Getting organized
2024-09-03
Newsletter #2
Reflection
This is my home office. It is tiny. You take a step in, and you are at the desk. Not much room to move around.
The size was driven by two factors:the more obvious one is that space is expensive in the bay area: the less obvious reason is because I believe a smaller space helps with focus. When I enter the study, I know there is only one purpose to being there: I block out everything else. I had a much larger space when we lived in San Diego, and I could never focus in that room.
The design of my home office is part of helping create healthy habits that enable focus on what is important. You have to create systems that support the outcomes you are aiming for because
We do not rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems.
The placement of ‘Atomic Habits’ on the desk is not accidental. This is a must read book for building the habits that will help get you to your goals. I make it a point to flip through it every day.
My desk is slightly more cluttered than I’d like it. I wish there were no visible wires: but I need the kinesis split keyboard which needs, sadly, a wired attachment. I keep a cloth and a desktop vacuum cleaner to keep the workspace tidy.
Effective note taking is essential to organization. I assiduously note down every single interaction, every stray thought. I was not very good with this in the past, and have made a determined effort to use the idea of a ‘second brain’. My tool of choice is Obsidian, which is excellent (but also check out the equally excellent Notejoy app, created by my friends Sachin & Ada).
After two weeks of capturing all the feedback from all the people I have met, I already have a lot of data: This is the graph that obsidian presents that relates all the tags I have created. (Blurred it out because I am not quite ready to share what I’m working on)
I use a system called Zettelkasten for organizing notes. The fundamental idea is to focus on creating connections between all your notes using a tagging system. Rather than notes being arbitrary and unrelated, tagging enables you to create a web of thoughts and connections between them are revealed. If you are interested in this, I highly recommend this video. Obsidian manages all my todos, daily activities , goals for the week and helps keep me on track.
Obsidian's integration capabilities are another advantage. I use getmatter.com for capturing interesting online content. I can queue interesting articles, highlight key points, and automatically import them into Obsidian. This integration feeds into my tagging system, enriching my knowledge base
Looking ahead, I plan to use Llama3.1 to index my Obsidian files, enabling advanced queries. While this isn't a priority yet, it's an exciting prospect for maximizing my note-taking system's potential.
Progress
I hope that was helpful! My calendar went quite crazy this week, thanks to all the connections people have offered up - I got to speak with everyone from CEO’s of large companies to people deeply in the flow of the domain to better understand the problems.
I know you’d like to know more about what exactly I am working on, but it feels too early. For those familiar with the Design for Delight framework, I am still getting to the deep customer empathy and still in the broad phase of understanding, and my plans may change.
Learning
The best advice I got all week was from Brad Menezes, the CEO at SuperBlocks who said (paraphrasing)
‘ Your greatest leverage at this point in your journey is the ability to walk away from your idea - so ask people why they think your proposal is stupid. People want to encourage you, so they will give you positive feedback - but you really want the naysayers and thumbs down now. 6 months from now, you will succumb to the sunk cost fallacy - the time to pull the plug on something is now’. This wisdom is driving my explorations.