Bear with me for a second (what a sentence to start my first public post…) I need this disclaimer since I’ve always had mixed feelings about people who write about productivity tools and instruct others to set up these sophisticated, intricate systems. It feels like peak ‘productive procrastination.‘
But I promise that while this is also doing that a bit, the core message is about how I’m trying to take advantage of the “AI superpowers” (really what I mean here is large language models) for my media consumption. While I’ve been quite good about accepting that there’s not enough time in the world to read the gazillion papers, articles, and threads I’ve bookmarked, I find it harder to ignore the many highlights, notes, and insights I made, but that live scattered across several tools and services.
The Starting Point.
More time to create. Quite some time ago when we were co-workers at Spotify, the amazing designer Mat Budelmann mentioned how he’s trying to consume less and create more (now you know, I stole that line!) And that’s the ultimate goal: spend less time managing that firehose of content to consume and spend more time creating something original based on my reflections and insights.
Less ‘useless’ reading. There’s never enough time to read, and to be honest, with more and more content being generated, it’s becoming hard to even just figure out what content is worth reading.
Less screen time. No, this isn’t suddenly turning into a parenting post, but just like kids, I should spend less time in front of a screen. But my setup required more screen time than I wanted. I love going on long walks or runs while listening to podcasts or even research papers (now that synthetic voices are so good), but I wish it would be easier to process what I’m hearing so I can remember it later.
I’ll get to how I’m now addressing these points in a bit, but here’s what triggered my exploration into a change of tools.
Obsidian Obsession.
My friend Daniel Leon introduced me to Obsidian and particularly the Caret^ plugin which allows you to visually create workflows using any sort of text file and feeding it into an LLM.
E.g., in the screenshot I’m using a card with some text about California, then added two more cards, one in which I ask an LLM to “generate keywords to advertise California to techies.” and in the other to “create a sarcastic tourism slogan.” After clicking a “sparkle” button, it generates the two responses which I pipe into another card with the request to “use that info to come up with a tweet and hashtags that are very ironic, but sound serious.”
The entire flow:
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And to spare you trying to zoom in, this is the result:
On a more serious note though, this tinkering around with it made me wonder, could I pipe in my documents and notes and help me sift through them? Could I help me resurface my reflections, and give me more mind space to focus on applying those insights to something practical?
In Consume less create more Pt2 I’ll describe how I’ve been starting to consolidate these thoughts and streamline my process.