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Apr 9, 2022 ∞

Being Wise with Readwise

This post is about how I make the best of Readwise.io, a service that works with your notes and highlights to enhance recall, reflection, inspiration, and creation.

If you don’t already use Readwise, I highly recommend it! You and I both get a free month with my affiliate code. As you can see, I use Readwise consistently:



I will cover:

• Getting Things In: making all your highlights and notes available
• Making Highlights and Notes: tips for capture and organizing
• Getting Things Out: making backups and data available in your notes system
• Working with Ideas: making the most of your highlights and notes

Getting Things In

My first principle for Readwise is:

Send Everything In

In other words, I want all my reading notes and highlights to end up in Readwise. I even want to supplement my notes and highlights with those that others are making! The system grows in value as more of your important items are included, both because of your ability to search the content and because of the network effects from different notes being available together. (We’ll explore this more in Working with Ideas).

Here are the steps:

1. Connect All Your Services

Once you have an account, head to the import page and turn on connections for any services you use.

For me, that means:

• all the places I read digital books (Kindle, Apple Books, Libby, and Kobo)
• all the places I read things other than books (Instapaper/Pocket, Twitter, Medium, Web Highlights, Inoreader/Feedly, and the new Reader service from Readwise)

You might use other services and want to connect other them as well. Some additional examples:

• Airr - podcasts
• Shortform - book summaries

(Side Note: Some of the connectors might even inspire you to try a new service, so Readwise has started partnerships offering discounts on services.)

2. Import Other Highlights

Not everything has a connector, yet. Even so, there is still probably an option to get those highlights and notes into Readwise. These options are also found on the import page.

For physical books, I use the mobile app (iOS, Android) and its OCR to import from my notes and highlights. Another alternative is the CSV or Email import option. I always add the location or page # field, because the structure and order of the highlights is often helpful later on (for context, etc.)

There are other non-connector imports as well, such as pdfs, Scribd, O’Reilly, Google Play Books, and “my clippings” for direct files in your Kindle.

You might even use the API to meet your needs:

“Our API supports creating, fetching, and updating highlights on behalf of the user.”

3. Get Other People’s Highlights

What if I finished a book a while ago and didn’t take highlights or notes? What if I listened to an audiobook? Maybe I just want to see other Readwise users’ highlights?

In these cases, you can use the “Supplemental Books” feature, also found on the import page.

Note: if you connect Goodreads in Step 1, everything you finish in Goodreads will automatically get added as a supplemental book in Readwise.

I do not use Goodreads anymore, so when I finish a non-fiction book where I didn’t take highlights or notes, I head over to the Supplemental Books tab and add the book. If no other Readwise user has made highlights, yet, I make a note in tasks to try again later.

In later sections, we’ll talk more about how these supplemental books are part of the ecosystem.

WARNING: some publishers lock down how much you can highlight and export from a book. This is not a Readwise problem, but it does affect Readwise. Just in case I run up against limits, I make a habit not to make really long highlights nor to over-highlight a book. These are generally good practices, anyway, as they limit your highlights to readable sections and just the really good stuff.

Making Highlights and Notes

The second principle for Readwise is:

Start Simple

This section will includes tips for how to use more advanced highlighting and note-taking features, but you can ignore it entirely or start using the tips as they help you. You might have a finely-honed method that you don’t wan’t to disturb. That’s fine: start there. Come back here went you want to use new features or enhance your process.

Organizing

When you’ve highlighted & annotated a long document or book, you’ll automatically have all those notes available to you, whether in the collection on the web, in daily review, or in your exports. But if you’re like me, you’d like to have a bit more structure, when you are looking at the overall document highlights.

This is where headings come in.

Headings allow you to structure your highlights at three different heading levels. A common pattern is to call out a Part as heading level 1, a Chapter as heading level 2, and a Section as heading level 3. Then, you’ll have a nice table-of-contents and structure for your notes.

To use this organizational structure, add a note of “.h1”, “.h2”, or “.h3” to the highlight that you want to turn into a heading. The period before the “h” tells Readwise to treat your note as a tag, not your commentary, and it then processes the highlight as a heading instead of a normal highlight.

Here’s an example from Lean Software Development where I used heading 1 for chapters and heading 2 for agile Tools and “Try This” activities.



Note: I generally avoid using heading 3. It is often too much. Make the choice based on your document and whether you’ll get value out of it.

WARNING: this is one area of Readwise that has some bugs remaining. Because the header tags get applied a special way, it’s important to enter the tags accurately and in order as you work through the document. I have some books where the heading structure is messed up and it’s not something you can fix fully in the web app. When this happens, you can delete and re-synch your book or document highlights, but this is a pain if you’ve already edited (with tags, commentary, etc.) the comments within Readwise, or already returned the digital book to the library. Hopefully this is something they are fixing in in the new Reader experience.

Want to know more about headings? See their blog post on headings if you would like a more detailed explanation.

Tags

You already learned about a special tag: headings. There’s another special tag: concatenation.

Have you ever found a long chunk of text but really just want parts of it? Concatenation lets you highlight that way. Use “.c1”, “.c2”, “.c3” etc. notes to build a highlight that combines them. Readwise will show ellipses between the parts in the final highlight. (Read their blog post about concatenation here)

Normal tags are created the same way as the special ones: while highlighting, add a “.” note, followed by how you’d like to tag the highlight. For example, I use “.i” for “inbox” and “.d” for “definition”. You don’t have to use shorthand, though! Your tag can be a word (or hyphenated words), but don’t add spaces or you’ll have just completed the tag and started making a normal note.

Tags will be visible anywhere you are reviewing the tagged highlight, such as during daily review or when reviewing the document. From the web, you can also go to tags , see your tags, and see all the highlights with that tag.

Note: as with headings, I recommend you don’t go overboard here. It’s easy to waste a lot of time on tags you won’t use. It’s easy to add them later, so feel free to be sparing.

Sometimes, you don’t know you want to tag something while you’re highlighting, but later you decide to in one of these situations:

• you’re reviewing highlights from a document or your daily highlights
• a theme has started to emerge in your highlights
• you’re researching a topic within your notes

That’s fine! You can easily add tags during daily review (“T” if you like keyboard shortcuts) or when reviewing a document. I do a lot of each of those bullets above. I now use “mental-model”, “health”, “coaching”, “reflection”, “security”, “attention”, “resilient”, and “curious” heavily, but often later, during review.

Final tip on tags: tag conversion.

Remember how I said I use “.d” for definition? Those actually show up in my tags as “definition”, because I converted (merged) the tag. From the tag view, click the ellipses on a tag and rename, and all once-and-future uses of the old tag will become the become the new tag. So while reading I enter as “.d”, but I get “definition” in my highlights and notes. It’s a nice time-saving trick.

WARNING: I don’t know if there is a way to undo tag conversion. I don’t see one in the web interface. I’d suggest being double-sure before you go about this.

Getting Things Out

Ok, so you’re now an expert at making good highlights, tags, and notes, right? But maybe you have a favorite notes system, or you’re worried about your data. For either (or both) reasons, you’ll want to sync your highlights outside of Readwise.

The third principle for Readwise, then:

Sync Your Data

Head to the export page. There, connect your note-taking system(s) of choice, or wherever you’d like your highlights & notes to land. I have the following enabled for various reasons:

• Evernote
• Obsidian
• Roam

…but you can add others like Notion or RemNote.

Note: this is one of the other reasons you may not want to go overboard with tags. Once your notes are syncing into one of these systems, you may decide you want to tag within your note system instead of in Readwise. Before you make that call, make sure you understand how your system handles syncs from Readwise. I still use 10–15 tags when highlighting or in Readwise, and then use wiki-style links within my notes system to cross-reference certain topics. (More on that in Working with Ideas.)

It’s also a good idea to backup any important data occasionally (and these highlights and notes are important, or you wouldn’t be making them!). The syncs you setup are a soft backup, but you can make a more direct one via the CSV or Markdown export, as well.

Note: you can also export just one document as markdown, when you need it. Head to browse and from the dropdown on your document, choose “Export Highlights”.

Another Note: At this time, we cannot export highlights from Supplemental Books. You only get your own highlights. Bummer! There are probably some very good reasons for this, though, such as not getting junk into your notes that you didn’t vet first!

Working with Ideas

Ok, so you have a collection of highlights and annotations and it’s backed up and available in your notes. So what? It’s no good to you if you don’t do anything with it! With that in mind, I’ll share the ways that I get the most out of what I put in.

Daily Review

Here’s my fourth principle for Readwise:

Never Miss a Review

While you’re still building the habit, you can use this common habit-building rule, instead:

Never Miss Twice in a Row

The Daily Review is the cornerstone of the value I receive from Readwise. Head over here to configure your review.

Here’s my basic setup:

• Sent every morning at 7
• Max out (15) highlights per day
• Blended old/new recency rate
• Bonus highlights off (I have other good recommendation sources)
• Quality filter off (I’d prefer to fix it)
• “Normal” frequency for books, articles, tweets
• Slightly-lower frequency for “supplemental books”

You, of course, can tune these settings to suit your needs. If you’re just building the review habit, you may want to start with fewer highlights, for example, to make it easier to build the habit.

During the daily review, I’m doing a few things:

1. Increasing retention of key points
2. Adding tags when I see themes emerging
3. Cleaning up and annotating
4. Getting inspiration
5. Making the highlights “talk to each other”

Retention (#1) happens naturally through the process, but I accelerate it. When I come across a challenging highlight or something that caught me by surprise, I hit the feedback button and choose “soon” or “later” instead of the default “someday”. This means I’m going to see that highlight again sooner.

And though my overall review frequencies are balanced, I do sometimes select the dropdown on a highlight and “show this doc more often” (or less often), to tune the amount of highlights I am seeing from a certain book or article.

I mentioned adding tags (#2) in Making Highlights and Notes. This normally happens when I’m noticing topics that I’m highlighting frequently, or which are becoming a common topic in my reading or research. I am very interested in attention and focus, so I have started tagging items related to those topics. I also read things related to health and longevity, so I have started tagging items with actionable advice. I also have two themes that are very important to me: curiosity and resilience, so I have developed tags related to those. You will come up with your own themes!

Cleaning up and annotating (#3) can be:

• removing bad or no-longer-useful highlights (using the “discard” button)
• fixing highlight or note errors (it happens, especially if they are ones you put in by hand or OCR, see Getting Things In)
• making highlights within the highlights (use double underscores around the part you want to highlight)
• adding new commentary

A common example would be when I don’t remember the context of a highlight, so I add a short note about what it means (perhaps after visiting the document highlights to see the surrounding highlights and structure).

Tip: Don’t feel bad about discarding highlights, especially from Supplemental Books, where they are someone else’s highlight. Discards don’t fully go away. Your discards go into a category named as such, and can be recovered. I’ve got 1276 discards!

Regarding inspiration (#4), some highlights will make me want to start a blog post or put a task on my planner/calendar. Let your highlights provoke you!

The last topic, highlight-collision (#5), is perhaps the most important, and is the reason why I max out my review to 15 highlights. I’m not just reviewing 15 highlights…I’m reviewing 15 highlights together. That means great chances for serendipity. Sometimes highlights will reinforce one another. Sometimes they will be in tension. Sometimes they will interact in such a way as to spark a new idea. These are magic moments. Dig in to what you are noticing. Add notes (either in the highlight or in your own system) about their interaction. Write a blog post. Make some art. Invent something. Run with it. Feel free to tell me what you learned or created.

If you practice zettelkasten, evergreen notes, or a related system, this moment of organized serendipity is a good time to write connecting comments or notes. I use backlicks in Obsidian to accomplish this.

Book Review

When I’ve completed a work of non-fiction (or even a work of fiction where I took more than a handful of highlights), I like to make sure all my notes are in order. I go back to the web view and check my structure (remember Headings?), my highlights, notes, and tags.

This is a good way to refresh myself of everything in the book, and is a jumpstart on spaced-repetition/retention. I may add Supplemental Highlights if I want to see what others highlighted, too.

This is also a good time to write a book review, even if it’s a short one.

Play Favorites

You may have noticed during your daily review, or book review, that you can mark a highlight as a favorite. Go ahead, do it!

Sunday Daily Review collections are special, and will contain only favorites. This is a good way to keep coming back to the highlights that are very meaningful for you. This leads us to…

Show Your Work

You can also let people subscribe to an email with a sampling of your favorites, one or more collections of tags, some combination of these, or all your highlights. Mine is set to a weekly broadcast with a sampling from my personal favorites and reflection questions.

But what I like even more than the subscription is the share button. When you are reviewing a highlight, hit the share arrow, and you’ll be presented with a few options to present an elegant version of your highlight, like this highlight I have tagged as “reflection”:



I often share this way during the Sunday Favorites Daily Review (like these). I also find these shares to be a fun way to place a highlight into my notes, especially if I’m collecting a few highlights on a topic.

Finally, if the notes system where you are highlighting your notes supports it, you can publish your highlights there, as well. All of my highlights are currently public, via Obsidian.

Conclusion

You’ve hopefully picked up four principles:

1. On input: Send Everything In
2. On highlighting: Start Simple
3. On output: Sync Your Data
4. On usage: Never Miss a Review

I hope these will help you make the most of Readwise and help you with recall, reflection, inspiration, and creation.

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This was already very long. Here are some advanced topics I didn’t cover:

• Themed Reviews
• Flashcards
• Metadata
• Document Tags
• Reader!

Contact me if you’d like to discuss any of these.

Apr 4, 2022 ∞

🔎 First 24 Hours of Trailcam

21 squirrel sightings

7 ring-tailed mini bear sightings, at least 2 raccoons

4 Canada geese sightings, at least 2 geese

4 deer sightings, at least 2 deer

2 river otter sightings?

1 great blue heron sighting

1 coyote sighting

1 platypus sighting 😆

Jan 9, 2022 ∞
2021 Recommendations - Listening 🎶🎙
As I mentioned in my 2021 Product & Service Recommendations, I primarily use Plex + Plexamp for listening to music (and Marvis Pro on the go), and track listens in Last.fm. I listen to podcasts in Overcast.fm.
I’ll cover a little bit about my listening habits, then share top albums and top podcasts.
Music Overview
Here’s a rough map of my top genres over the year:

If none of those genres are of interest to you, you may just want to skip down to podcasts, otherwise you’re going to be scratching your head (or even recoiling) at a bunch of “weird music”.
And here were the top 20 artists:

Thanks to last.fm and tuneR, I can see that three bands were new to my top 20 this year: clipping., Silent Planet, and Joyhauser.
I got tuned in to clipping. via a friend on Bandcamp, but as I mentioned in my 2021 Watching recommendations, became a fan after watching their NPR (actually!) Tiny Desk Concert. If you start to watch the video and are like “wait, I know him”, then you’re probably right. Hamilton, Snowpiercer, and Central Park are just a few of Daveed Diggs’s major credits.
Silent Planet has been a fave of mine for a while, so I’m surprised this was the first time they broke the top 20. In addition to making great music, frontman Garrett Russell is a brilliant lyricist, delving passionately and intelligently into political and spiritual themes. (You may remember I’m slowly working on a readthrough of all the books referenced in just one of their tracks.)
Joyhauser is simply great thumping beats for when you need to focus or keep moving.
Albums
Unlike my other reviews, I restricted my specific album recommendations to ones that were released this year, so as to not have an overwhelming list.
On Bandcamp
• Aquilus - Bellum I: black metal, neo-folk
• Boys Noize - +/-: techno, industrial
• clipping. - Wriggle (Expanded): hip-hop, industrial hip-hop, horror
• Dave Quam - Greasemania Vol 3: experimental, electronic
• Dawn of Ashes - Blood of Titans (Remixes): industrial, aggrotech
• Drumcorps - For the Living: breakcore, experimental
• Faderhead - Years of the Serpent: industrial, ebm
• Gelassenheit - Gelassenheit: black metal, christian
• Gelassenheit - …Don Thyself in the Armor ov God: black metal, christian
• Hollywood Burns - The Age of Saucers: soundtrack (to nothing), synth
• Heliocentric - Ishmael: metalcore, djent
• Keygen Church - ░█░█░░█░█░█░: electronic, black metal
• Noise Unit - Deviator: ebm
• Spiritbox - Eternal Blue: metalcore, djent
• TesseracT - Portals: progressive metal, prog rock
• Thou - Hightower: sludge, doom
• Violence - Opus I: industrial, metal, crossover
• Virtual Terrorist - Gutter Mixes Vol 2: industrial, noise
Honorable Mentions that are not on Bandcamp (boo!)
• Between the Buried and Me - Colors II: progressive metal, jazz metal
  • Note: some of their music is on bandcamp, but not this album, yet. Likely a problem with their current label
• Bo Burnham - Inside: humor, satire
  • Note: I also referenced the special in my 2021 Watching Recommendations
• Demon Hunter - Songs of Death and Resurrection: non-metal-versions-of-their-metal-tracks
• For King & Country - Burn the Ships Deluxe Edition: gospel, pop
• Silent Planet - Iridescent: metalcore, homework core
Podcasts
• The Ezra Klein Show: deep conversations on topics of the political economy
• Just Plain Wrong: hilarious reviews of Amish fiction, from 3 Mennonite librarians
• The Peter Attia Drive: health science interviews and deep dives, I am a paid subscriber
• Risky Business: cybersecurity news
• Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!: a comedic game show about the week’s news
Jan 3, 2022 ∞

2021 Recommendations - Reading 📚🗞

Note: I’ve collected the recommended books from this post on this bookshop list, where possible. It is an affiliate link (though you can and should change to your local favorite bookshop), but if you buy any of them via my storefront, I will put that money back into getting more books and sharing the good ones.

I read 48 books in 2021. As I mentioned in my 2021 service recommendations I use StoryGraph to track reading, so you can see an overview of my reading there.

But just because I read a book doesn’t mean it was good! Here are the ones I recommend:

Fiction

• A Memory Called Empire: this one had some elements that ended up intersecting in interesting ways with Foundation (the show at least)
• Echo: a challenging and beautiful younger-reader book that I recommend listening to, as they do some interesting things with the audio
• Anxious People: I started off disliking this one, but the things that annoyed me at first turned out to make sense as it went on, and it ended up being something I enjoyed very much
• Altered Carbon: great start to the series, and it was good to see the written version
• The Resisters: interesting mashup of baseball and speculative fiction
• Parable of the Sower: another great series start, one that I had put off reading too long!
• Abaddon’s Gate and Cibola Burn: Expanse #3 and #4, the former of which was a very rare 5-star book for me
• Harrow the Ninth: #2 in the series…a very-challenging-but-very-rewarding “all the genres at once” book
• The Testaments: #2 in the series, and a worthy successor to Handmaid’s Tale
• A Canticle for Leibowitz: I was surprised this was written decades ago, as it feels like modern speculative fiction

Nonfiction

• Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations: full of her cutting insights and beautiful wit
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty: summarizing how political and economic are intertwined and how extraction leads to downfall
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: we are getting better at some ways of thinking and worse at others, and it’s important to understand the modes and tradeoffs
• Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art: fascinating look at the development of our faces, how breathing affects health, and various breathing experiments & exercises
• The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline: while I’m not high risk (due to not having the genetic variants), I wanted to learn more about this topic, and this book is a very interesting deep dive full of detailed guidance and information that is relevant to any person’s health
• The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century: the description of this book made me think I would hate it, but it ended up being one of the most interesting things I read this year
• Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony: as a Methodist-turned-Mennonite, Hauerwas is probably “required” reading for me, but it took until this year for me to finally read this one
• Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: another classic that I finally read to get back to the principles that started a movement
• The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World: highly speculative, but a fascinating overview of the various areas in which we’ll need to meet challenges

Periodicals

• Plough Quarterly: I love engaging with their challenging blend of radical and conservative (published by the Bruderhof, an Anabaptist common-purse denomination)
• Anabaptist World: similarly, the publication for my Anabaptist denomination (Mennonite)
• New Philosopher: a thoughtful periodical with each issue being dedicated to a topic
• Indianapolis Recorder: the best local newspaper

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Further reading: 2020 Fiction Review and 2020 Nonfiction Review

Jan 2, 2022 ∞

The Future Is Unwritten - Wilde

As mentioned in a previous post, I received a new journal with quotes on the recto pages. I decided I would write short reflections on these, and sometimes I will share them to my blog. Here’s the first:

“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” -Oscar Wilde

Disobedience, yes, but not the childish kind that says, “I can do whatever I want and you can’t stop me”. Rather, the kind that knows the rules well enough, knows the community well enough, knows the problems well enough…to demand something better. Without the understanding, it is selfish flailing. With this understanding, it can lead to much needed change, benefit to the community.

I can’t find the source right now, but I recently heard someone implement a practice that went like this: “you can change the rule once you understand why the old rule was there.”

Dec 31, 2021 ∞
2021 Recommendations - Watching 📺
• Your local theater - enjoyed (even via streaming) renditions of Tuesdays with Morrie, Cyrano, and A Christmas Carol
• See Season 1 - terrifying, mesmerizing, and incredible
• Rememory - contemplative and crushing
• Dear White People Season 2 - very well done
• Resident Alien Season 1 - Alan Tudyk is great in this mishmash of all the genres into a single show
• John Oliver on Raids - Raids are devastating and almost never necessary.
• John Oliver on Sponsored Content - All ad-driven news creates perverse incentives, but sponsored content is particularly bad
• Canadians rescue the USA national anthem - brilliant use of harmony
• The Sinner Season 3 - more terribly haunting than the first two seasons, combined
• The Commute: Walking 90km to Work - another incredibly documentary from Beau Miles
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season 1 - in release order of Trek shows, this is my favorite, so far
• Kim’s Convenience Seasons 1–2 - fun sitcom, though it got a little formulaic by season 3 and we got tired of the “people didn’t communicate” trope as the main plot driver
• Endeavour Season 5 - I love the attention to atmosphere in this series. It feels like a (modern) history lesson every time, too. Warning: every episode of this show seems to end on a melancholy note, literally and figuratively.
• I Am Mother - I’d love to discuss this sci-fi suspense!
• The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Season 1 - This felt like the most “comic book” of the MCU so far, due to the everybody having to fight everybody, etc. Great preaching from Sam at the end of the season.
• Venom - utterly ridiculous and a lot of fun
• Blade - rewatched this; interesting to hear Blade will be coming into the MCU
• Fantastic Planet - totally original french animated scifi from 1973
• Mr. Show Seasons 1–3 - some of this didn’t age well, but I love sketch comedy and their take on the Python-esque surreal sketch transitions
• Tenet - this was an instant purchase
• Line of Duty Season 1 - What a wild ride! I had to space these out because they were so provocative, complex, and intense. Season 2 not recommended.
• A Black Lady Sketch Show Season 2 - Not as good as season 1, but still good sketch comedy
• Love, Death & Robots Season 2 - Not as mind-altering as Season 1, but still full of incredible experiments
• Self/less - Good, interesting. Would have been even better with more of a Christopher Nolan treatment and less of a Product Placement treatment.
• 🎶 Welcome to the Internet - “could I interest you in everything all of the time?“ Lots of good critique in this hilarious self-produced music video. Full special here.
• Primal Fear - Very late to the party on this one. Surprised I didn’t see this back when it came out, as it was definitely my kind of movie. A little dated and a little predictable, but still very enjoyable and worth a discussion.
• 🎶 Tiny Desk Concert: clipping. - this is the first actual tiny desk concert, and the start of my obsession with clipping. (Stay tuned for Listening Recommendations)
• The Suicide Squad - Ludicrous, gory, and hilarious. I’m not much of a DC guy, but this was some wicked fun.
• 🎶 Marc Rebillet and Madison McFerrin - incredible looping and improv chemistry
• Middleditch & Schwartz - long-form improv comedy
• Ted Lasso Season 2 - not as good as season 1, but still challenging, human, and funny
• Foundation Season 1 - Unnecessarily brutal at at times (and I mean the storytelling, not the content…some details don’t need to be on the screen), but otherwise very good
• Soul - Heartbreaking at times, but a beautiful movie
Further Reading:
• 2021 Recommended Products & Services (incl. those related to watching)
• See last year’s writeup here.
Dec 30, 2021 ∞

2021 Recommendations - Products and Services

Reading 📚📑

• Your Local Library and Libby for borrowing ebooks and audiobooks
• Bookshop for purchasing books and supporting your favorite bookstore
• UpNext for read-it-later (note: I will likely move to Readwise Reader once I get through the waitlist)
• Readwise.io to automatically manage & resurface highlights and notes from all of the above and more
• Storygraph for tracking books
• Inkl for lower-hassle news from a variety of sources

Further reading: 2021 Reading Recommendations

Listening 🎙🎶 and Watching 📺

• Bandcamp for trying and buying music
• MusicHarbor for finding out about new music releases for bands who have made the poor choice to not be on Bandcamp
• iTunes match to make your music collection available across multiple devices
• Marvis Pro for listening to that library on iOS
• Plex for serving up your whole media library and Plexamp for an incredible listening experience wherever you’ve made that library available (note: I’m looking for Plex friends!)
• Last.fm for tracking listening, including from Marvis and Plex (above) or from Web Scrobbler in the browser
• JustWatch for seeing where a show or movie is currently available and tracking watchlists/watching without losing your place when a show moves to another provider
• Overcast for podcasts

Further reading: 2021 Watching Recommendations, 2021 Listening Recommendations

Writing and Communication

• Craft for fun notetaking, writing, shared documents, and impromptu websites
• Fastmail for email, calendar, contacts
• Micro.blog for blogging, microblogging, social media that’s not a dumpster fire, and (optionally, additionally) POSSE, a newsletter service, read-it-later service, bookshelf service, podcasting service, and video service
• Mars Edit 4 for revising, tagging, managing, or deleting micro.blog posts or importing/adding a backdated post

Security and Privacy

• NextDNS for blocking a lot of bad stuff (including trackers and ads)
• Signal for direct messaging and calls
• DuckDuckGo for search that respects you
• A digital password vault
• Multi-Factor Authentication for everywhere that supports it, especially for your main email provider that all your other accounts are tied to (note: avoid text messages as the 2nd factor whenever there are better options)
• A couple hard drives and an alternate location (such as a family-member’s home or a safe deposit box) for periodic swapping of backups outside of your cloud storage

Other

• Parcel for tracking packages and deliveries
• CloudMounter for accessing cloud storage on your Mac
• Magnet for turning OSX into a tiling window manager
• Vivaldi for a full-feature independent browser that still works on most of the Internet

Luxuries That I Wish Weren’t

• Levels for learning about how different foods, activities, and events affect your glucose and health
• A periodic home cleaning service
• A personal trainer to help with physical therapy and fitness

Note: This page contains affiliate links. I may receive a discount or commission for things your purchase. Nevertheless, these are real recommendations for products and services I have used.

Dec 16, 2021 ∞

Week in Review 2021-12-10....err 2021-12-16

I started writing this on Friday the 10th, but am just now posting, because…

🔒 The Log4j issue is really bad. Security and engineering teams are scrambling to protect against attacks. The best teams started last week or weekend, but many organizations waited until Monday or later to get going. The vulnerability is once again hitting the hard problems of inventory management, 3rd-party software component management, and vendor management. I don’t think I’ve seen something this bad in 20 years of being a security practitioner. The vulnerability is easy to exploit, has the worst kind of impact (it runs the attacker’s code), and is present in many common technologies. In addition, there have been several follow-on problems identified, such as additional attacks, or weaknesses in the fixes for the attack! If you’d like a laugh instead of cry, check log4j memes.

⚽️ After a really great start to the Premiere League (where they were recently top of the table) and Champions League (where they are reigning champions), Chelsea are leaking goals and struggling at this point in the seasons. 3-3 vs. Zenit in the CL means they take 2nd spot (below Juventus), but are on to the round of 16 and matched up with Lille. They got a little lucky in the Leeds PL game to win 3-2, but tied 1-1 in what should have been an easy win at home against Everton.

🛩 I recently had my 2nd business travel since “the beforetimes”. I tested when I got back and am luckily safe. I welcomed my new team members (direct and indirect reports) and honed 2022 strategy with the leaders on my team. It was good getting people together, but still feels a little strange getting back to it! In other work news, I also got the promotion I had been hoping for, bringing me to only 1 to 2 levels below my internal customers and working peers 😆. (Outside my team, I primarily work with SVPs and VPs, and am now an AVP.) Joking aside, I am thankful for the support of my leaders, who have shown trust in me and helped find funding and assistance for the important initiatives I’ve been pushing.

📚 My spouse and I registered for a new library. To be honest, we mostly did it to have another library in Libby/Overdive, but it turns out the library is lovely, too. There’s no public funding in the town for a library and kids had to pay high fees to get access to a library in one of the neighboring towns. So, one family donated the land, funds for the building, and funds for the initial collection of materials. The library stays afloat with donations and a modest yearly fee for patrons. We were charmed by the library, especially their themed puzzle 🧩 collection that you can borrow like books!

🌟🎄 I’m looking forward to a break, soon. We’ll be hosting my spouse’s side of the family, again. All (who can be) are vaccinated (and boosted) and we will be testing before we get together. We have folks with compromised immune systems and/or who are too young to be vaccinated, but we are being safe for each other. We’re very much looking forward to time together, as there has been so little of that in the last two years.

Aug 22, 2021 ∞
9 square: 2HISS 🏐
We played 9-square-in-the-air with the church youth group, today. If you’re not familiar, it’s like four square, but overhead, like volleyball.


As part of the exercise, we had the youth set it up without talking, which went better than expected...except they forgot to get a ball to play with. (we actually set it up as just 4-square-in-the-air, due to how many people were there.)  

The way we play, whoever is in the champion position get’s to make rules (calvinball style!) to edit the defaults. We had some fun ones like:


• "shortcuts": if you get somebody out ahead of you, you can go straight to their position instead of the normal rotation
• "spikes": you can reach over/across into somebody else's square for your hit
• must hit twice
• keep it going: you have to try to hit it if it's going out
• use a fist: must use bumps/punches, not sets, etc.
• dance: you have to do a dance after you get somebody out or instead you are out
• equipment is lava: if you touch the bars, etc. you are out
• lowered: towards the end, we started moving the height down
• permanent out: we ended with this as our last rule, to bring it down to find the final champion

One common collection of rules started to become our default. We called it "2HISS", and it means "2 hits allowed, spikes allowed, shortcuts allowed.

Lots of fun!
 
Aug 22, 2021 ∞
📑 Sunday Quote




This quote comes from one of my favorite podcasts, the Peter Attia Drive, a podcast focused on health science and longevity.

In this episode, they were discussing accumulated results regarding insulin and insulin resistance.

Thankfully, I’m not insulin resistant, but I am working on improving my metabolic health and weight. As I’m now in my second month of using a continuous glucose monitor, and having conducted some self-experiments, I can see the effects of the above quote in my own body.

For example: I participated in a coke challenge, where we had a coke after fasting compared to a coke after fasting followed by walking for half an hour or more. Walking improved my glucose response by 5 points on a 10-point scale (from a 2 to a 7). Here’s another way they say it in the podcast episode notes:
 

 
I’m continuing to work with a trainer a couple times a week, doing a fun activity at least once a week, and am moving (walking, hiking, biking, etc.) almost every day. I particularly get moving after having a meal that would be a bit higher in carbs. It makes a significant difference on my results.

To explain “to your tolerance”: we are all different in our hormonal setup (insulin, cortisol) as well as our muscle mass/distribution, both of which are major deciders of how much our body will burn glucose (and use glycogen) versus store it as fat (as triglycerides in adipose tissue).

So their point there is that if we are getting good exercise, good muscle but not getting good metabolic results, then we also can limit simple carbs (especially fructose, which has particular effects beyond glucose) to get to where we want to be.

This is really promising for preventing or reversing the issues listed, such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and other metabolic disorders.

—

Tagged: Resilient -> Self
 
Jun 30, 2021 ∞
What I learned during my first week with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM)
About a week ago, I got started with a continuous glucose monitor. "Glucose monitor" means it's a device that records and reports blood sugar. "Continuous" means it is collecting data throughout the day and night.
 
You might be wondering:


Why? Are you diabetic or pre-diabetic? 

No, thankfully I am not!

However, data is growing showing a link between metabolic health and many major diseases, from the more well-known links like heart disease to the lesser-obvious ones like dementia and certain types of cancer. I want to reduce my risk for these chronic diseases and also increase my likelihood of being able to continue the types of activities that I enjoy. This is one part of broader habits meant to benefit my health (e.g. good sleep habits, healthy eating, mental & physical exercise, stress management, etc.).


But can't you just eat keto or vegan or whatever my preferred diet is?
 
Turns out there can be great difference in people's genetics and biomes, leading to different responses to different foods. I have some simple eating habits that help me a great deal, but one reason I'm doing this is to see what is healthiest for me.


About the CGM:
I acquired my CGM through Levels, as part of their beta. They do not manufacture the CGM device, but instead make an app and service that works with the CGM data.
The CGM is applied to the upper arm and stays there for up to 14 days. It's held on by an adhesive patch. While there, it records and holds up 8 hours worth of data. A mobile phone is held up to the CGM to pull in the data to the CGM manufacturer's default app.
Levels has developed an additional app and service that enhances the base data from the CGM manufacturer. It links with Apple Health data and the CGM app data to perform enhanced reporting.
The Levels app takes my notes about food/drink, exercise, or other events (like stressors) and uses these data points to score those actions by looking at the blood sugar for the 2 hours following the activity (they call this a "zone"). Zones are scored 1-10 based on blood sugar response. Days also get a rating of 1-100, and then daily, weekly, (and it looks like) monthly reports are provided. 

The three main scoring factors Levels uses are:


• Glucose Variability (lower scores better)
• Average Glucose (lower scores better)
• Time in Target (higher is better, with "target" being 70-110 mg/dL)

The app also builds a catalog of zone scores so that I start to get a profile of healthier activities (10/9/8) and less healthy ones, based on my unique metabolism. It also offers "challenges" of things to try different ways to see what my scores will be, to help me make informed decisions.


What I've Learned:
• Mornings must start right: I see that my days often start on my higher end for blood sugar. In addition, if I have carbs in the morning, it is easier to spike. Prevailing wisdom about this is that our bodies are ramping up cortisol in the morning as we prep for the day (and perhaps start experiencing stressors). One of my friends who is a doctor said this cortisol response is why many heart attacks happen in the early morning! What I've learned is I should skip breakfast, have a very-low (or no-carb) breakfast, or have a mild workout and then have a light-carb breakfast.
• Exercise makes even more difference than I thought: I already knew that taking a walk after a meal is helpful, but I didn't realize just how much. I had a pretty terrible dinner one night (pizza, sport drink, cake, ice cream), and some fun exercise before and afterwards, and my blood sugar wasn't too bad! Conversely (see bullet #1), I've had morning meals that registered as really bad (a #3 score), even when they didn't include sweets.
• Order of operations - not just for math: what order I have my meal in makes a difference. Putting the fiber, fat, and protein at the front of a meal leads to better results than having bread, etc. up front. If there's something a little bad in the meal, having it last really does help. This is likely because the absorption rate of carbs is slowed down by the fiber, fat, and protein.
• Ice cream isn't so bad: Likely a corollary of the above bullet, ice cream doesn't affect my blood sugar too much. This may be my best option when having an occasional treat.


I'm looking to see what I learn about more food, exercise, and stressor events in the coming weeks. Which food pairings work for me and which do not? Does meditation counteract stressors sufficiently? Do I do ok with sweet potatoes? Bananas? Rice? Much more to learn!

---
Have you used a CGM? Do you have questions for me or ideas for experiments? I'd love to hear from you.
Jun 1, 2021 ∞
"it's hard to decry Constantinianism when you're trying your damnedest to win every election"
Longer quote:


During the years of the Iraq War and during the 2008 election, Christian blogs spent a lot of time writing about Constantinianism in voicing their opposition to the war in Iraq. Christian blogs were very Anabaptist during the golden era of blogging. Not so much anymore.

Why the change?

My argument, made in 2016, is that the post-evangelical Christians who inveighed again Constantinianism during the Bush years weren't really Anabaptists. They were, rather, Christian realists in the tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr. That is to say, progressive Christians, as witnessed in the 2008 election of Barack Obama, actually wanted and desired to win and weld the power of the nation state. You saw this hypocrisy in how post-evangelical bloggers hammered Bush with Constantine but said nary a word about Obama's drone war. Turns out, it's okay to pull the trigger when it's your guy holding the gun. And we saw again the thirst to win back and weld power among progressive Christians in the election of 2020. 

All that to say, it's hard to decry Constantinianism when you're trying your damnedest to win every election. 

This is from the second post in a new Experimental Theology series called "Will the Real Christianity Please Stand Up".

Now, as one of those folks who started blogging in the early 2000s, became Anabaptist during that "golden era", and then maintained that anabaptist perspective, this whole post (ugly parts and all) rings true to me.

Richard Beck's key blog series have become some of my favorite books: Unclean, The Slavery of Death, and many more. I'm very interested to see where this series will go, and how Beck will deal with the "No True Scotsman" problem in the analysis.

---
Thoughts? Let me know!
May 27, 2021 ∞
Friday Good Reads
Read any good articles, essays, etc. this week? I did! (Yes, this edition is early due to holiday in the USA.)

Here's the list, in its usual place over in my public notes.

This week covers such topics such as:
• the challenges in "green investing"
• security, GPS, and global logistics
• science!
• a reminder that conflict in the streets biases people towards fearful and authoritarian reactions
• one way to cook Brood X

Drop me a line if you have something to recommend, or have thoughts on any of these pieces!
May 23, 2021 ∞
📑 Sunday Quote
Today we’ve got another 3-part quote. All of these arrived in my Readwise review today, and they tell a story.






The third quote here is an important follow-up to the first two.

The reign of Christ does not mean that Christians take Caesar's place in ruling over others. Rather, we are called to embody another way of living together: bound together with love & service rather than power & violence.

Peace to you as you enter this week.
May 9, 2021 ∞
Sunday Quote 📑



This is great advice for many behavior changes, not just procrastination. (Make the healthy food visible, put away distractions, place practice music sheets out, etc.)

Here’s where I’d take a little issue, however:


Environment and habit change is how we change ourselves.

Willpower is limited, situational, and varying. The way we make lasting change is to exercise willpower when it is strong in order to set ourselves up for success when our willpower is diminished.

When we do that, we keep taking actions we planned to take, building up habits and reinforcing our sense of identity as someone who is the kind of person we’d hoped to be. This is how change endures.

It’s there something you can change in your environment this week?


---
-Todd


May 2, 2021 ∞
📑 Sunday Quote and "Persecuted" Christians
Let's make my biases clear up front:

I'm part of a tradition (Anabaptism) that has a long history of pacifism and has collected the stories of how they were murdered due to their faith (it's a giant book and not a great read, but you can still find copies).

Also, I live a pretty comfortable life. I grew up in a wealthy country, didn't experience serious health conditions, and have not had to worry about if I would be able to find my next meal. I had access to good education. I haven't been harassed, harmed, or neglected due to the color of my skin. And most importantly for this topic, I grew up in Christendom, a part of the world where Christian belief has been a dominant force in public opinion and even in governance.

It's in these areas of Christendom where I am surprised (and frankly, embarrassed) when Christians talk about being "persecuted". Christians in Christendom often read Bible stories and see themselves in the narratives as the Israelites enslaved in Egypt, or the early Christians under Rome. But what we must realize is we are more likely to be on the side of Pharaoh, Herod, or Caesar.

When you dig into it what "persecution" these Christendom-Christians are facing, it usually ends up being one of two things:


• Social consequences for conservative ideology and/or for bigotry
• An underlying fear that we are moving into a post-Christendom world

Neither of these are persecution. Let's talk about them in order.


Social Consequences
To understand this one, we need to step back a bit.

One of the problems with Christendom is that Christianity syncretizes with the government, with the dominant political beliefs, the dominant economic order, and/or with nationalism. Christians begin to conflate being part of a party, ideology, or nation with being a Christian. We can end up working as hard (or harder) for those beliefs than we do trying to follow the Lamb.




Specifically, far too many Christians in Christendom have an unhealthy (and frankly, heretical) confusion of social conservatism and Christianity. They attempt to wield the power & violence of the state to control non-Christians' personal beliefs and actions, most egregiously and notably in issues of sexuality. This isn't the gospel, and it's not behaving like the one they proclaim to follow (who specifically refused power-over temptations when Satan put them to him!). And when people react to this controlling (and often bigoted) behavior with condemnation, social sanctions, or defensive legislation, it's not "persecuting" the Christian. The Christian was the aggressor, here.


Post-Christendom
It's true, many parts of the world are on the move from Christendom to post-Christendom. (Note: this is partly due to Christians acting as pretty terrible representatives of the good news, as I alluded to earlier...but that's a whole other post). In Post-Christendom, Christianity has a waning influence on public opinion and governance, as a plurality of voices emerges or a new perspective becomes most common.

This is unsettling for Christians who enjoyed (whether they realized it or not) being in the seats of prestige and power. But as the saying goes, "When You're Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression" In other words, losing privilege is not the same thing as being persecuted.


Ok, But What About Real Persecution?
If a Christian should suffer real persecution, the gospels and epistles offer us instructions and hope:


• Mat 5:44 But I say to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you
• Rom 12:14 Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse.
• 1Co 4:12 When we are verbally abused, we respond with a blessing, when persecuted, we endure
• Heb 10:33 At times you were publicly exposed to abuse and afflictions, and at other times you came to share with others who were treated in that way.
• 2Co 4:9 we are persecuted, but not abandoned; we are knocked down, but not destroyed
• Gal 1:23 They were only hearing, “The one who once persecuted us is now proclaiming the good news of the faith he once tried to destroy.”
• ...and many more

Jesus and early followers of the Way were very clear about not returning evil for evil. In fact, the church has often grown the most in places and times of persecution!

While we don't desire persecution, the duty of a Christian is to follow the third way when encountering it, to bear witness to shared humanity, to goodness, and to a God who loves all people.

---
Have thoughts? Here's how to respond.
Apr 25, 2021 ∞

Sunday Quote 📑

Have you heard of The Unicorn Project? It’s the follow-up to the great Phoenix Project. As I said in my 2021 book review:



"what Kim did for Ops & DevOps in the Phoenix project, he has continued for product development in this work"


Both of these books use narrative to demonstrate the move to agile ways of working and devops transformations within an auto-parts selling business.

These five ideals are very helpful for looking at ways to enhance a technology practice.

—

Here’s where I’m going to "think out loud" again. As I read these, I realized they’d make a better framing for how I’ve been approaching some challenges my team faces at work. I’ve been communicating with my manager using the perspective of "accountability without authority or responsibility", and while that’s true, the Unicorn Project ideals might be an even better lens by which to view the problems.

Let me work through them to see what we are doing or could do in each area.



Locality and Simplicity

This is the core issue, as I’ve recently been thinking about it. My team relies on data, processes, instructions, and approval for almost everything from another team (and primarily one team). Work comes in from the other team, work goes back to that team. This disincentivizes problem ownership by either team, as things get "tossed over the wall". Further, because of the back and forth, there are steps that don’t necessarily add value.

To solve these, we need to create local ownership and reduce waste & complexity. Instead of there->here->there work, we can improve this in one of the following ways:



• here->here->there: meaning that my team sets the direction, rather than receiving it, but the other team still manages the result
• there->here->here: meaning that my team still receives the direction, but has more capability to finish the work on their own
• there->there->there or here->here->here: meaning that one team has full ownership for direction, results, and problems for an area of work




For us, the most appropriate short term answer is here->here->there, with a potential move eventually to a true locality where one team manages something all the way through the lifecycle. I’ve been advocating for this two-step approach, but now have a different way to talk about it.



Focus, Flow, and Joy

We have a culture of meetings. This is especially true for our New York office (where my boss and my peers are originally from). During covidtide, this has ramped up even further. Added to that, my team is working with a great number of stakeholders (often working with with many leaders and over 250 internal customers, each), has many sources of incoming requests, and encounters many "squirrels" caused by hot topics or VIP perspectives.

Altogether, those equate to very little time for focus or deep work. That results in less satisfaction and joy as people feel like they are constantly juggling instead of achieving momentum through wins.

We’ve got a few irons in the fire on this, too:



• "No Meeting Wednesdays": we instituted this recently, and while not perfect (due to stakeholder meetings and increased interruptions from people who know we are "free"), it helps there be the chance for blocks of time for focus
• "Ways of Working" agile alignment: I’ve been proposing that we get all our work visible under one mechanism, so that we can better manage priority, work-in-progress, etc. It would also help to have requests come in a common way, reducing interruptions. We’ve got buy-in now to get some agile coaches working with our broader org on a group transformation.
• Using collaborative tools: Many interruptions can go away if we have standard means to keep one another up-to-date or make decisions. I’m helping push adoption of these ways. (Kanban boards instead of status meetings and inquiries, asynchronous work out of the same document rather than a meeting for committee-editing, decision-records and next-actions captured in writing, etc.)




Improvement of Daily Work

There isn’t a lot additional to say here, as so much of it is dependent on the above two areas. If my team doesn’t have much ownership of their work, nor the time to focus on changes, it’s very difficult to focus on daily improvements.

Instead, I try to make up for some of this deficit by spending a lot of my time on this, looking for ways to help the team. Creating clarity. Creating or sharing resources that make things easier. Promoting the internal sharing of best practices, wins, and lessons-learned. Cutting waste. Eliminating blockers. Etc.



Psychological Safety

The idea of psychological safety is this: Team members have to feel that it’s ok to speak up, that their concerns won’t be dismissed and they won’t be retaliated against. Team members have to feel that it’s ok to learn, make mistakes, clean up after themselves, and grow; that they won’t be penalized for trying something new. 

It wouldn’t be appropriate to say much here (as it could affect psychological safety!), but I will say that I seek to promote psychological safety by being transparent, authentic, and non-defensive. I look to give opportunities for people to stretch themselves in a safe manner. I aim to make sensitive constructive comments in private and heap praise in public. 



Customer Focus

We can think about customer focus in two ways.

The first is the most important: the end costumer of the product or service. Do we know what they need, and is our work ultimately serving them? Or are we creating waste and doing pet projects?

The second is the internal customer, or stakeholder. This one is easy to overlook, especially if a team isn’t used to thinking about having customers, which is an all-too-common occurrence in the technology world.

To help with this, what I do is to advocate for customer and stakeholder perspectives up front and every step along the way, both in my team and for the teams where we are the internal customer.



• Who will use the product or service?
• What do they need?
• How does that inform our requirements?
• Is somebody getting their perspective and feedback?
• Do you need to get their buy-in for the solution?
• Is there an easy way for them to give you feedback and see that you are doing something about it?
• etc.


If your org has a product-owner type role, this helps a great deal!