Return on Attention

#distill

We want to build a system for personal knowledge management that frees up attention, rather than consuming it.

- Maggie Appleton

Valuable returns come from the state of flow

  • Pinnacle of:
    • Experience
    • learning
    • performance
  • Biochemistry of Flow
    • Nitric Oxide - supresses stress and creates relaxation
    • Endorphins - Creates pleasure and inner calm
    • Dopamine - improves pattern recognition
    • Norepinephrine - creates focus to ignore distractions
    • Anandamine - Improves divergent lateral thinking
  • State of Flow
    • Needed for entering flowstate
      • Clear goals
      • Instant feedback
      • Good balance of challenge and skills
    • When we sit down, we run into obstacles
      • Environmental prep - set up desk, lighting, silence distractions
      • Mental prep - recall relevant topics, questions, facts, priorities
      • Emotional prep - facing self-doubt, fear, and uncertainty

Placeholding

A solution to obstacles to our state of flow

  • Focus work sessions need to be broken down into a series of packets
    • Research
    • Brainstorms
    • Outlines
    • Drafts
    • Final edits
  • More frequent, shorter work sessions = less vulnerability to interruption
  • Breaks between packets creates
    • Time for feedback
    • Modular system - reuse packets between projects like gitgit
      #organize

      {Git commands: an illustration](https://maggieappleton.com/git-mistakes)

      Checkout a New Branch

      git checkout -b new-branch
      #This will make a new branch if it doesn't exist already


      Re...       commits.
  • Being good at jumping into small packets requires
    • Encoding - how we enter information into our system
    • Retrieval - how we take it back out to apply it

Interactive Info

  • Don't just consume content, interact with it
    • draw sketchnotes
    • highlight
    • make notecards
  • Ways of wrestling with knowledge
    • SEE it in different contexts. Get others' opinions.
    • WRITE notes and summaries
    • DRAW sketchnotes and diagrams
    • PERFORM by presenting at meetups, record video
    • PRODUCE original content, condensing, interpreting, critiquing, transforming
    • SELL any exchange of value, collaboration, teach others