Avoid High Modernist Design in your Knowledge Base

Whether you're using @tana_inc, Notion, or any other tool to manage knowledge and collaborate – that's the one thing you want to avoid.

Let me tell you what I mean: 🧵 What is "High Modernism"?

It's a term from James Scott's fantastic book "Seeing Like A State" and describes, slightly condensing,

"uncritical optimism about comprehensive planning."

It's been applied to everything from forestry to city planning – and you should avoid it.

Some thoughts and experiences:

1) Work in 2h blocks
2) Use noise cancelling headphones
3) Use
4) Interstitial Journaling
5) Rapid Feedback

Some more detail:

1) Work in 2h blocks

I did this way before Huberman taught me about ultradian cycles, but apparently our brain doesn't just cycle through 1.5h long periods while we sleep, but also while we are awake.

So what I do is the following (starting at top of hour for ease of demonstration):

08:00 – Plan: what am I going to focus on, what's the goal? How am I doing, any interruptions I need to expect? How will I handle them?
08:10 – Work for 30min
08:40 – 5min break: stand up, look around, stretch, refocus: where do I move my focus next?
08:45 – Work for 30min
09:15 – 5min break: stand up, look around, stretch, refocus: where do I move my focus next?
09:20 – Work for 30min
09:50 – Review: how did this round go? What did I get done? Anything I can do better? Move, take a short break.
Ready to go again at 10:00

I've done full 8-12h days like this, but often even a single 2h cycle gets me deep enough into the zone that I stop following the template until I physically can't anymore or am interrupted.
Also works at the end of the day to get that one more rep in.

2) Noise cancelling headphones are amazing for focus even without any music in them.

3) is magic I don't understand but use liberally. Best with noise cancelling headphones

4) Interstitial Journalling
This is what I do during my 2h sessions and esp. the breaks: plan/review/refocus in writing so that you a) can think better and b) have a record you can go through later. Flows directly into

5) Using this approach gives you a rapid feedback cycle in 30min and 2h chunks. If you do this for a week, you're going to learn A LOT about how you work, what the most common interruptions and friction points are, and how you can eliminate them.

Additional notes:
This obviously works best with a maker schedule and less well with a manager schedule. If your whole day is meetings and you don't have interruption-free 2h blocks that's not great.

This is not something to slavishly adhere to for the sake of following the template/program. I start a coding/reading/writing session like this, but I'm not forcing myself to stop if I'm deep in the zone.

This is great for learning scoping: you usually vastly overestimate what you can get done in 30min. After doing this for a while you'll get a very intuitive sense for how long certain tasks take you.brain.fm

https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1711673235891257441

Back in the day when I worked for Ultraworking we used to teach this as "Work Cycles" and the results people got from it were really, really good.

We also used to host "Work Marathons", a three day event where you'd try to pack as much focused work into the 72h as possible (without compromising on sleep). People regularly worked three 12h days and got a LOT of work done.

Now Ultraworking doesn't exist anymore as far as I know, but their website and template for doing "Work Cycles" are still up:

"No two kitchens are the same, therefore you need to build your kitchen cabinets from scratch yourself" - @fortelabs on Second Brain templates (paraphrased)

That's basically what Tiago wrote in a newsletter he sent out yesterday

Now of course I'm biased, but here's what I think OF COURSE you need to modify any template to fit it exactly to your needs. Even a big, encompassing template like Tanarian Brain isn't going to work 100% perfect out of the box for you.

And everyone who's bought it knows and expects that.

The biggest unacknowledged problem for proponents of the Zettelkasten method as a tool for writing is that its inventor, Niklas Luhmann, is famous for how badly he wrote.

I still believe a Zettelkasten is fantastic tool, but only if you learn how to go from non-linear to linear. This is a much better linearization of Luhmann's ideas (well, some of them, at least) than Luhmann has ever produced himself:

🤯 Supertags 💥

The secret behind supertags in @tana_inc is that they aren't just links.

When you apply a supertag in Tana, you create an instance of a thing.

And by doing that, you unlock all sorts of possibilities – I'll cover what makes supertags so _super_ in this thread: In Tana, every node is basically a "thing" – here I've created two nodes, one for Elon Musk and one for Steve Jobs:

How to use alias links in @tana_inc

In Tana you can link from any node to any other node in your workspace very easily. You type @ and then search for the node you want to link to.

But sometimes "transcluding" the full text isn't what you want!
That's where alias links come in.

Sometimes you don't want to have the whole text there, however: our example reads very weirdly at the moment.

What we want instead is something like "As Hamlet has remarked" and have the "has remarked" link to the "To be" node.

Here's how the finished product will look like:

After just talking for 15 minutes into my phone while walking my dog, let me share with you again how awesome Tana's iOS app is.

I've wanted this sort of app for the longest time, and I'm so excited that it's now finally here!

Let me show you what you can do with it! The app is called Tana Capture and it lets you do what it says on the tin: easily capture anything you'd want while you're on the go!

Voice Memos? ✅
Photos? ✅
Text? ✅
Text scanned from paper books you're reading? ✅

It's awesome.

✨ Tana AI is INSANE

It's crazy how easy it is and how powerful at the same time.

Of course, my template Tanarian Brain has gotten an upgrade to take advantage of what you can do now...

Let me show you! So far I've added nine special commands and fields to Tanarian Brain that take your notetaking and thinking to the next level.

Let's start easy: it's really simple to get a definition of the concepts you encounter while you're taking notes:

Getting to Inbox Zero in @tana_inc

Tana's Capture app on iOS is fantastic – I use it all the time.

That means my Inbox gets filled to the brim with links, photos, voice recordings, and ideas.

Here's how to get to Inbox Zero the Tana way: This is how my inbox looks right now, as I'm writing this thread.

Just one node, but that's very rare – and only the case because I cleaned up this morning.

In any case, I want zero nodes here. The trick is the second button at the top: "Move to Date Created"

Here's how you can put a little bit of creative serendipity into your Tana workspace

Want to see a couple of random fleeting notes from your Zettelkasten as daily inspiration, for example?

Here's how to set it up! One convenient way to get prompted with random notes from your workspace is in your daily page.
Open up your #day-tag configuration and add a new field >Random Zettel
In the next step, we'll configure this field:

How to use @tana_inc to summarize voice notes

With Tana's Capture app on iOS it's super easy to record voice notes on the go and have them sent directly into Tana.

And through the magic of AI commands it's super easy to get them summarized. Let me show you! First some general setup: for the workflow I'm going to show you, you need two generic fields:
>Summary
>Additional Info

Check out this thread for how I organize fields in Tana:

https://twitter.com/cortexfutura/status/1664999139023949824

Tana Organization that sparks joy 💫

Here's a little trick that can help you keep a sense of what's what in your Tana systems: when you're creating new fields, think about whether it's a generic field or a local field. The "Topic(s)" field in Tanarian Brain (my Second Brain template for Tana), for example, is used all over the place!

Quotes, fleeting and permanent notes, questions, claims, sources...they all refer to the same "Topic(s)" field.

That makes it a generic field.

Getting Readwise into Tana – with Raycaster!

I do most of my reading in @ReadwiseReader, and so it's super important for me to get my highlights from there into Tana.

Let me show you how to do that using the Raycaster "Readwise-to-Tana" plugin! Once you have installed the plugin and entered your Readwise API token, you get the "Search Highlights" option in Raycaster.

This is your entry point into ALL your Readwise highlights:

The Daily Dashboard

One @tana_inc feature I take full advantage of every single day is the day-supertag.

It's the perfect place to configure a daily dashboard, and I've built a very powerful collection of live searches for it into Tanarian Brain: Tanarian Brain comes with a fully-featured GTD Dashboard for your Daily Node:

Do Next – anything you've marked "In Progress"
Due Today – Due Date is today
Overdue – Due Date is in the past
Upcoming Tasks – Due Date is in the future

📢 Tana is now on iOS!

I've wanted this for the longest time, and I'm so excited that it's now finally here!

Let me show you what you can do with it! The app is called Tana Capture and it lets you do what it says on the tin: easily capture anything you'd want while you're on the go!

Voice Memos? ✅
Photos? ✅
Text? ✅
Text scanned from paper books you're reading? ✅

It's awesome.

✨ Tana AI is INSANE

It's crazy how easy it is and how powerful at the same time.

Of course, my template Tanarian Brain has gotten an upgrade to take advantage of what you can do now...

Let me show you! So far I've added nine special commands and fields to Tanarian Brain that take your notetaking and thinking to the next level.

Let's start easy: it's really simple to get a definition of the concepts you encounter while you're taking notes:

HUGE new feature for Tana: Calendar Views!

Tana has done an amazing job in bringing this feature into the world – so many people wanted this, and Tana has delivered.

Let me tell you all about it: 🧵 You can show ANY node in a calendar view!

This will then show you any INDENTED node that has a date field on that calendar view.

If you add a new event, it gets auto-indented – and nodes without any date info are hidden from the calendar view.

Note-taking in the Age of AI

🤖 As AI continues to advance, what's the point of note-taking?

After spending the day working through my adrenaline rush after GPT-4 was announced, some thoughts why note-taking STILL matters: 🧵👇 💭 AI may be powerful, but it's still a TOOL.

Our role? Shift focus from documenting generic info to deeply reflecting on our thoughts & making sense of the data.

And guess what? Less time collecting info means more time for our inner reflections.

I've been thinking about note-taking and tempo.

When you take notes in a professional capacity, so not as part of a hobby, you're generally interested in generating tempo:

Make better decisions faster because of better analysis.

This has implications: 1/ Minimum Viable Structure

You're not a librarian - your main focus is not to catalog and deeply index information.

Your focus is on getting the most important information down and process it for integration and retrievability as quickly as possible.

Resources, Topics, Concepts, and Assets

What's the difference and why do you care?

We had this discussion in the support community for Tanarian Brain the other day (smart folks in there, you should join!) and a couple of interesting points came up 🧵 In @fortelabs' PARA system, a "resource" is "a topic or theme of ongoing interest".

I'm not sure why Tiago chose "resource" to mean "topic/theme" (except maybe PARA sounds better than PATA 😁), but this mix of terms creates an interesting friction point:

Templates are actually apps

There's a huge economy out there building templates for different apps: Notion, Excel, and now @tana_inc

I've always thought about these as "information products" – but I think I was wrong. Earlier this week Tana launched a big new feature: templates.

Templates are an interesting feature, because they build a growth-loop that's otherwise hard to get:

they make using your app easier for beginners AND they incentivize others to build templates.