snippets

Revisit some snippets from this blog

In the next section, I thought it might be relevant to revisit some thoughts I previously discussed on my blog about “time”, just for the fun of it! I still deeply resonate with each of them, and I like to think that each of them still contributes to my work up to this day.

The time I spend to go through my older journals can easily be some of the best moments of my life. Instantly you travel in time and see your older self talking to you now. You see yourself dreaming, talking to people, going places & envisioning where you'd want to be and what you're trying to achieve. When you do it from a place you dreamt about visiting, the handshake feels like a dream, because we tend to forget. We forget about what we dreamt of, and our thoughts & aspirations.

I believe time is the most important concept among all concepts.

And reality is I find the most meaning in connecting events & progress embedded in the tinniest stretches of time. I discovered I might be into that because of the way I bounced back from the toughest times of my life, & how I like to look back on how I long changed.

A journal is essentially trying to associate every new stimulus with a result, like one big monitor where you are performing an infinite amount of experiments, trials & errors, while learning about life, people, and yourself in the process.

23May15 | What I’m working on & why I became interested in time travel

I'm working on a time machine, going to release it later this year.

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Every lesson must have already been learned by somebody at some point. If there exists an experience that we can think of, then there sure is someone who tried it & learned from it.

Reading books is our way of encapsulating someone else's knowledge & lessons learned. Writing notes is our way of letting ideas that are deep in our heads come to the surface. Reading & writing together are our ways of transcending time & space and connecting pieces of thought next to each other!

23Jul16 | Reading & writing as form of time travel

Have you ever came across the same lesson in more than one book?

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The act of writing enables us to relive and savor experiences. When we write, we engage with the moment, immersing ourselves in the sights, sounds, and emotions of the experience we write about.

When reflecting, we can then revisit those experiences we once wrote about, gaining new insights, understanding, and perspective. Because there’s always new data! So reflecting is often our way to match, compare, learn, and grasp the bigger pictures. And so we can revisit our memories, reinterpret our experiences, and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world.

23Jun19 | I have tried every journal app that exists

From a “Human Performance Optimization” perspective, of all my habits, journaling has constantly been the most rewarding act.

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A beautiful thing about taking notes is that they’re like seedlings. Seedling notes need time to grow into timeless ideas. You don’t know which piece of thought you will need at what time and that’s the beauty of it!

Maintaining an efficient note-taking system will enable you to make sense of your scattered thoughts across different points in time. I have spent a better part of the last few years trying to make my note-taking system as efficient as possible, to help me achieve this very goal.

23Jun16 | 90% of our problems are not new

Recently I was thinking about how I encounter the same types of problems I used to go through from 2, 3, or 4 years ago. Noticing how I used to react to each of them versus how I react now.

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Like in all aspects of life, history is always there to help us navigate from worse to better, from older to newer, and from lower to higher. So imagine having a full history of everything you did, wrote, or thought, at all times. This could be the base for a new transformative tool, one through which you are becoming a version of yourself that is not only comparable with your version of the last year, but comparable to that of the last month, meaning you are consuming knowledge, building connections between ideas, interacting with people & systems, at a much much faster rate than most people could.

23Apr24 | Self-tracking + Rotated Focus

I started a Quantified-Self spreadsheet back in 2019, since then I've been on & off with tracking multiple aspects about my life: training, sleep, nutrition, vitals, screentime focus, places, and other misc lifestyle & behavioral metrics.

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In the grand picture, if we could condense life & days to some shots, then that's all there is to it, right? That may be the most important thing, and I think that makes utmost sense. It's the reason I keep thinking about life in snapshots, past & future, here & now, everything is just a snapshot in a docuseries through time. It starts with your first moments & ends with your last moments, and if there was ever something concrete about these moments it will only be in or about these snapshots.

These snapshots strengthen the idea of the connectedness of time and it helps calibrate your compass towards what matters.

I noticed successful people keep thinking about their future in snapshots, they see themselves reach some place or achieve something and it won't ever be possible if they can't see it earlier in time. You only see what you can, but if you can't see it then you can't be it.

Back to real life, this concept of capturing shots as you go makes your moments far more valuable. Things change, people change, and most importantly, you change, but that doesn't always mean that older snapshots were false. And that's why I value them so much.

I generally have no expectations from life, I know all what I get is all what I am, and that makes me cherish good moments when I feel them. I even don't worry about when or what if they fade out. Every snapshot that matters will find its way through time. If I have to interfere, it defies the logic of having them in the first place.

21May28 | Visual snapshots as form of time travel

Snapshots enable glimpses into the past & the future.

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The “time” aspect is what easily attracts me in any photo sharing service I use. Over the history, there were 4 different services that were trying to achieve more or less the same thing, each of which I liked some things about: Snapchat Memories, Instagram Story Archive, Timehop App, BeReal.

23Mar11 | Project Visuals

Two years ago I decided to refrain from using instagram as a platform to write – Ever since we left facebook, instagram is the platform that has all of my friends in one place, so naturally it has been my default place to vent & document.

zeyads.com

As I'm overseeing my life from the 10,000 ft view, I came to behold that everything is intrinsically connected. I now believe I don't have to visualize the whole timeline, and that slowly and with time, dots connect. Not only that, but they connect when & how they should.

22Dec13 | #everythingisconnected

In 2018 I subconsciously made a masterplan.

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If we know for sure we can not connect dots looking forward but can only connect them looking backward, isn't this enough of a reason to trust & wait?

I think most of those who pulled big visions into existence, they had an insane ability to visualize themselves into their higher states. They saw something no one else could.

23mar10 | All makes sense in hindsight

In retrospect, everything seems clear and inevitable. For every uncertainty you deal with, you always know more truth to it after some time. As of today, nothing is guaranteed, we make moves, we take risks, we overthink, but whatever it is, there are no guarantees.

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essay #2 draft: focus, clear thinking, solving the context problem

It’s becoming frustrating how distracted we are getting during the day.

Focus is becoming a rare asset, although I doubt this was the case 4-5 years ago.

From this distraction emerges an underlying problem that’s even worse.

Which is unfinished to-dos.

Recently it’s becoming so daunting to give undivided attention to the task at hand till it’s finished. And although this might seem like an easy problem to solve, it’s actually not.

Now the average person spends over 3 hours per day on their phone, or 45 days per year. I think this is disastrous. This is not to say that phones are the problem; the problem is our affected attention span. We can choose to leave the phone aside, and the side effects from years of using it will still exist. It’s very strange that those who are able to maintain focus for extended periods are considered superheroes today, although I bet this was the case just a few years ago. It could be because of remote work or the introduction of reels or short videos, but something is sure changing.

Another side effect is that we now experience time passing at a seemingly increased rate compared to before.

The result has become more open loops than we can track! Things we start and don’t finish are lost within threads of time, and time itself is passing much faster than we can keep track of what was lost.

we forget

open loops → fog

fog → clear thinking

clear thinking → writing

note-taking space <> clear thinking

note-taking <> time

time <> personal story

problem → modern software → solution

solution <> my story

my story → value

→ “let me show you”

Note-taking & clear thinking

For me, and I guess you too, so many open loops (unfinished tasks & projects) messes with my mind. It creates even more stress, slows progress, and blocks clear thinking. We tend to perform at our best when we do it from a place of clarity. I firmly believe that no one ever had a ‘motivation’ problem. It’s always a ‘focus’ problem.

While there are lots of practices on how to unlock this state of clear thinking, I found writing to be the most effective of them. Writing is the catalyst for clear thinking, and without it, it’s easy to get lost in information overload.

That’s why I always believe that a good (only?) entry point to this world of clear thinking is 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.

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.

For me, I think this realization fully materialized during Covid, when I had lots of time to spend by myself, 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.

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, takeaways, everything. My notes became my weight room.

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.

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.

I couldn’t have guessed that what I would need to be less of an over-thinker, a productive professional, and a smarter human in general, is a space to write notes on my computer.

What is a second brain?

During the past few years I became so fond of the term ‘second brain’ because it encapsulates the practice I described above. A ‘second brain’ is just another term for writing everything you know on a digital screen. It’s a practice adopted by many in order to help their daily output in all domains. Especially since almost all jobs today require digital note-taking.

If everything that you’ve ever known could be turned into writing, then you could:

• Keep copies of it all outside your first brain
• Search all your knowledge at any given time
• Never lose anything you read, know, or learn
• Reduce overwhelm & information exhaustion
• Ultimately enhance focus & creative capacity
• Prioritize presence and real effortless output

Only then we’d be able to reduce the heavy lifting imposed on our first brain from having to remember everything, and make sense of every input. Honestly this often provides a sense of security, and enables me to be more present, because I have a system that takes care of the past and the future.

There’s an obvious roadblock here for anyone paying close attention. One of the first challenges I had when I first tried building a second brain is I’d often stop the practice because I wouldn’t have enough time to write about everything! The efficiency of this system is dependent almost solely on the amount of capture; which is how much we’re able to capture and write about.

The reason this is a problem is that I found in order to keep getting benefit out of this practice I’d have to keep taking notes about everything I know from my life; if I stop it stops. And frankly I wasn’t able to keep up because modern life is already demanding, so I found I had neither enough time nor head space to keep doing it.

This motivated me to imagine what it was like if everything I was doing was already recorded, such that I don’t have to write about it, but it’s already there if I decided to visit and expand on later. This means that if every open loop (unfinished thought, task, or project) was recorded, I still would have everything in my second brain but without me having to manually do it. Thus the best of both worlds.

This would make me more chill, and ultimately less stressed about ideas and work I start but don’t finish. The mere possibility of having an option to return back in the future reduces the pressure on our present, don’t you agree?

And so on our quest to be more present (1), with minimal friction (2), comes a thread of questions:

Q: How would we be able to track open loops?

A: By tracking everything.

Q: How would we be able to track everything?

A: By automating the tracking.

Q: How would we be able to automate the tracking?

A: By using modern technology and software.