24Feb03 | Tools for thought

The world’s most valuable skill is: Clarity of Thought.

It enables people to build multi-million dollar companies.

It enables athletes to break world records.

It enables creatives to create art.

No single skill can match it, not even remotely.

Clear Thinking is not a moat; anyone can tap in anytime they want.

And when they do, it’s an entire world within.

When I first learned about the concept of “Tools for thought”, I think my life kind of changed, forever, I would say.

“Tools for thought” means: Using a technological function (software) to support a biological function (thinking).

The idea is that we can now use one or more of many tools that can extend the abilities of our brains in some of the most useful ways. And this can enable serious strides in the way we work, think, write, and collaborate.

A good (only?) entry point to this world of Clear Thinking would be a note-taking app.

A note-taking app is not just the place we take notes, it’s often where we think about problems, where we articulate what we already know, where we learn about ourselves, where we train our memories, and where we snapshot our knowledge into tangible form.

If we ever want to adequately state what note-taking does for our patterns of thinking, a few articles won’t probably be enough. The single most important criteria for the quality of our thoughts is how we’re able to communicate them. So having an open space where you can challenge your own thoughts, spend time trying to formulate them in the best shape possible, and re-iterate on your existing mental models is just one of the most undervalued things to ever exist. If anything, I’d pay a recurrent membership to access this space just like I do to the gym.

Back in the day, note-taking apps used to be very primitive; a boring interface that lets you write down anything quickly, but that’s about it really, nothing more. This was always the case for too long, until ~10 years ago, tech became more advanced, which enabled more & more features that can help the human brain. Now we have tools that augment the way we think, connect ideas together, capture knowledge from many sources, and visualize graphs of our entire knowledge.

For me, I think this realization fully materialized during Covid, when we had lots of time to spend by ourselves, and no one else. An open gym for the mind was the best thing I could use during these times. And just like that I tapped into this world for the very first time. Before this, I was using Google Keep, but it wasn’t anything extra-ordinary.

Then during 2020 I tried almost every new tool I would find. I would spend an insane amount of time re-organizing my notes, writing about my days, documenting everything I can, and augmenting these notes with whatever data I can from my life (photos, etc). I was writing about every new thing I learn, every project I take on, and all experiments I would run in my personal or professional life. I would communicate to myself all my learnings, failures, take-aways, everything. My notes became my weight room. I spent so much time in it to the point that made learning new stuff an enjoyable experience because I would write everything I learn so it doesn’t matter if I ever forgot it. The results kicked in so quickly I could see the world much more clearly and my output became much more effortless because of my evolving database of notes. Notes about each & everything! I became addicted to the process of documenting & writing I forgot how to live without it.

Then post-covid, the world, my world, became much more complex, especially as I was delving into the second half of my 20s, trying to make sense of so much stuff simultaneously and without breaks. Normal adulthood break-in, but for me it was much more intense because of my over-thinking. Many many things to make sense of at the time you’re just exploring the world for what it is, the state at which I believe many people can break if they’re not cautious. Every single time I’d just sit down and write even if it’s something I don’t yet understand. Normally what would happen is that as I’m writing I’d actually figure out many of the stuff and reach answers I’d been looking for. Nothing I ever did did this effect for me. My apps became my friends. Their subscriptions became a non-negotiable, like food & water.

I developed an implicit attachment to my note-taking tools. I couldn’t have ever guessed that what I would need to be less of an over-thinker, a productive professional, and generally a smarter human, is a space to write notes on my computer.

Then a few months later I got introduced to a whole community of people who only talk about writing & note-taking tools. This community was called “Building a Second Brain” (BASB) – It literally means writing down everything such that you develop a brain outside of your brain and thus you don’t have to remember everything because you can just search your notes app.

I was obviously hooked and it was one of those times where I can find myself and resonate with many of the challenges these people are having. We’d enter a Zoom session for a couple hours and talk about a use case for a note-taking app. Quickly felt like a tribe. We were all in search for one thing: How to gain maximum benefit from current software to augment our thinking, extend our brains, and better our lives.

Then later I’d build a simple website for me to publish some of my notes (this website, but like 5 iterations back). Then suddenly writing notes became even more rewarding because now I’m using a subset of these notes to share ideas, gain feedback, collaborate around topics, and passively create friends who can resonate with any of the ideas I share online. This is also apart from the fact that a website where I share ideas is possibly a better introduction of me & my beliefs than any proper real-life conversation would do.

Looking back, what made writing easier for me was always context. We don’t write from scratch, we often continue from where we left in real life. We build on top of what we already know and try reach a better understanding, a clearer view. During this very same process we transform into our smarter selves, because writing lets us spend enough time with our thoughts, and then tries to bring the best out of them. So to retain context from real life, is of utmost priority, because the richer the input, the richer the output.

Context means everything we do or experience in real-life. Because writing is not sand-boxed. Writing is only the extension of every idea we conclude from our work, life, interactions with people, etc. So in order to do this I was always in constant search for anything that retains context for me.

Thinking about it, a tool (like this website) or a practice (like BASB) are just different ways to retain context while writing. They enable me to link similar ideas with each other, such that every idea on its own will have a deeper take because it’s linked to another idea. Or because it’s linked to a time from my life where I was doing X or learning Y or traveling to Z. These details are what generally make writings rich and useful.

One of the best feelings is when you revisit something you wrote in the past and capture many of the details of your state back then. Because we’re humans we’re always changing, always getting from a place to another, always experiencing different mental & physical states. So having a snapshot that can be as comprehensive as possible in displaying many of these details is priceless. Thus the feeling you get is precisely that of time-travel, because the deeper you engage with that version of yourself through that memory, the more you’d feel the sense of progress you have in your life.

In fact that’s why “Gratitude Journaling” is a popular form of writing. Because it enables people to write about what makes them feel grateful to their lives, and through writing they can actually feel better towards their already complex lives. Not only that, but it’s one of the few things that gives a sense of purpose in the middle of the very fast pace of modern life.

Because of this, I’ve since been on a quest to keep a journal, but also keep as much details into it as possible. That is to say a priority of mine over the past few years is to keep the most detailed journal possible of my life. A journal that is rich with details & context, and that I can use to its maximum to serve my life: track how I’m living versus how I used to live, track lessons learned in every life endeavor, capture experiences as they happen, track my progress, explore my memories, jump to any point in time, and don’t forget anything. Like a memex for my life.

I took extreme measures to ensure I do this journal and capture as much detail about my life as technologically possible, which was not an easy task. Then I found another community that does something similar: The Quantified Self.

“The Quantified Self” refers to a community of people interested in self-tracking with technology.

“Quantified-Self” refers to the practice itself (of self-tracking). Sleep, physical activity, vitals, photos, people, maps, anything that could be measured by a device is included! After a while it occurred to me what I wanted to do (the richest journal) lies perfectly in the intersection between these exact two worlds: Note-taking & Self-tracking.

If we can take the most detailed notes, and merge it with the finest tracking we can have, we can actually reach destination: A perfect journal of our days that has as much context as possible – Ready for us to use later, reflect back, quantify progress, refresh memories, and much more.

If you want to retain some context,

you can probably use one app & settle with whatever comes out of the box.

If you want to retain more context,

you would probably use 3-4 apps to track some aspects about your life, and may be journal about some of them.

If you want to retain the most context possible,

this is so hard of a task, because you’d be using at least 7-8 apps to track as much as possible, and may be implement a dashboard to gather all of them but then you have to be technical.

This has become so frustrating for me, and I believe many others – Because if I’m strongly invested in capturing everything I can from my day, I have to get technical, write scripts, tinker with many tools & code.

At some point in 2023, and after spending lots & lots of hours to maintain my detailed journal, I thought of turning it into an app, which later became Hyperspaces.

For Hyperspaces, I did two main things that were the base for a comprehensive journal:

• Integrated the world’s most advanced open-source place tracker
• Integrated the world’s most advanced open-source screentime tracker

These two tasks were the most challenging, but also the most rewarding.

Because at any given point of time, I can connect my journal to one of the two, and thus capture as much context from this moment as possible.

Following this, I went on to add:

• An integration with Apple Health → All wearable data is collected in Apple Health
• An integration with Apple Photos → Automatically fetch photos captured at a place

From this moment on, the effort I was doing into maintaining my journal went significantly lower, because not only data capture is easier than ever with the app, but also all of this stuff happens automatically on auto-pilot, and without friction. The only thing I do is just review tracked items from time to time, and write journal notes on top of the ones I see worthy!

That said, I found out that this is one of the few things I would voluntarily spend long hours at just to make it better and help other people get max value out of it, serving the cause we discussed earlier: A tool for clear thought.

Thanks for reading!