Mathilde’s Musings #4
My weekly digest of discoveries during quarantine.
🍎 One Product
Roam Research — one tool to rule them all
When I first signed up to try this new note-taking tool six months ago, I was skeptical. As a power user of Notion, what would this do for me?
Turns out, plenty.
I’ve been able to capture all my ideas in one place and find anything in a matter of seconds without the need to tag or organise anything. This is because Roam is fluid. Unlike most productivity apps that impose a structure on you, Roam mimics how your brain works, helping you capture, connect and recollect ideas when you need them.
In this respect, Roam has become a second skin (or brain). It helps me resurface my knowledge in helpful ways, without the fear or friction of forgetting where I’ve stored a specific note.
So I’ll give you that: the interface might give the most design-savvy nightmares, but I promise it’s worth a try.
Here are some helpful resources to help you get started:
Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It [Nat Eliason]
A beginner’s guide to Roam Research [Ness Labs]
Short Youtube tutorials [Shu Omi]
👂One Podcast
The importance of chitchat for happiness
I was on my way to my first post-quarantine appointment when I listened to this episode of Sam Harris’ podcast on the science of happiness. I was grumpy and stressed. 30minutes later, after my first casual conversation with a stranger in two months, I felt like a different person. The frequency of social interactions, no matter how trivial, appears to be associated with a greater sense of happiness. There’s only one small issue, as Laurie Santos points out in the podcast: striking up conversations with strangers feels awkward, and many of us end up staring at our screens. To remedy this, the team at Irrational Labs developed a fun deck of conversation cards: No Small Talk.
👁 One Perspective
Why do we work so hard?
What are we running away from or towards? This article highlights some interesting ideas on what lies behind our cult of performance.
It is a cognitive and emotional relief to immerse oneself in something all-consuming while other difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Work is a wonderful refuge.
The pleasure lies partly in flow, in the process of losing oneself in a puzzle with a solution on which other people depend. The sense of purposeful immersion and exertion is the more appealing given the hands-on nature of the work: top professionals are the master craftsmen of the age, shaping high-quality, bespoke products from beginning to end.
Take care of yourself, and don’t forget to rest!
See you next week!
Mathilde
