July/August links

With the Denali climb complete, my focus has shifted elsewhere. Turns out you get a lot of time back when you're not preparing for an expedition! We spiffed up the backyard, and brewed several kegs of beer for the Fourth of July. I've also been fly fishing as much as I can. It's one of those beautiful and short-lived things about summer in the Tetons. The rivers are serene, warm, and chock-full of hungry trout.

Separately, I was inspired by this piece from Casey Newton to take another look at my productivity setup. I've tried not to heed the siren call of #productivity culture for a long time (I've realized it actually often distracts from doing to focus so much on process and apps), but I made a few changes that work well:

• Shifted to Notion as my main personal note-taking and organizational database. I store all my weekly, yearly, etc. checklists in here, along with links for this newsletter. (Related: If you are curious about my approach to personal goal setting and organization, I wrote about that here). I've grown to love the writing experience in Notion, since I use it daily for work. I tried Capacities, but I found it to be overly complex, though I do think the "object-model for everything in your life" is a cool concept. The built-in relationship graph is intriguing. But I didn't want to invest the time up front to make it useful.
• Notion has a new calendar offering too that has a lot of nice little features that I'm trying out. E.g. auto-blocking time across calendars, scheduling links, easy ways to peek at co-workers calendars for scheduling, and also integrations with Notion databases so you can pull in timeline-based events or tasks.
• I like to focus on one task on one window on my computer at a time and try not to leave that context until the job is done. I've found having email, Notion, Jira, GPT and other myriad tabs open on my browser causes me to flip constantly between things. I find I do this less when I have to tab between desktop apps. I don't know why, but it works! So, I've been transitioning to desktop apps like the chatGPT client. Option + Space opens a little overlay over whatever you're doing like Apple's Spotlight, and you can ask a quick question without leaving your flow. Like most everyone, I've converted to using GPT in place of Google for most searches, code help, etc. I still refuse to let it write stuff like this newsletter for me though.
• Continuing the theme: Desktop Gmail client. Google doesn't actually make one, but you can just open Safari, go to Gmail, click the share option, and then "Add to dock" and it functions pretty much like any other MacOS app. I then trimmed down the UI by toggling off settings like Meet and Chat and went for a minimalist look.
• I followed a link in Newton's article to David Pierce's Installer blog. The "Screen share" section in this piece encouraged me to take another look at my iPhone organization. I now have a single screen of apps, folderized into categories, with a few big widgets that correspond to my desktop: A big one for my Things daily to-dos (there's a lot of functionality I like here that I can't yet replicate in Notion), a smaller one for my Week checklist in Notion, and then another small tile for my Notion Calendar. Feels nice.

Anyhow, onto the links!

From the past couple months

From me:

• Catching a big trout on the South Fork, ID [Short video]
• Fishing the Pecos River, New Mexico [Short video]

On the goodness of standardizing people & comms & values while leaving other things purposely unstandardized at your company [Link]

What a GPT actually is (nice visual explanation) [Video]

This music video is rad but must have been incredibly labor-intensive to make; some really cool architectural shots that remind me a bit of Takashi Ito [Video]

How people spend their time [Link]

How fungi created life on land [Video]

Nanoscapes [Video]

The Korean DMZ at 70 [Link]

The XBox video game, Halo, but on the Gameboy Color. I thought this was so cool. [Video]

Children of Russian sleeper agents learn that they're actually Russian. This is something out of the Cold War. Kudos to my buddy Rob G. for pointing this one out. [Link]

The Torment Nexus. Heh, so true. [Tweet]

How Yeti coolers were invented [Short video]

Be nice to ChatGPT [Short video]