Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yesterday there was a Show HN about Obsidian[0] which you might be interested in. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598
Not that great since it lacks Latex support.
I just wanted simple hyperlinking.
Tools for Better Thinking
131–140 of 140 posts
Re: Tools for Better Thinking
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe in some cases it is helpful (for both parties) if it is written down. However, in my experience, a conversation can often be very helpful as well - you can ask clarifying questions etc. It becomes more of a brainstorming together. Has helped me many times (on both sides of the conversation).
I find the instant messaging is even better(for informational conversations). It gives you time to think, can decrease miscommunication and the psychological element of conversation(giving more clean space for the informational element) and increase the depth and details of a conversation.
Completely the opposite for me. What would be a couple of minutes of conversation is stretched out to an hour or more. And no point starting something different while waiting for the next message.
Re: Tools for Better Thinking
#133great!
Re: Tools for Better Thinking
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hate to be that guy but... org-mode :) I use it as an outliner, to link to documents (using org-roam), and liberally sprinkle TODOs among the notes, which the agenda picks up. Took a while to get comfortable with it, but it's totally worth it.
I'm concerned because the emacs community is significantly smaller than the vi community. Do you happen to know anything about vim-org?
citation needed
Re: Tools for Better Thinking
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
org-mode allows linking within notes.
still a bit too heavy for my purposes, but it looks like it may be the only option. I was trying not to resort to `.md` files, but that may be a more future-roof option to be honest.
org is as future proof as anything else
Re: Tools for Better Thinking
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly this. What is really weird, though, is that I have occasionally tried to promote this approach to people that ask my help, simply by asking them to write the request to me instead of calling. Also, getting the help request in written helps me to think the case and open issues in my own pace uninterrupted by discussion. The weird part? I have a strong feeling that more and more often (luckily not too often yet…
That sounds like a tricky message to deliver: 1. It could easily come across as "my time is more important than yours". 2. Depending on what they are asking for and how urgently they are treating it, they might not want a lesson in solving their own problems. They just want help fixing the problem. 3. A lot of people are self-centred. Of course their problem should be your top priority and you should drop what you're…
> 1. It could easily come across as "my time is more important than yours".
Well yes, if someone comes to me to ask for help, that means they weren't able to solve it by themselves, but expect me to have the skills, knowledge or experience to help them solve it. So my time working on this problem is obviously more valuable than theirs, because I'm expected to fix something they weren't able to.
So I think it's fair to ask them invest the time to provide a proper description of the problem, before I invest time to help them.
Re: Tools for Better Thinking
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
This raises an interesting point. Maybe excels at written communication is how everyone else is doing it (bullet points, spelling and grammar mistakes) and we are the aberration .
I usually to write in short sentences instead of long paragraphs. I find that it improves clarity. It also seems the readers respond well to that. With that in mind, why are bullet points so bad ? they seem like a simple technique to simplify writing.
I've written a bullet point message to a client once. He was pieved because it sounded like I was enumerating his failures instead of genuinely asking questions. I find that bullet points are only good if you enumerate what you've done, or something neutral. But nothing in regards to what somebody else needs. It's really aggressive.
I've found that bullet points come off as really aggressive in communication.
Re: Tools for Better Thinking
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hate to be that guy but... org-mode :) I use it as an outliner, to link to documents (using org-roam), and liberally sprinkle TODOs among the notes, which the agenda picks up. Took a while to get comfortable with it, but it's totally worth it.
I'm concerned because the emacs community is significantly smaller than the vi community. Do you happen to know anything about vim-org?
I tried vim-org previously (I’m a Vim user at heart) and didn’t have any success, but I hadn’t grokked org-mode at that point anyway. So definitely worth trying it out.
Re: Tools for Better Thinking
#139This is a really nice presentation of these ideas. However, I think that the Decision Matrix idea is too complicated: specifically the part where he advocates adding a weighting to each factor being considered to arrive at a numerical score. At Microsoft, some of us use a system that I like to call the "Abolade decision making framework." It's the same idea, but instead of assigning weights to factors, we simply rank…
Is there somewhere I could read further about the Abolade framework? I can't seem to find any good resources from a quick web search.
+1, I would love to read more about this, particularly around how it scales to multiple (possibly overlapping) options.
> Additionally, the factors are expressed as positive attributes and an option either has that factor or it doesn't.
This is very intuitive for binary decisions, where the "pros" of one option are the "cons" of the other. How do you scale it to multiple options though? (e.g. if I am deciding between internet providers, speed is clearly an important factor, but I may have 3 options with low/medium/high speed respectively)
Re: Tools for Better Thinking
#140I've found that the most underrated problem solving tool is simply typing out my thought process. I used to be the type who asked a lot of questions until I realized that formulating the question was often more important than getting the answer.
It's amazing how much a technique like rubber ducking[1] helps to work through issues. The number of times I've felt like I have no idea how to solve a problem until the moment after I ask someone else is incredible. I think the act of thinking how to explain the problem to someone else really helps trigger the problem solving side of the brain. That and the number of times taking a 10 minute walk has been more produ…
Rubber duck debugging is extremely useful to unblock. I very rarely use an inanimate object, though — for me, the real help is the first or second (apparently very basic) question that the other person poses to me. That key question usually comes at what would seem the beginning of my explanation, but there lies the magic.
Rubber ducks don't ask questions.