a great application like ScreenFlow.

My unsolicited and unpaid recommendation: upgrade to version 6.

CNBC on the apparent “pay gap” between the allowance parents give to boys and girls in the UK:

… boys received an average of £6.93 per week — almost 12 per cent higher than the average £6.16 parents gave to their daughters.

Despite receiving significantly more, boys were also more likely to complain that they were not receiving enough money. This year, 44 per cent of boys said they thought their parents should give them a rise, compared to 39 per cent of girls.

“Just like in the modern workplace, I suspect there is an element of ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get’ as some little girls are probably too nice to ask for more,” said Lindsay Cook, co-founder of consumer website Money Fight Club.

Articles like this make me sad. Not so much that a gender pay gap exists—I believe it always will in one direction or another. Just like women (greatly) outnumber men in college, there’s a very high probability that one gender will always out-gain the other in pretty much any arbitrary measurement system you could devise.

And as human-made measurement systems go, money is as infinitely sad as it gets. But that’s how Western society values all of us at an increasingly younger age. We’ve been duped into thinking that our worth is tied to our pay. It’s made children, family structures, and even leisure time fundamentally incompatible with modern capitalism.

To be happy, we’re told, we should have the right to work—all the fucking time. Everyone should work. Work is the ticket freedom in the land of the free.

But when the answer to the question, “how much money is enough?” is always “more than I have now,” how free are any of us? If our value is chiefly monetary, we’re certain to go to the grave feeling undervalued.

The resolution to the gender pay gap is not to pay women more or to pay men less—or to pay men more in ten years when women make more than men. The solution is to psychologically abandon money as a human value metric.

Money does not exist in the physical universe. It’s an illusion we created. We imagined money into existence. Maybe one day we’ll be advanced enough to forget we ever thought of it.

That’s not likely to happen in our lifetimes, so if I were you, I’d look for happiness somewhere other than your bank statements. If I achieve any success as a parent, that’s what my daughter and son will do.

Jason Fried:

Does that matter? Is that really worth doing? These are important questions that you should be considering often. Getting the right work done is almost always about creating less work to do.

Adding this one to my “read every 6 months list.”

Focusing your time on a narrower set of priorities is the biggest gut check you can experience in business and life. It is a never-ending fight with your primal self. Feature bloat, mass marketing, and “do it all” are driven by fear, and the internet age enables that fear like no other medium devised by humanity.

Before you decide to spend time making more instead of making something better, ask yourself: what am I afraid of?

You should listen to this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast because it’s an episode that you really need to hear. OK, that’s actually a terrible reason to listen to it because…

In this episode, three experts in logic and rationality will explain how circular reasoning leads us to “beg the question” when producing arguments and defending our ideas, beliefs, and behaviors. You will also learn how to identify, defend against, and avoid begging the question, or restating your beliefs without arguing for or against them.

Yeah, that’s a more rational reason. This is the most nuanced, yet most widespread, logical fallacy I’ve heard in a while.

Overcast link

A huge part of my job involves reading actuarial and insurance-industry-related articles. Mic drop: If that sentence doesn’t hook 999 out of 1000 readers, I don’t know what will.

But anyway, virtually all of these articles are written by people who have three universal things in common:

1. They are super smart
2. They aren’t professional writers
3. Their articles receive little to no editing before publishing

These three traits lead to a number of structural problems in most articles that I don’t want to nitpick now, but one of the most common (and easiest to fix) is the introduction problem.

The introduction problem

The introduction problem, put simply, is the objective fact that introductions in shortish 3–5 page newsletter articles are universally terrible, if they exist at all. But the irony is that the introductions really do exist. They just end up in the last paragraph of the article in a section that’s usually called “Conclusion.”

The typical conclusion section of an unedited article is something the author wrote very last, meaning the author wrote it at the point when he or she had finally figured out what they wanted to say by writing the preceding words of the body.

In almost every case, a “conclusion” paragraph can be cut and pasted to the beginning of the article—completely overriding the original introduction—with almost no additional editing at all.

Why am I talking about this?

People don’t have a lot of time these days, and editing resources are increasingly scarce. If you’re asked to write something for a newsletter or industry publication (in any field), try moving your conclusion to the introduction after you write your thing. It will make your article significantly more accessible and relevant from the moment time-pressed readers lay eyes on it.

See what I mean? If I had just put that paragraph first, wouldn’t this have been a better and shorter blog post?

Venkatesh Rao:

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Stock a lake with fish, and he’ll fish till he’s 40, at which point it’s generally not critical to anyone else that he continue to eat.

If you aren’t subscribed to Ribbonfarm at this point, shame on you.

Back in December, I removed all Twitter apps from my phone. I felt that maybe Twitter was causing me to look at my phone too much, and I wanted to see if my phone habits changed as a result.

This experiment is over, and Tweetbot is back on my phone—and not because I wasn’t able to resist looking at Twitter.

It’s because I created a worse problem by removing Twitter. My desire for news and information didn’t die when I took Twitter away, and I began using the Apple News app. This turned out to be a horrible idea because no matter how much I tried to curate and tell Apple News what I wanted to see, it filled my “You” tab with mainstream headlines of death and disaster. The unfortunate reality of a news aggregator is that by the time you cover every tragedy in the last 24 hours, there’s no room for anything else.

It took a few months for me to truly realize the effect this was having on my mood, especially if I was foolish enough to look at it first thing in the day. I feel like the Apple News app itself is as much a tragedy as the headlines that flow through it, and I’ve moved it as far away from my home screen as I can get it.

So anyway—yes, Twitter, and all its attention baggage are back on my phone. Twitter will always have good and bad elements to it, but it’s the best all-purpose source of curated information I’ve found.