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🪓 “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe” — Not Abraham Lincoln
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Core Tools
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📓
- Functions as a second brain/long-term memory
- My entire life is stored inside Notion. It's a little scary, but I love it
- See my templates here: Jesse’s Notion Templates
- Things I use it for include: this website, journaling, book lists, shopping lists, career planning, job applications, school assignments & classes (when I was in school), task management, relationships, and so much more…
- Relationship database - I keep track of people, their birthdays, when I last reached out to them, and what journal entries they were involved in. I have a linked database that shows people I haven’t reached out to recently
- Why you might not want to use Notion
- If you want my help using Notion, see: Notion for High Impact Orgs
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🖍️
- Raycast, in its simplest form, is a spotlight replacement for Mac (and Windows
soon)
- It has so many features that make my life on a Mac that much easier - Including a clipboard manager, file search, a better calculator, snippets, and keyboard shortcuts for any command, including the ones I just mentioned, switching between apps, etc.
- You can also create custom scripts, which are just Python/bash/etc files that you can activate with Raycast. I have
two many commands that I (by which I mean mostly Cursor) made that I am really happy with
- Search in browser from clipboard - Opens copied text or link in my browser. I use this a lot!
- Create calendar event from clipboard - which uses Gemini to parse the most recent clipboard item and uses the gcal API to add it to my calendar and then opens it in Notion Calendar so I can see it / edit it if necessary
- And more… - Add task to Notion, fix spelling with llm, go to Notion home, strip url params, toggle boolean value, upload clipboard image to imgur and return link, etc.
- Resources for making your own custom script commands - my script commands in GitHub here
- Another feature I love is snippets. For ex: I type
slc and it automatically transforms to take whatever I last copied and pastes it as <CONTEXT>\\ntext I copied\\n</CONTEXT>. Great for llms!
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📝
- Functions as my short-term memory
- Just used for writing small things down before I forget (or if I am offline)
- I then transfer these things to my long-term memory in Notion
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🌈
- I love how you can save and organize tabs into spaces and folders, especially in the sidebar. Makes much more sense there, and having no top bar makes the screen feel so much bigger
- I like the keyboard shortcuts. The split screen is nice
- It is seeming like Arc is dying (not being developed anymore) :/ - I’ve heard Zen Browser is a good replacement?
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📅
- It uses Google Calendar accounts, so it is a pretty small investment to try
- Because it is connected to Notion, it can show Notion databases on the calendar
- This is especially useful for showing my tasks/to-do database
- I also use it to show people’s birthdays - from my relationships database
- I’m a big fan of time blocking, including things like sleep, meals, etc.
- I generally like the UI a lot more than gcal. Also more keyboard shortcuts, and nice availability sharing
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🧑
- AI code editor (fork of VS Code) - it's just soooo good. If you write code, you have to try it
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🤫
- For audio dictation. Uses the OpenAI Whisper speech to text mode. Is SO much better than built-in Mac dictation
- Has simple and elegant keyboard shortcuts that make inserting a piece of transcribed audio so painless. Makes computer-using experience so much more pleasant and fast
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🍎
- iPhone, MacBook - I have hated on Apple products for a long time, but I think they are just much better. Also, Raycast being on Mac has a nontrivial effect on this decision. Being able to copy and paste between my computer phone saves me so much time
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Other Tools
Important Habits
- If you have an intention of doing something, making sure you actually do it
- Remembering to do it
- Having an extremely low bar for writing a task down
- Similarly, having really low friction for writing a task down - make it as easy and painless as possible
- Commitment mechanisms: Getting yourself to do it even if your future self won’t want to
- Offering to pay a friend $x if you don’t complete a certain task by a certain time
- E.g. “If I don’t finish this application by tomorrow EOD I’ll Venmo you $20”
- Schedule time to cowork with someone on it
- Time blocking
- A reflex/system to set aside to think about how you can most effectively use the rest of your time, for various time intervals. For example:
- Spending 2 minutes thinking about how best to use a 30 minute meeting you have
- Spending 1 hour thinking about the previous and following weeks
- Spending several weeks if not months thinking about how best to use the 80,000 hours in your career
- Using randomness to make decisions you are uncertain about
- Making SMART goals & making them process and outcome based
- ~ Just make a Notion page ~
- Just doing things
- All the healthy things
- To be continued…