Blog Archives
Past articles on writing, productivity, and personal information management.
| Date | Title | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| 02/28/2017 | Welcome | A note on stepping back from regular blogging and exploring existing archives. |
| 02/20/2017 | Information Overload? Filter It With These Three Questions | Three questions for triaging feeds, articles, and incoming ideas. |
| 02/14/2017 | Rethinking Productivity: Five Big Ideas From Tiago Forte | Modern productivity thinking drawn from Tiago Forte's work. |
| 02/08/2017 | How to Take Useful Notes on Books | Moving from passive reading to active note-taking within a commonplace book. |
| 02/06/2017 | Five Principles for the Care and Feeding of Ideas | Guidelines for capturing, refining, and incubating creative ideas. |
| 02/01/2017 | Write More, Sell More — Nuggets of Wisdom from Bob Bly | Practical advice on output, marketing, and craft from copywriter Bob Bly. |
Browse by Topic
Writing & Editing
Insights from Bob Bly, Robert Greene, and others on craft, output, and building an audience.
Productivity & Habit Change
Productivity ideas drawn from Tiago Forte and BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits approach.
Notes & Commonplace Books
Guides on building a commonplace book, filtering information, and managing information overload.
Looking back through a personal archive can feel like opening a quiet library of one's own thinking, where each saved fragment carries the weight of a moment worth remembering. Commonplace books have long served this exact purpose, offering readers a private space to gather quotes, reflections, and observations that would otherwise drift away. Revisiting those collected pieces often reveals patterns in what truly captures attention over time.
The practice of curating ideas is closely tied to how we manage information in daily life. When feeds and articles arrive faster than they can be read, a simple habit of capturing only what resonates helps reduce the sense of overload. Asking a few honest questions about why a passage matters turns passive scrolling into an active practice of selecting, framing, and saving meaningful material.
Note-taking on books becomes far more useful when it moves beyond copying sentences and instead engages with the reader through questions, summaries, and personal reactions. Treating each book as a conversation rather than a checklist transforms reading into a richer activity. The resulting notes become a personal collection that can be revisited, reorganized, and recombined whenever a new project or question arises.
A personal archive also supports clearer thinking about productivity and creative work. Seeing past projects laid out in one view makes it easier to notice which habits produced results and which quietly drained energy. With a small structure for capturing ideas and reflecting on them regularly, the archive becomes less a storage space and more a steady companion for ongoing learning and writing.