While I did not get out my video on how I deal with book notes last week, I did get it all done for Monday. I also wrote and recorded another episode of Should I Read It on Where Good Ideas Come From which will be out Wednesday.

On the whole, I think the week went well and I very much enjoyed getting the podcast episode out. I need to get back to reviewing the books I read, but I’ll start with a clean slate so I don’t burden myself to review all the books I missed unless there is some special reason. Expect more episodes of Should I Read it to come out on a regularish schedule.

If you’ve found my content helpful then new in 2019 I’ve opened up a Patreon page. You can help ensure that more helpful content keeps coming.

Friday Five

1. The iPad Blogging Workflow of Shawn Blanc

You can read the whole thing here. The coolest thing I found is a “pro tip”…

First, highlight the text you want to send into Ulysses, but don’t share from the little pop-up menu that appears after you highlight the text. Instead, go to the main Safari Share button and share the whole page URL. That way the title, the URL link, and your selected text will all be populated into the Ulysses Share Sheet. If you share just from the selected text pop-up menu, then all you’ll get is the text.

I don’t keep my ideas in Ulysses like that so much, but it’s a really cool thing I didn’t know the Share button could do in Safari.

2. A Vim writing workflow

Seems to be a time for writing workflows. Here is one based on Vim. The most interesting part is flashbake which takes his plain text work and checks it into a Git repository every 15 minutes.

For everything there is to love about Ulysses, I do love Vim and I do like the idea of a private writing repository. I’m sure there is some tool that would be Scrivener-esque to compile a bunch of my book writing for me as well.

So…maybe I will look at Vim for my writing. I think my biggest problem with Ulysses is that sync via iCloud is blocked on all city owned WiFi in my town so that means I can’t write at the library unless I have all the docs already downloaded.

3. 140 Characters doesn’t leave much room for kindness

From Ryan Holiday:

As we’ve become more polarized and more algorithmically sorted, we care a lot less about the people who think differently than us and put little effort into persuading them. That’s because persuasion is no longer the goal—it’s signaling. And with signaling, it’s vehemence that matters, not quality.

Holiday goes on to talk about political correctness, anti-intellectualism1 and polarization in our media.

Here is the final point as well:

If you can’t be kind, if you won’t empathize, then you’re not on the team. That team is Team Humanity, where we are all in this thing together. Where we are all flawed and imperfect. Where we treat other people’s point of view as charitably as we treat our own. Where we are civilized and respectful and, above all, kind to each other—particularly the less fortunate, the mistaken, and the afraid.

4. Matt Ragland – taking steps to be free of social media

Matt says:

Many of you know I took February off from social media. A little over a week through March and I’ve given very little of my time back to it. Here are a few tactics I’ve used to limit the temptation.

  • Removed Twitter, Facebook, Messenger, Gmail, Chrome, Slack, and Amazon from my phone. Basically the ones sucking up my attention (more in a sec).
  • Moved Instagram to a “folder” named TIME SUCK with other mobile-only yet distracting apps. Moved the folder to a back screen on my phone.
  • Set a time limit of 15 minutes for Instagram and Safari.
  • Only log in to Twitter using TweetDeck, which I promptly close after each (short) visit. I also moved the public timeline out of view and look at my notifications first. If there’s nothing new, then close the app.

I’ve done a bunch of similar things which I’ll be talking about in an upcoming post/video.

How are you keeping your social media and distraction time under control?

5. Don’t Learn for Learnings’s Sake

From Talking to Humans:

Your goal is not to learn for learnings sake. Your goal is to make better decisions and increase the odds of success.

This is talking about talking with your customers as market research, but the same goes for reading or any learning. What are you going to do with the stuff you read about?


  1. On that note on of my next reads will be The Death of Expertise