Tiago Forte Is In Everything This Week

Happy Sunday everyone!

If you were a bundle subscriber, you’d get access to 5 new articles this week totaling ~6,000 words.

But that’s not all! We’re super excited to announce that Tiago Forte has agreed to allow us to republish one of his members-only Praxis articles for our members. Tiago is incredible, and we’ll have more on that below, but if you want more of his stuff in the bundle make sure to let us know in the comments! 

Our top 3 articles this week:

1. A deep dive into how Roam’s “first prophet” uses the tool to do everything from remembering what he reads, to keeping track of who he knows. Read now.
2. Adam Keesling’s take on the Shop app from Shopify. Hint: sometimes companies have the right idea, but the wrong execution. Read now.
3. Tiago Forte traces the history of commonplacing from Ancient Greece to China to Harvard. Read now.

(If for any reason, COVID or otherwise, you want a bundle subscription but can’t afford one — get in touch and we’ll work something out.)

Essays

⚡️Nat Eliason is Living in The Matrix

Every note-taking enthusiast is familiar with the problem: you’re taking notes and you’re nagged by the constant question: “Where should I put this?” One answer, it turns out, is “Put it everywhere.” That’s what Nat Eliason does with his setup in Roam, and he did a deep dive with us to show us how. (20 minute read)

Related: Members got access to a screencast of Nat’s Roam setup. Watch here.

🔮 "Shop" from Shopify: right problem, wrong solution

If you're a consumer brand, how do you grow revenue? Ads have been getting more expensive and there's not a great place to retarget existing customers. Shop, a consumer app from Shopify, launched this week to address this problem by allowing consumers to browse through a feed of curated products from Shopify brands, and purchase them with one click. However, there's a big risk with this: transforming into a marketplace has tradeoffs that might tarnish Shopify's long-standing relationship with merchants. (5 minute read)

⚡️ If Your System Was a House, Would You Want To Live In It?

One way to think about personal productivity systems is as a house for your mind. A good house is one that fits into its occupants’ lives. So how do you build a house that fits? You get rid of all of the points of bad fit. (3 minute read)

🔮 Sonos Radio: We've Gonna Need a Bigger Moat

A few weeks ago we asked Does Sonos Have a Moat? and concluded...probably not. However, they're making every effort to build one with a new streaming service they launched called Sonos Radio. While it'll be tough to convince people to switch from Spotify or Apple Music, it might just be the kernel that could make them a stronger business in the long-term. (10 minute read)

⚡️ A System You Can Keep for Life

It’s often easy to get so caught up in organizing that we never actually get down to doing the work. We build giant complex systems for ourselves that are hard to use. But usually this kind of organizing is a response to fear: fear of failure, and use that to think about how to build systems that we’ll hold on to forever. (7 minute read)

New In Our Network

📚 Commonplace Books: A Universal Note-Taking Method That Unites Humanity Across Time and Space

By Tiago Forte

Tiago Forte has agreed to allow us to republish one of his members-only Praxis articles for you this week.

If you don’t know who he is, you can read Dan’s 3,000-word interview with him: Inside the Mind of a Productivity Master.

But if you don’t have time for that, suffice to say: Tiago is a Big Deal in the productivity space.

He’s the creator of the Building a Second Brain course, the inventor of PARA, and the discoverer of progressive summarization. When Superorganizers got started last August he was one of the people Dan looked up to the most in the productivity community, so it’s slightly surreal for us to get a chance to work with him on the bundle.

In this previously paywalled article Tiago introduces the concept of commonplacing: it’s a kind of journal used explicitly for recording notes from different sources like books, talks, and lectures. Tiago traces the roots of commonplacing back to Ancient Greece and the European Enlightenment, and then explains how these books are still so relevant today. (10 minute read)

Best of the Bundle

🔮 Hiten Shah: Great Strategies Depend on Great Inputs

Nathan interviewed Hiten Shah about why strategy is more important now to startups than ever before: increased competition. Hiten argues that the most important thing to get right is focusing on getting great information to feed into your decision-making by talking to customers. Worthy of your time. (10 minute read)

⚡️The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Because this is Tiago week for the Everything Bundle we thought we’d bring up a riff we did on his PARA organizational system. PARA can be a little intimidating to get started with so we wrote a guide to help you with a two step solution to clean your file system. First: put all of the files related to projects you’re currently working on. Second: throw everything else in an archive. That’s it. (5 minute read)

Discussions

⚡️ What Do You Think of Roam?

Superorganizers Members discussed the finer points of Roam. Community heavyweights like Tiago Forte and Jeff Morris Jr. even weighed in. 

Deals

⚡️Supercharge Your Productivity Course

Bundle Members got discounted access to Khe Hy’s course Supercharge Your Productivity.

Did you like this? 

The bundle is new and we’re trying to make it as good as possible. Train our “neural net” and click the “Like & Comment” button at the bottom! This is no vanity exercize — it’s just information for us so we can make the Everything bundle better for you!

Thanks! And see you next Sunday :)

That’s it for this week!