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If you've been having trouble using Twitter recently, you aren't alone — the service has been having issues ever since it started limiting the number of posts users could view each day. Although many of the platform's issues stabilized over the weekend, Tweetdeck remains broken unless users switch to the beta version of the list aggregator. Now, Twitter is gearing up to solve the issue by making that beta version of Tweetdeck the main version, announcing on Monday that it has "launched a new, improved version of Tweetdeck."
We have just launched a new, improved version of TweetDeck. All users can continue to access their saved searches & workflows via https://t.co/2WwL3hNVR2 by selecting “Try the new TweetDeck” in the bottom left menu.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 3, 2023
Some notes on getting started and the future of the product…
Despite officially launching, this "new" Tweetdeck still calls itself the "Tweetdeck Preview" while in app, and users still need to opt-in to using it in the menu of the original Tweetdeck interface. Even so, switching to the new interface does indeed restore basic Tweetdeck functionality for users that rely on its list aggregation features. Twitter says the process should be fairly straightforward as well, promising that saved searches, lists and columns should carry over instantly. Although Twitter says that the updated preview build should now support Twitter Spaces, polls and other features that were previously missing, it notes that Teams functionality is currently unavailable.
Twitter hasn't officially announced that it's retiring the old version of Tweetdeck, but in a thread discussing the issues a Twitter employee suggested the change would be permanent, stating that they were "migrating everyone to the preview version."
Hey folks, looks like the recent changes have broken the legacy TweetDeck, so we're working on migrating everyone to the preview version
— Ben (@ayroblu) July 3, 2023
Although switching to the new version of Tweetdeck potentially resolves the issue, many legacy users may still find themselves without access to the power-user tool in the near future. According to Twitter Support, the feature will become exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers in the near future, noting that "in 30 days, users must be Verified to access Tweetdeck." It's unclear if that change will be applied to all users in early August, or if all users will have a 30-day trial of the new Tweetdeck before being prompted to subscribe.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitter-launches-new-tweetdeck-as-the-old-version-breaks-down-231939160.html?src=rss
Twitter Issues
FILE - A sign at Twitter headquarters is shown in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2022. Thousands of people logged complaints about problems accessing Twitter on Saturday, July 1, 2023, after owner Elon Musk limited most users to viewing 600 tweets a day — restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the site. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
Enlarge / A Wendy's old-fashion burger. Romaine lettuce on Wendy's burgers is thought to be the cause of the outbreak. (credit: Getty | Francis Dean)
We will never know for certain what caused a large, multistate outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 infections linked to Wendy's restaurants late last year, according to a new study led by investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study, highlighting weaknesses in our ability to respond to foodborne outbreaks, lands amid a separate report published by the CDC finding that, in general, we're also failing to prevent outbreaks. In fact, cases from some common foodborne pathogens have increased relative to pre-pandemic levels.
In the outbreak last year, which spanned from July to August, at least 109 people in six states fell ill, with 52 needing to be hospitalized. Eating at Wendy's was a clear link. But it wasn't enough to crack the case.
Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket soars through the sky over Cape Canaveral with Europe's Euclid space telescope. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)
A European Space Agency telescope launched Saturday on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida to begin a $1.5 billion mission seeking to answer fundamental questions about the unseen forces driving the expansion of the Universe. The Euclid telescope, named for the ancient Greek mathematician, will observe billions of galaxies during its six-year survey of the sky, measuring their shapes and positions going back 10 billion years, more than 70 percent of cosmic history.
Led by the European Space Agency, the Euclid mission has the ambitious goal of helping astronomers and cosmologists learn about the properties and influence of dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to make up about 95 percent of the Universe. The rest of the cosmos is made of regular atoms and molecules that we can see and touch.
“To highlight the challenge we face, I would like to give the analogy: It’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there’s no cat,” said Henk Hoekstra, a professor and cosmologist at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “That’s a little bit of the situation we find ourselves in because we have these observations … But we lack a good theory. So far, nobody has come up with a good explanation for dark matter or dark energy.”
Habits change. Inspiration comes and goes. Workflows spring up and taper off. But for me, time blocking never changes. Time blocking has become fundamental to my work day, ensuring I have chunks of time to complete tasks and ensuring my colleagues know what I’m up to. Time blocking structures my day. Time blocking blocks out extra meetings. Time blocking pushes me forward.
I’m not sure if one could say there are many forms of time blocking. By and large, time blocking consists of putting tasks into your calendar with a time duration for completion. To my knowledge, nearly all forms of time blocking consist of tasks — rather than events — building out your calendar.
But some apps do structure various parts of the time blocking workflow differently. Today, I’m hoping to discuss the two apps I have the most experience with on the Mac: Sunsama and Fantastical. These are very different apps — one is a full-on productivity app with many productivity features; the other a calendar app on steroids. However, both have succeeded for me in some shape or form and both have fallen flat in other facets.
Many may not even consider Fantastical a productivity app at all. Recent updates have me thinking otherwise, though — you can now quickly drag and drop tasks into your calendar and use natural language parsing to set a duration for the task. Those tasks sync over to the built-in Reminders app or Todoist, providing integration with other productivity apps. And Fantastical also provides excellent meeting scheduling features. Think Calendly, but in a Fantastical style. Overall, I think Fantastical is right at home in any time blocking conversation.
To me, there are three major stages to a time blocked day:
Sunsama and Fantastical both play a role in all three stages, but differently.
Without further ado…
The planning stage for me consists of sitting down, looking at all my task silos, and building out a day to work on the most important items. I aim to complete this in 15 minutes or less. Some days I prefer granularity and specificity (“reply to this email”) and some days I prefer generalities (“email”).
Sunsama does an incredible job helping you plan out your day. Each morning, Sunsama pings you with a reminder to build out your day. The planning process works in the following order:
Sunsama rocks in the planning department. You can quickly drop all tasks you want to complete in a day in step #1. This is effectively your “Inbox” of tasks. Sunsama also integrates with Notion, Todoist, Clickup, Github, Exchange, Gmail, and more, ensuring you can actually bring in your emails and other tasks from a wide variety of apps all at once. This first step is basically the ultimate productivity inbox.
Once done, you can also tag your tasks “Work” or “Personal”, set an estimated duration time, and add any other notes to build out the task’s context. This can become quite granular and can take some time if you have many shorter duration tasks.
In step #3, you can defer the less important tasks to a future date.
In step #4, you can use some automation features by clicking a certain key to automatically build out your calendar based on the duration of each task created in step #1. Sunsama ties a tag (“work” or “personal”) to the calendar of your choice. This effectively creates a unique calendar event for each task you add in step #4 — perfect for notifying your colleagues what you’re up to each day.
Fantastical doesn’t have a built-out planning workflow of any sort. There are no queues to sit-down and tackle your day. There are no task silos or multiple inboxes to bring in everything you want to do into one specific list. There are no pings or notifications to get you off on the right track.
However, since Fantastical integrates nicely with the Reminders app — which itself integrates with a few other apps on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac — you can still build out a planning workflow in Fantastical.
My planning workflow involves Spark (my email app), Reminders, and Fantastical. I tend to swipe important emails over from Spark to Reminders, which nicely show up inside Fantastical’s “Tasks” section.
From there, I can drag specific emails and tasks right into my calendar. Each task adds a default event with a default duration in your calendar, but you can quickly edit this by stating the number of minutes you expect the task to take by adding “[15m]” or “[120m]” to the task. Fantastical will then update the duration of the time block automatically.
The biggest hiccup for me with Fantastical’s planning process is the fact that time blocked tasks do not become calendar events. This means my colleagues can’t see what I’m doing during the day. If I need to block out time to notify my colleagues what my plans are, I’ll have to create a second generic time block within a calendar. This duplicates some of the planning work.
As you work through the day, you’ll have to return to your productivity app to check in on your progress, mark tasks completed, and make changes to your plans. Again, Sunsama and Fantastical are very different in this regard.
Sunsama has two specific time tracking features some users will love:
The first method provides an extra area to store notes as you work through the task. This works great for writing meeting minutes and referencing any other notes you added to the task when you planned out your day.
The second method is ideal for folks who get interrupted throughout the day and forget to toggle the task’s timer. This is definitely where I fall — instead of tracking down to the minute, I complete a task and mark how long it took me to complete, generally with a round estimate to the 15 minute mark.
Tracking time in Sunsama is fundamental to the last stage of time blocking: review.
Fantastical is king at capturing events and tasks throughout the day via its natural language parsing field. Simply typing task Pick up car from oil change at 3:00PM [15m] will create a 15-minute time blocked task at 3:00PM to pick up the car from the oil change. This is ideal for capturing new tasks and events throughout the day.
However, there aren’t any specific time tracking features baked into Fantastical at this point. Jumping in and out of the app is pretty easy and you can check off tasks in any calendar view or the Tasks list view in the left sidebar. If you want to be more specific about how long it took you to complete the task, you can change the “[15m]” moniker in the title of the task to the amount of time it actually took you. You won’t be able to review the difference between your planned duration and your actual duration this way, but it certainly helps in the review stage of your time blocked day.
Finally, the review stage. What good is all this planning if you can’t go back, review, and learn from your mistakes? Reviewing each time blocked day can be important in different ways — you can review to ensure you don’t miss any billable time, you can review to determine if your expectations aren’t matched with reality, and you can review to provide a jumpstart to your next day’s plans. No matter the reason, review is fundamental to good time blocking.
Sunsama’s review process isn’t as built out as its planning process, but it’s still great.
When your day is about to wrap up — which can be set to any time you want — Sunsama will allow you to work through the shutdown routine. The shutdown provides analytics, breaking down how much time you spent working on work and personal tasks and which tasks you completed. There’s also an opportunity to write out your thoughts on the day and post those thoughts to Slack.
More than anything though, the shutdown routine in Sunsama triggers and somewhat forces you to step back from your computer. When it’s time to be done for the day, Sunsama can force you to be done for the day. If you’re aiming for a better work-life balance, Sunsama is certainly trying to do its part.
You can read more about Sunsama’s startup and shutdown processes in our article right here.
Just like the prior two stages, Fantastical doesn’t have a specific shutdown or review process. You can, however, ensure you have a shutdown routine through a few more manual ways.
First, I tend to create blocks at the beginning of my day labelled “Wake, prep, and arrive” and at the end of my day titled “Shutdown”. Both of these can be very easily created using a shortcut in the Shortcuts app, which you can trigger from anywhere in iOS or macOS. Once created, you have your day’s start and end times. This shutdown time block ensures you have the time you need to review your day and move into the next one.
Second, if you change the number of minutes for each planned task to the number of minutes for actual time taken to complete the task, you can review your day pretty easily in either of Fantastical’s Day or Week views. To view completed tasks, you’ll have to jump into the View menu and select Show Completed Tasks. Otherwise, completed tasks will disappear off your calendar. If you change that duration when you finish a task, you should be able to quickly tell where your daily plan went awry.
Can you tell? Indeed, Sunsama is built for time blocking. In each of the above three steps, Sunsama has a feature or workflow to work through each day. Fantastical’s time blocking features are quite new, meaning any time blocking routines you want to use inside Fantastical will be more manual by nature.
And this is fine — some folks may find Sunsama’s built-in routines to be too stringent and structured. You may find Sunsama to be too granular — each individual email and individual task has to be added to your calendar, creating the potential for a calendar littered with short events throughout the day and constant need to interact with Sunsama as you work through your task list. Some folks may prefer the generalities and manualness Fantastical provides in these regards.
Or, planners will be planners — some folks will adore the top-to-bottom planned approach Sunsama provides.
You do ultimately pay for the specific Sunsama routines. There’s a price difference between these two apps, to be sure. For those who have endless buckets of tasks, Sunsama’s monthly cost will be a bargain. For those who either have better control of their buckets or want a more general approach to time blocking, Fantastical’s cost may be easier to stomach.
Hopefully the above breakdown provides two options on opposite ends of the time blocking spectrum to help build out your daily calendar.
If your to-do list overfloweth and you have multiple areas of life to manage, it’s time to get a system that actually works.
Get complete access to all the frameworks, training, coaching, and tools you need to organize your daily tasks, overcome distractions, and stay focused on the things that count (starting today).
Step 1: Refresh → Audit and streamline your current tools and systems and get clear on what’s working for and against you.
Step 2: Upgrade → Build a productivity system that plays to your strengths (even if you find “systems” annoying).
Step 3: Nurture → Make your system stick. Create a flywheel that keeps you focused on what matters most day after day.
Get all this, and more, inside the Focus Accelerator membership.
Join 300 focused members who have access to $5,000 worth of our best courses and masterclasses, the Digital Planner, a Private Community Slack, 2x Monthly Coaching Calls, and much, much more…
What is it that holds you back from being efficient and intentional with your time? What obstacles do you face to doing focused, deep work?
Previously, I shared about the three “waves” of productivity: Efficiency, Intentionality, and Meaning.
Now, let’s dive in and find out what it is that threatens these three areas of productive. In short, what is it that threatens your time, attention, and focus…?
It’s obvious, but it’s also true. Your efficiency is threatened by inefficiency.
The first wave of productivity focused on improving efficiency through the implementation of productivity workflows, systems, and tools.
You don’t have to go full-on GTD, nor do you have to start using expensive and complicated software. I get by just fine using a physical paper notebook to manage 90% of my task and time management needs.
The tools and systems you use in and of themselves are not what’s important. But if you have an inefficient system — or perhaps even no system at all — then you won’t be able to reap the benefits and freedom that come with efficiently managing your day to day life. Instead, you’ll be spending a significant amount of your time just juggling and wrangling things that you could easily be managing well.
Without protecting the margin in your day, then the free time you create will be swallowed up by other demands and responsibilities on your schedule. This most commonly occurs by giving in to the tyranny of the urgent.
Boundaries are important. You must be able to say no to the non-essential demands on your time and attention, and you must maintain margin and breathing room within your schedule so emergencies don’t arise every time there is a little unexpected thing that pops into your day.
Many people do not have clarity about what it means to be productive and valuable in their work. From a high-level, they cannot define what important, deep work is. And from a granular level, they lack the clarity to know what their next steps are and what they should aim to do on a regular basis.
As a result, that lack of clarity leads to unfocused busy work such as checking email, social media, news, etc. And this is super-bad-news because many people substitute busyness as a proxy for productivity.
As I mentioned last week, clarity cures busywork.
But clarity alone is not enough. You also need the skill to focus and do the work, rather than procrastinate and give in to distractions.
If you’re struggling to find clarity about your focused, deep work, you’re not alone. Ditto if you’re a master procrastinator.
(Side Note: I put together all my book notes from Deep Work and also combined those notes with all the key takeaways and highlights from my interview with Cal Newport. You can download the in-depth notes here.
Up next in this series, we’ll be hitting on the most common pitfalls to productivity and how your time and attention are crucial in protecting your margin.
The pitfalls differ from the above threats in that the former are habits and mindsets you have that you may not even know about. They’re things that are found in your own individual productivity systems as well as within the teams you work with, and even within your whole company.
If your to-do list overfloweth and you have multiple areas of life to manage, it’s time to get a system that actually works.
Get complete access to all the frameworks, training, coaching, and tools you need to organize your daily tasks, overcome distractions, and stay focused on the things that count (starting today).
Step 1: Refresh → Audit and streamline your current tools and systems and get clear on what’s working for and against you.
Step 2: Upgrade → Build a productivity system that plays to your strengths (even if you find “systems” annoying).
Step 3: Nurture → Make your system stick. Create a flywheel that keeps you focused on what matters most day after day.
Get all this, and more, inside the Focus Accelerator membership.
Join 300 focused members who have access to $5,000 worth of our best courses and masterclasses, the Digital Planner, a Private Community Slack, 2x Monthly Coaching Calls, and much, much more…
Productivity training has matured significantly over the past 15 years.
We began with an emphasis on efficiency. Then, we began to ask the question about how to use that efficiency to free up time in our day. Now we are realizing that using that extra time to do meaningful work is a skill in and of itself.
In short, third-wave productivity has nothing to do with artisanal to-do list apps.
A little while back, I had the honor of interviewing Cal Newport about his book, Deep Work. While there is a lot in our conversation that I’d love to get into, it will have to wait for another time. Today, I wanted to pull out one segment where Cal and I talked about the Three Waves of Productivity.
Side Note: I put together all my book notes from Deep Work and also combined those notes with all the key takeaways and highlights from my interview with Cal Newport. You can download the in-depth notes here.
This first wave focused heavily on systems, methodologies, and tools. It touted efficiency as the ultimate form of productivity, stating that you need to capture and organize all your tasks and projects and other areas of responsibility. To do this you need smarter lists and more powerful tools.
(Note that there are many ways to be efficient with your time and your tasks beyond a specific or complex methodology. I for one am a huge fan of the Ivy Lee method.)
This second wave built on the first. Saying that organizing your tasks is not the height of productivity. Rather, it’s about making room to do the real work. This second wave was more of a mindset shift than a skill.
In other words, it was the realization that when you are efficient with all the incoming stuff and your ideas and time, then you are able to create space in your day to do the important work. (Note that another way to create space in your day is to say ‘no’ to certain incoming things and create some margin for yourself.)
This intentionality of choosing to do meaningful work exposed a truth that to merely free up your time isn’t enough.
Once people had time available to do the “real work,” they often didn’t even know what it was — nor did they have the skills needed to take advantage of that time.
Doing the real work is, in itself, a craft that takes time and practice, and this is what the third wave is all about…
Wave three is about defining what to do in the time that you’re fighting to clear out and taking advantage of that “real work” time.
We have had to reengage with what it means to concentrate and do focused, meaningful work. We are now giving our attention to what it means to do deep work.
These three waves serve one another. You need all three to get the true benefits, and it’s not until you get to the third wave that you start to see all the benefits.
It is in the third wave where you start to produce more valuable work and you find your work more meaningful.
However, the challenge here is that many people do not have clarity about what it means to be productive and valuable. They cannot define what important, deep work is. As a result, that lack of clarity leads to unfocused busy work such as checking email, social media, news, etc.
In his book, Deep Work, Cal warns against using busyness as a proxy for productivity:
In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
Clarity about what matters also gives clarity about what does not. Clarity is vital if you want to do deep work on a regular basis over the long run.
Next, we’ll talk about the most common issues that will threaten your efficiency, intentionality, and deep work. We’ll also get into the most common pitfalls to productivity.
In the meantime, I’ve put together all my book notes from Deep Work and combined it with all the key takeaways and highlights from my interview with Cal Newport. You can download the in-depth notes here.
There are two very distinct periods to my year: tax season and not-tax season. The not-tax-season season continues to get more busy, but there’s still quite a drop off from the prior high-stress period of the year. With each passing deadline between April 30th, June 15th, and June 30th, the demands of the season progressively subside.
Like most people, I tend to revisit my systems during the less stressful periods of the year. Creativity returns over the summer, system failures are addressed, and new habits are adopted. Coincidentally, nearly all my annual app subscriptions renew between August and October of each year.
On the other hand, the veil of less intensity hangs over the non-tax-season season. This often tricks me into thinking I can do more during my busy seasons than I actually can.
Sunsama and Obsidian were perfect examples of this.
Last October, I began a simple bullet journaling habit inside Obsidian with the hopes of developing a small knowledge archive that could be used by students or other young accountants in the office. I intended on logging general steps to the solutions I developed each day — either via voice dictation and AI summaries or via direct SOP-creation — and ensuring the notes were all searchable inside my own Obsidian bank and the office-wide Notion database.
That habit made it to mid-January — I encountered more problems each day than I expected back in less-intense October, and the Obsidian habit died.
Sunsama lasted a lot longer than Obsidian. In fact, Sunsama may return, though with a different approach during the most stressful seasons of the year.
Here are three things I found myself adopting during the busiest season of my year to ensure my productivity system still worked for me each day.
Sunsama was the bread and butter to my productivity system during tax season this year. I jumped into Sunsama every morning and planned out each day. I’d generally check off items throughout the day with the amount of time each task took to complete, and I’d generally review each day’s success late in the evening or the next morning.
Where Sunsama broke down for me was in its granularity. For instance:
Each tax return I wanted to complete, each email I wanted to answer, and each ordinary task I wanted to work on amounted to a mountain of work I could barely keep track of. While Sunsama did a great job of tracking everything, the breakdown came in the planning process. I would ultimately spend 30+ minutes in the morning clicking and dragging each email/task/tax return into my time-boxed day.
I could probably complete 2 or 3 tax returns in that 30 minutes if I focused. And I dreaded the mental overhead in that 30-minute span.
My treasured Sunsama planning process quickly found its way to pasture.
I had to come up with a new solution to track all my work and ensure I found focused moments throughout each day.
My first step to fixing my stressed out productivity system was to break down everything I needed to do each day into four or five general categories. The five main categories became:
These five blocks became the core of my work days. And by and large, each work day became very routinized and structured.
Once it was email time, rather than pore through my Sunsama list to view all the emails I wanted to answer, I would instead just jump straight into my email inbox and hammer out as many replies as I could in the time allotted.
Once it was tax time, instead of jumping into my pre-planned set of work for the day, I’d either jump into our office-wide Notion and pick the most urgent tax work to complete, or I’d walk straight into our file room and just pick a random name to begin work.
I hated admin time, so I avoided it at all costs.
And when it was finally personal time, I dropped everything I was doing and headed straight into personal time.
In summary then, instead of having my actual tasks in my calendar — the method which was so great for me in my non-tax-season season — I created blocks or zones of time where I would focus on one general category of tasks instead. Flying at 30,000 feet, you could say I stepped back and summarized my day into zones rather than planned out what I’d work on each day.
It became apparent that I could easily fall into a trap of thinking I was productive each day by checking off dozens of tax tasks, non-tax tasks, and emails as I worked through them. I think this was somewhat of an illusion though — in reality, I jumped in and out of Sunsama at least 30 times a day to see what was next on the list, which ultimately led to less focus time, more distraction, and a higher probability of getting out of my chair and grabbing a cup of coffee.
The solution was to avoid my productivity system altogether save for three important times of the day:
Each day, I found myself operating more by memory than by direction. When planning, I’d pick the absolute imperatives for the day — file this return, send that email, finish that piece of admin — and ensure those were done first thing within each of the appropriate time zones. After the imperatives were done, I’d just continue onto the next thing I saw in that particular silo:
And of course, when enough was enough…
I would jump into the next personal, family or free time block whenever my brain hit a wall.
As time wore on during tax season, I found it absolutely fundamental to stop everything I was doing on the spot when a personal or family time block rolled through my schedule. It didn’t matter how close I was to finishing a return or how much more work pumped through the email inbox, when it was time to slow down, it was time to slow down.
There were two main things I found both surprising and awesome about scheduling free time into the schedule:
There are two other little things I did during the most intense part of the season to ensure I always had some personal time scheduled:
I greatly appreciated the chance to stress test my productivity system this last six months or so. I learned a few important lessons about myself:
I’m sure the coming months will result in a bunch of imaginative workflow brainstorming and will result in a more convoluted planning workflow than I’m capable of implementing. It seems to be the annual cycle. But each year that goes by, past stress tests of my productivity systems have moulded my workflows piece by piece into something that works great for me.
If your to-do list overfloweth and you have multiple areas of life to manage, it’s time to get a system that actually works.
Get complete access to all the frameworks, training, coaching, and tools you need to organize your daily tasks, overcome distractions, and stay focused on the things that count (starting today).
Step 1: Refresh → Audit and streamline your current tools and systems and get clear on what’s working for and against you.
Step 2: Upgrade → Build a productivity system that plays to your strengths (even if you find “systems” annoying).
Step 3: Nurture → Make your system stick. Create a flywheel that keeps you focused on what matters most day after day.
Get all this, and more, inside the Focus Accelerator membership.
Join 300 focused members who have access to $5,000 worth of our best courses and masterclasses, the Digital Planner, a Private Community Slack, 2x Monthly Coaching Calls, and much, much more…
When it comes to productivity and focus, I have a secret weapon — a book that I never see anyone talking about.
Now, I know not everyone is a nerd about planning, scheduling, and setting goals, but there is a book by J.D. Meier that’s just fantastic.
It’s called Getting Results the Agile Way. (It’s free on KindleUnlimited, but since it’s more of a workbook I recommend getting the paperback.)
This book is jam-packed with ideas and practical systems for helping you manage your time and priorities. I first went through this book nearly five years ago, and it had a significant impact on the time management system I use today and on which I based The Focus Course.
I say Meier’s book is a secret because I’ve never heard anyone talk about the book anywhere. (Perhaps it’s the fault of the cover design, which, honestly, isn’t great.)
In his book, Meier identifies 30 pitfalls to productivity. These are common pitfalls that limit your results and cause immense friction and roadblocks to your workflows and systems.
Moreover, these pitfalls can be found in your own individual productivity systems as well as within your teams and even within your whole company.
Of the 30 pitfalls that Meier lists, the five most common are:
Analysis Paralysis: You are constantly waiting to take action until you have more information, call more meetings, get more opinions, etc.
Doing It When You Feel Like It: You wait for motivation and inspiration before you get started, and you lack a routine of doing your most important work on a regular basis.
Not Knowing the Work to Be Done: You lack clarity about things as granular as the next step or as macro as the whole big picture, thus you can’t plan accordingly.
Lack of Boundaries: You allow work to spill over into other areas of your life (weekends / evenings); you push yourself past your limits; you allow urgency to become the dominant factor surrounding your work.
Perfectionism: This bites you before, during, and after a project. Perhaps you don’t even begin because you know you won’t be able to do it just right. Or you never finish because you’re incessantly fiddling and trying to get things just right. Or, once you’ve shipped, you’re beating yourself up over how things could have been better.
Do any of these pitfalls sound familiar to you?
Perhaps you see them at work within your office culture or within your own life. Or both!
For me, numbers 1 and 5 are what I’ve most had to learn to overcome. I also use to suffer from a terrible case of #3, but that has changed completely for me over the years — a story for another time, perhaps.
Here are some related links where we’ve discussed other pitfalls and ways to bolster your productivity:
FYI: I put together all my book notes from Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work and combined those notes with all the key takeaways and highlights from my interview with Cal. If you haven’t already, you can download the in-depth notes here.
I love me some Obsidian, but one of Obsidian’s weak spots has always been it’s Shortcuts support (or lack thereof).
That’s where Actions for Obsidian comes in.
Actions for Obsidian serves as the bridge between Obsidian and Shortcuts on the Mac, resulting in almost native support for Shortcuts actions that allow you to do some pretty neat things with the text you send to Obsidian.
To call Actions for Obsidian an app is a bit of a stretch. It’s a macOS utility that serves as a graphic interface for adding over 30 additional actions to Shortcuts that Obsidian doesn’t support out of the box. It also includes a tutorial for setting up Obsidian to take advantage of them, and gives you a link to an Actions & Workflow Library where you can download some pre-made example Shortcuts workflows to download and use instantly.
When you first launch the “app” you get a window with three options: 1) link your Obsidian vault, 2) open the Shortcuts app to use the actions, and 3) visit the Actions & Workflow Library to download pre-made workflows.
In order to use the new actions, the first thing to need to do is to link Actions for Obsidian with your Obsidian vault.
Click the blue button, and the app walks you through a short wizard that helps you set everything up and make sure it’s all connected.
Once you link your vault, the next step is to go into Obsidian itself and enable a specific plugin that allows Obsidian to receive and act on the requests that will be sent to it from the Shortcuts actions. If you’ve not used community plugins before, it will show you exactly how to enable them first.
Once community plugins are enabled, Actions for Obsidian walks you through installing and enabling the Actions URI plugin needed for the Shortcuts actions to work.
Once everything is configured, Actions for Obsidian will perform a test to see if instructions can be sent to Obsidian (and whether it can also send information back using callback URLs). Click the blue Ask Obsidian to call back button and you should see a confirmation prompt if everything is working correctly.
Once everything is good to go, you can start to use the additional actions by creating and editing shortcuts from inside the Shortcuts app. You can find the additional actions by looking for Actions for Obsidian under the Apps section.
The actions are split into five sections:
Some examples of things you can do with these additional actions are creating your Daily Note using a shortcut to help start your day, adding events to an appointments section of your Daily Note from your calendar, and even getting results from a Dataview table (another very powerful third-party plugin that can query your entire vault and return results in the form of a table).
While this does add a nearly-native level of Shortcuts support to Obsidian, there are some limitations. For example, the additional actions currently only work on macOS. The developer is working on adding support for iOS, but it’s not surprising that there are some additional technical hurdles to be overcome there with iOS sandboxing. So right now you can build Shortcuts and fire them on iOS, but the extra actions will break the moment they need to communicate with your Obsidian vault.
Regardless, I’m thrilled this app exists and find it fascinating that a cross-platform Electron app like Obsidian can offer such extensive support for Shortcuts — with a little help from a utility like Actions for Obsidian.
The distribution model is interesting too, as Actions for Obsidian is free to download on the Mac App Store with an in-app purchase. There are three different price tiers to choose from based on how helpful you find the app, starting at $9 USD and going up to $15 USD.
I think this is a really interesting business model for a really interesting app. I hope it’s successful, and I hope to see others create extendable Shortcuts like this for other popular apps. I know Obsidian is well-suited for this because of the third-party plugin architecture, but I think power users of apps like Notion or Craft would absolutely be willing to pay to have a little more automation power at their fingertips too.
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👋🏼 Hi, I’m Mike Schmitz, and I’m an independent creator.
Like Josh, Matt, and Jeff did previously, today I’m going to share a handful of my favorite productivity apps that are essential for how I work.
Of course, an article about my must-have apps is going to start with Obsidian. 😂
My entire life is in Obsidian. I use it for digital journaling, storing all my notes and ideas, all of my writing projects, even Bible study.
What makes Obsidian so powerful is the plugins. You can basically design your own app with the features that you want. For example, I wrote previously about how I used community plugins to add the essential features I missed from Ulysses into Obsidian, giving me the best of both worlds.
One of the best things about Obsidian is that it sits on top of local Markdown files. So if Obsidian ever disappears (doesn’t seem likely in the near future with the release of 1.0 and the hiring of a new CEO), I can take my Markdown-formatted text files anywhere else.
This is easily my most used (and most loved) productivity app.
Mind mapping is underrated. I use it all the time for brainstorming, thinking through things, breaking down complex projects, and more. I even take notes on the books that I read in mind map format.
And if you’re going to create mind maps, MindNode is the app to use.
It has the best user interface of any mind map app available, and gives you a ton of power while still being incredibly easy to use.
If you are looking for a visual thinking tool for macOS or iOS, you need to check out MindNode.
Keynote is a deceptively powerful app that can do WAY more than just create great presentations.
The auto-align feature makes it a great canvas for making quick designs. Yes, they can be exported as images, but I frequently just use CleanShot X to grab a screenshot and add a quick background before sharing.
It’s also great for making quick animations with the Magic Move transition. Create a couple of slides, start a presentation, and use screen capturing software like ScreenFlow to record the animation as a video.
Don’t write it off just because it’s free and comes with your Mac! In my humble opinion, this is easily the best app Apple has ever made.
I don’t use my iPad mini a lot. But when I do, I’m likely using GoodNotes.
GoodNotes is the app to use if you’re going to do anything with handwritten text on the iPad. It’s also a great tool for sketching or diagramming, and the ability to add PDF templates opens up a host of other uses for this powerful app (like The Focus Course Digital Planner).
GoodNotes is the place that I create anything with an Apple Pencil. I’ve tried other more “professional” apps like Procreate, but GoodNotes is the perfect sweet spot between ease of use and powerful tools. I started sketchnoting in GoodNotes several years ago, and it’s only gotten easier and more fun.
If you do any kind of sketching or diagramming, this is an essential app.
I wrote recently about my experiments in using ChatGPT for productivity and creativity, but my preferred way to access ChatGPT is through a macOS app called MacGPT.
On the tin, MacGPT is a menu bar app that allows you to quickly access ChatGTP, and the quickest way to access the ChatGPT website for using GPT-4 without a GPT-4 API key. But it also has a couple of other modes (which do require an API key) for accessing ChatGPT via a spotlight-style global textfield or even inline in any text editor.
If you’re a heavy ChatGPT user who uses your Mac a lot, check out MacGPT.
The apps listed above are critical for my productivity and creativity workflows. If you took these away, my job gets a lot harder.
But there are a bunch of other apps and utilities that I rely on for my day-to-day work. Here are some of the honorable mentions for apps that are important to me, but not quite essential.
Matt Birchler has convinced me to use Cron as my calendar app. It’s Google-only, but I’ve had countless issues with iCloud calendars, so I’m happy to leave those behind.
The keyboard shortcuts in Cron are top notch. You could probably do everything in Cron without ever taking your hands off the keyboard. But what I really like about it is the built-in scheduling system. Just set some availability on your calendar and Cron gives you a sharable link that people can use to book time on your calendar. It doesn’t have all the features of Calendly, but it’s so easy to use that I find myself using this instead most of the time.
Best of all, it’s completely free. And since the makers of Notion are also behind this app, I’m not worried about this one disappearing any time soon.
Like Matt, I also use CleanShot X all day, every day. It’s a brilliant app.
In addition to letting you make quick edits and share your screenshots to the cloud (so you can share link instead of a file), CleanShot X also makes it easy to capture animated gifs and scrolling screenshots.
But the feature I find myself using the most is the ability to add colorful backgrounds to your screenshots. Built-in macOS screenshots are boring, and CleanShot X makes them a lot more interesting.
At the day job, I had a lot of meetings. And Camo Studio was essential for whenever I wasn’t in my home office to attend them.
For example, I share an office with someone at a coworking space so I can get out of the house once in awhile. I have an external monitor there and can use Continuity Camera, but it’s still fairly limited in my ability to touch up my on-screen appearance. But Camo Studio now works with any of your camera sources, so I can customize the video from my Continuity Camera and get it look almost as good as my setup at home.
If you want good-looking video but don’t want to spend a ton on a dedicated webcam or camera, check out Camo Studio.
For a long time, I was a die-hard Alfred user. But Raycast has become my launcher of choice because of the library of extensions you can use to easily extend the capabilities of the app.
You can get extensions that allow you to add things directly to Obsidian, view events on your calendar in Fantastical, add todos to your task manager in Things, and a lot more. Just search the Raycast Store and find the one you want to use from within the app itself and click Install.
I also like what Raycast is doing with the built-in AI in the Pro plan. And I’ll be really intrigued when they add the promised support for the GPT-4 model.
We’ve written about this a ton before, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Drafts. I use Drafts for quick capture on my iPhone and Apple Watch all the time for small bits of information or as the starting place for content pieces. It’s especially useful when I want to capture an idea while out for a run.
Where I really rely on Drafts though is on the Mac. That’s where I go through everything I’ve captured and either delete things I don’t need or move them to their permanent home (likely Obsidian). Having access to all my Drafts on my Mac (and the actions I use to process them) makes combing through my Drafts inbox a breeze.
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Step 2: Upgrade → Build a productivity system that plays to your strengths (even if you find “systems” annoying).
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We’ve heard from Matt and Josh on which apps they consider irreplaceable for their workflows and productivity, and now it’s my turn to pull back the curtain. These days, a lot of my work happens on a work MacBook Pro that is fairly locked down. The IT-managed operating system presents some challenges when it comes to finding a good productivity balance, and these apps meet my needs on my work device and personal devices too.
I use Todoist for task management. I spend a considerable amount of time on Linux systems, and I absolutely love how Todoist is available on every modern operating system. I’ve used Todoist for years and am quite comfortable with its many strengths and weaknesses. It fits my system and helps me stay productive, and that’s all I ask of my task manager. Since I share several projects with my partner for house chores and shopping lists, I now consider project sharing and collaboration features a necessity for any task manager. Todoist does this flawlessly across all my devices.
1Password is essential for me in the way electricity is essentially to electronics. This password manager has matured so much over the past few years, and I love finding new ways to use it for my own needs or our household. 1Password houses all my username/password and MFA tokens, but also holds security keys for logging into remote servers as an additional level of protection for those assets. Like Todoist, 1Password has excellent support for Linux (and even the command line!), and I encourage anyone that uses SSH to check out 1Password’s SSH key functionality.
Online shopping is such a large part of our world, and the risk of credit card information being leaked or stolen is at an all time high. Cancelling a credit card is a huge hassle, so we use Privacy whenever possible to reduce that risk. Privacy is a service that 1) securely connects to your bank account for funding and 2) allows you to create credit card information for paying for stuff online. The beauty of this is that you can create a credit card number for each retailer you shop with. Similar to passwords, using different information for every retailer you shop with significantly reduces your exposure if someone steals that information. On top of creating credit card numbers that are locked to specific retailers, you can also create cards that automatically close after one use, automatically limit the max spending amount on a weekly/monthly/yearly basis. This is a service that I recommend to everyone I meet. This service is fantastic on its own, but they’ve partnered with 1Password recently so that you can create unique Privacy card numbers on checkout forms straight from 1Password. This saves you the step of logging into Privacy and creating a new card.
I’ve spent a couple years getting away from Gmail, and I chose Fastmail as my email provider. I love Fastmail because I know that I’m paying for a straight-forward, reliable service instead of providing Google with advertising data. After two years, I’m really happy with how rock-solid and fast Fastmail’s email, calendar, and contacts platform is. It also simplifies my life by making it easy to use custom domains for email, as well as setting a number of aliases for different purposes. In fact, Fastmail also partnered with 1Password so that you can create unique email aliases straight from 1Password when creating a new account online. It’s only a few clicks in Fastmail, but having it automatically populate in the form from the 1Password extension is so useful.
I was a customer of 1Password, Fastmail, and Privacy long before they were in business together, and I’m legitimately happy to see how they work together to make security and privacy easy. Their integrations certainly make a compelling argument to use them if you don’t want to use Gmail or iCloud for email.
Whether it’s notes for work, personal knowledge blurbs, recipes, writing, or editing, I use Obsidian to keep it all organized. This Swiss-knife text tool is great at what it does, and it doesn’t hurt that it also has apps that work on any platform you use. I love that this app can be a simple, minimal text editing app when that’s what I need, but it’s also a powerful organization tool for all the information that I decide to keep around.
Alfred is my launcher of choice on macOS, and I quickly forget that it’s not actually part of macOS due to how integral it is to how I use a Mac. It’s fantastic for quickly launching apps and finding files, but I use it quite a bit for quick calculations and the one-off script run. But, the other major thing I use Alfred for is clipboard management. There are other dedicated clipboard managers out there, but I’ve always used Alfred for this. It does what I need, and it’s second-nature at this point.
I used TextExpander for the longest time as a snippet tool, but I moved to Espanso shortly after it came out several years ago. Espanso is open-source and community driven, and also (you guessed it) works on all operating systems. Instead of a GUI tool for setting up snippets and combinations, Espanso relies on a configuration text file, which is something I’ve come to appreciate from my time on Linux. Adding a snippet or making a small adjustment is quick and easy, and keeping it in sync is easy enough with a file sync tool.
Managing windows can be a headache, and I don’t have any interest in clicking and dragging window borders around to set up the perfect layout. Josh mentioned the excellent Magnet in his list of apps, and I love that app for bringing easy window snapping/sizing controls to macOS. It’s the perfect gateway drug to what I’ve used for years now on my Mac: Amethyst. Think of Amethyst as an automatic version of Magnet. Instead of pressing a shortcut key to make a window snap to a certain area, Amethyst automatically tiles all windows on your desktop as you open and close different things. This is a somewhat common thing on Linux, and I’m a big fan of tiling window management systems. Amethyst gives me the tiling window experience on macOS. If you’re interested in an even more true-to-form window manager for macOS, check out yabai. I prefer yabai, but it isn’t compatible with my IT-managed MacBook Pro.
I’ve written about Meeter Pro before, and I’m still using it today. This is a great menu bar utility that pops up a notification that takes you to the virtual meeting in the calendar invite. This is definitely a “does one thing well” utility, and I really miss it if I don’t have it on my work computer. When it’s time for a meeting to start, Meeter Pro pops up a notification, and all I have to do is click the notification to launch the meeting — Meeter knows which app to open based on the meeting link. Simple but efficient!
Finally, I use Bartender to keep my menu bar tidy. I love how this little utility has grown over the years. It keeps things hidden unless I need to see them, and even when I need to find something that Bartender has hidden, it’s just a simple click away under the Bartender menu. This is truly one of the apps that I forget I have installed until I set up a new computer and wonder why it looks so cluttered.
I’m definitely at a point in my life now where I’m less inclined to try out new apps or tools just because they’re new. I’ve found a really good combination of apps that meet my needs and make me more efficient. I don’t see a reason to go looking for something else unless the current apps stop working for me. I’m really enjoying the innovation and collaboration I’m seeing between companies like 1Password, Fastmail, and Privacy, and I want to see more of that in the industry. Making online privacy and security so easy and approachable is a good thing!
If your to-do list overfloweth and you have multiple areas of life to manage, it’s time to get a system that actually works.
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Step 2: Upgrade → Build a productivity system that plays to your strengths (even if you find “systems” annoying).
Step 3: Nurture → Make your system stick. Create a flywheel that keeps you focused on what matters most day after day.
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"I love the poorly educated," Donald Trump said in 2016 after polls showed that most of his support came from people who did not attend college. And so does Rudy Giuliani, or so he says on his Common (non)Sense podcast, desperately hoping to charm that same faction of Trump's MAGA base. — Read the rest
As a chronic maximizer, here are a few reminders that I need from time to time.
Having breathing room — a little bit left over — is perfectly acceptable. In fact, it’s preferred.
In a nut, I’d rather go big on a few really special things by doing less on everything else.
Way, way back when, Shawn showed off one of his cool tricks for spurring the creative juices each morning. Rather than sitting down cold turkey at the computer to begin work for the day, Shawn would leave a note right in front of his keyboard the prior evening outlining the next step, the next idea, or the next topic to write. Rather than sitting down to chaos, the note provided a clear path forward for Shawn.
This was my first introduction to a “startup” routine.
Honestly, the introduction didn’t root — I only developed a startup routine about five or six months ago.
I had no idea what I was missing. Since adopting my own startup routine, I’ve never felt so in control. I wake up in the morning with a new shot of confidence and a spurt of energy because I know what’s coming. I know what I’m in for. Less reaction. More action.
I can point the rooting of this startup routine to the discovery of Sunsama. Sunsama has done a number of things for my life in recent months. The app has rooted this startup routine and is developing a shutdown routine. The app helps me come to grips with an immense workload and an acceptance of my limits each day. The app helps track my time, carve out moments of personal time, and ensure my actions are aligned with my objectives each week. Sunsama has quickly become one of the most fundamental apps in my workflow.
This startup routine, though? It’s this startup routine in Sunsama which has altered how I work.
Each morning, Sunsama presents you with the chance to plan out your day. The planning process takes no more than 10 minutes and has 3 or 4 steps, which I’ll use my own terms to describe:
Off the top, I noted Sunsama presents you with this planning process first thing in the morning. However, you can pre-plan a day the night before if you’d like. There’s something quite magical about planning your day the night before — you can go to bed with a ton of confidence knowing you have the next day completely under control.
This will be one of the more subjective areas of any startup routine. Here’s how I tend to structure my day.
First, context: I have two or three goals in mind for each day:
With those goals in mind, I generally group all my messaging and administrative tasks first thing in the morning. These sorts of tasks usually take the least amount of brain power, so they hit a time of day where my brain isn’t at its peak performance.
The six hours of billable time is broken apart between each of my best focus times of day: the later morning, later afternoon, and later evening. Sometimes I’ll use that first block of focused time to prepare for the second block. Sometimes I use the last focused block of my day to prepare for the next day’s first focus block. However it ends up being structured, my most important work falls into these three time blocks.
Finally, I always add my personal time into the calendar first before building out the rest of my day in Sunsama. “Wake, prep, and arrive” gives me some time to wakeup, get ready for the day, and arrive at the office. This also includes early morning coffee time with colleagues at the office. “Lunch” gives me a full hour of personal time mid-day (though I never take a full hour), but this ensures I don’t book anything important during the hour and gives me a full hour to check-in with my family. And no matter what, I have a block of “Free time” added to every day — usually at the end of the day — to allow for some decompression.
This decompression time is a great time to use Sunsama’s shutdown features.
For my day, the startup routine is far more important than the shutdown routine. At least at this point. Perhaps, in the same way the startup routine took awhile to root itself, the shutdown routine will eventually become more important to me.
This isn’t to say Sunsama does a poor job handling the shutdown routine. In fact, if you use Sunsama to the full extent of its capabilities, your shutdown routine will physically force you to stop working for the day.
Depending on when you set your shutdown routine to start, Sunsama will notify you when it’s time to start winding down your day. Once wind down is done, Sunsama will provide you with a review of your day — a complete breakdown of your work hours, personal hours, all the tasks you completed in the day and the calendar events you worked through. You can use this time to align your work with your weekly objectives (more on that another day) and to ensure you achieved what you wanted to achieve in the day.
The final step in Sunsama’s shutdown routine is the opportunity to post a quick blurb to Slack. This is one of the team areas of Sunsama which I find to be arbitrary and less useful in practice. But if you do you use Sunsama as part of a team, you can notify everyone of how your day went as part of this shutdown routine.
This shutdown routine and review period takes no more than two minutes to complete (five minutes if you want to align everything with your weekly objectives) and ends with a giant “Done for the day” notifier, easing the process of closing your computer and physically shutting down for the day.
More often than not at this point in time, I find myself missing this review step. 6:00PM rolls around, I have supper with my family, I enter into another focused period later in the evening, and shutdown routine triggers at 9:00PM with no Josh in sight. As a result, I often end up reviewing the prior day right before I plan my day the next morning.
In some ways though, reviewing your day the next morning is kind of like leaving yourself “The Note” — if you provide yourself a trigger for where you left off the prior day, you may more easily figure out where you want to start your next day.
I have never felt so in control of my day as I do when I use Sunsama’s startup routine. When Sunsama was still new in my life, I often chose to plan my next day in the evening prior, which led to a sense of calm when I went to bed that I had never experienced before. It was fascinating — in a way, I felt like Superman, such that there was nothing the coming day could throw at me that I couldn’t handle.
Time has worn on and that startup routine has shifted to the earlier morning, if only because I find myself working later into the evening. The last thing I want to do right now at the end of the day is to think about more work the next day.
But it’s this startup routine which ensures I have structure in each day, ensures I meet or exceed my billable goal targets for each day, and ensures I stay up to date with colleagues and clients at least once a day.
Perhaps it’s because my life and work is more consistent now than it was when Shawn wrote “The Note” in 2015, or perhaps I’m just now a new man (!), but I’m grateful this startup routine in Sunsama has taken root as seamlessly as it has these last few months.
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Science is the reason you aren't reading this by firelight nestled cozily under a rock somewhere however, its practice significantly predates its formalization by Galileo in the 16th century. Among its earliest adherents — even before pioneering efforts of Aristotle — was Animaxander, the Greek philosopher credited with first arguing that the Earth exists within a void, not atop a giant turtle shell. His other revolutionary notions include, "hey, maybe animals evolved from other, earlier animals?" and "the gods aren't angry, that's just thunder."
While Animaxander isn't often mentioned alongside the later greats of Greek philosophy, his influence on the scientific method cannot be denied, argues NYT bestselling author, Carlo Rovelli, in his latest book, Animaxander and the Birth of Science, out now from Riverhead Books. In in, Rovelli celebrates Animaxander, not necessarily for his scientific acumen but for his radical scientific thinking — specifically his talent for shrugging off conventional notion to glimpse at the physical underpinnings of the natural world. In the excerpt below, Rovelli, whom astute readers will remember from last year's There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness, illustrates how even the works of intellectual titans like Einstein and Heisenberg can and inevitably are found lacking in their explanation of natural phenomena — in just the same way that those works themselves decimated the collective understanding of cosmological law under 19th century Newtonian physics.
Excerpted from Animaxander and the Birth of Science. Copyright © 2023 by Carlo Rovelli. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Did science begin with Anaximander? The question is poorly put. It depends on what we mean by “science,” a generic term. Depending on whether we give it a broad or a narrow meaning, we can say that science began with Newton, Galileo, Archimedes, Hipparchus, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, or Anaximander — or with an astronomer in Babylonia whose name we don’t know, or with the first primate who managed to teach her offspring what she herself had learned, or with Eve, as in the quotation that opens this chapter. Historically or symbolically, each of these moments marks humanity’s acquisition of a new, crucial tool for the growth of knowledge.
If by “science” we mean research based on systematic experimental activities, then it began more or less with Galileo. If we mean a collection of quantitative observations and theoretical/mathematical models that can order these observations and give accurate predictions, then the astronomy of Hipparchus and Ptolemy is science. Emphasizing one particular starting point, as I have done with Anaximander, means focusing on a specific aspect of the way we acquire knowledge. It means highlighting specific characteristics of science and thus, implicitly, reflecting on what science is, what the search for knowledge is, and how it works.
What is scientific thinking? What are its limits? What is the reason for its strength? What does it really teach us? What are its characteristics, and how does it compare with other forms of knowledge?
These questions shaped my reflections on Anaximander in preceding chapters. In discussing how Anaximander paved the way for scientific knowledge, I highlighted a certain number of aspects of science itself. Now I shall make these observations more explicit.
A lively debate on the nature of scientific knowledge has taken place during the last century. The work of philosophers of science such as Carnap and Bachelard, Popper and Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Quine, van Fraassen, and many others has transformed our understanding of what constitutes scientific activity. To some extent, this reflection was a reaction to a shock: the unexpected collapse of Newtonian physics at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the nineteenth century, a common joke was that Isaac New‐ ton had been not only one of the most intelligent men in human history, but also the luckiest, because there is only one collection of fundamental natural laws, and Newton had had the good fortune to be the one to discover them. Today we can’t help but smile at this notion, because it reveals a serious epistemological error on the part of nineteenth-century thinkers: the idea that good scientific theories are definitive and remain valid until the end of time.
The twentieth century swept away this facile illusion. Highly accurate experiments showed that Newton’s theory is mistaken in a very precise sense. The planet Mercury, for example, does not move following Newtonian laws. Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and their colleagues discovered a new collection of fundamental laws — general relativity and quantum mechanics — that replace Newton’s laws and work well in the domains where Newton’s theory breaks down, such as accounting for Mercury’s orbit, or the behavior of electrons in atoms.
Once burned, twice shy: few people today believe that we now possess definitive scientific laws. It is generally expected that one day Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s laws will show their limits as well, and will be replaced by better ones. In fact, the limits of Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s theories are already emerging. There are subtle incompatibilities between Einstein’s theory and Heisenberg’s, which make it unreasonable to suppose that we have identified the final, definitive laws of the universe. As a result, research goes on. My own work in theoretical physics is precisely the search for laws that might combine these two theories.
Now, the essential point here is that Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s theories are not minor corrections to Newton’s. The differences go far beyond an adjusted equation, a tidying up, the addition or replacement of a formula. Rather, these new theories constitute a radical rethinking of the world. Newton saw the world as a vast empty space where “particles” move about like pebbles. Einstein understands that such supposedly empty space is in fact a kind of storm-tossed sea. It can fold in on itself, curve, and even (in the case of black holes) shatter. No one had seriously contemplated this possibility before. For his part, Heisenberg understands that Newton’s “particles” are not particles at all but bizarre hybrids of particles and waves that run over Faraday lines’ webs. In short, over the course of the twentieth century, the world was found to be profoundly different from the way Newton imagined it.
On the one hand, these discoveries confirmed the cognitive strength of science. Like Newton’s and Maxwell’s theories in their day, these discoveries led quickly to an astonishing development of new technologies that once again radically changed human society. The insights of Faraday and Maxwell brought about radio and communications technology. Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s led to computers, information technology, atomic energy, and countless other technological advances that have changed our lives.
But on the other hand, the realization that Newton’s picture of the world was false is disconcerting. After Newton, we thought we had understood once and for all the basic structure and functioning of the physical world. We were wrong. The theories of Einstein and Heisenberg themselves will one day likely be proved false. Does this mean that the understanding of the world offered by science cannot be trusted, not even for our best science? What, then, do we really know about the world? What does science teach us about the world?
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-anaximander-carlo-rovelli-riverhead-books-143052774.html?src=rss
Newton's cradle, illustration
Illustration of a Newton's cradle.
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Researchers understand the structure of brains and have mapped them out in some detail, but they still don't know exactly how they process data — for that, a detailed "circuit map" of the brain is needed.
Now, scientists have created just such a map for the most advanced creature yet: a fruit fly larva. Called a connectome, it diagrams the insect's 3016 neurons and 548,000 synapses, Neuroscience News has reported. The map will help researchers study better understand how the brains of both insects and animals control behavior, learning, body functions and more. The work may even inspired improved AI networks.
"Up until this point, we’ve not seen the structure of any brain except of the roundworm C. elegans, the tadpole of a low chordate, and the larva of a marine annelid, all of which have several hundred neurons," said professor Marta Zlatic from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. "This means neuroscience has been mostly operating without circuit maps. Without knowing the structure of a brain, we’re guessing on the way computations are implemented. But now, we can start gaining a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works."
To build the map, the team scanned thousands of slices from the larva's brain with an electron microscope, then integrated those into a detailed map, annotating all the neural connections. From there, they used computational tools to identify likely information flow pathways and types of "circuit motifs" in the insect's brain. They even noticed that some structural features closely resembled state-of-the-art deep learning architecture.
Scientists have made detailed maps of the brain of a fruit fly, which is far more complex than a fruit fly larva. However, these maps don't include all the detailed connections required to have a true circuit map of their brains.
As a next step, the team will investigate the structures used for behavioural functions like learning and decision making, and examine connectome activity while the insect does specific activities. And while a fruit fly larva is a simple insect, the researchers expect to see similar patterns in other animals. "In the same way that genes are conserved across the animal kingdom, I think that the basic circuit motifs that implement these fundamental behaviours will also be conserved," said Zlatic.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/scientists-create-the-most-complex-map-yet-of-an-insect-brains-wiring-085600210.html?src=rss
Neuron system
System of neurons with glowing connections on black background
There was a time when movies based on video games tried to distance themselves from their source material. "This ain't no game," bragged the poster for the 1993's live-action Super Mario Bros. film. Times have changed: The final trailer for The Super Mario Bros. Movie by Illumination leans hard into its origins. This is absolutely a game, it says. See? Here's a scene that looks like New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, and another one that looks just like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
If you were hoping to hear more of Chris Pratt's Mario voice, you won't find much new here — but the final trailer does give viewers a clear look at the tone the movie is going for. We watch Bowser list off an army of familiar video game enemies. We watch Mario and Donkey Kong use power mushrooms and fire flowers as they run through a training course that looks like a traditional Mario level. We see Mario and Peach race through a brightly rendered Rainbow Road. It looks familiar. It looks fun. And it looks like a game, but with better graphics.
That's no surprise. According to directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, Illumination has worked closely with Nintendo to make sure the film feels right. The directors also say that Illumination has improved its lighting and rendering technology to help push Super Mario Bros. Movie to the next level "beyond anything Illumination has ever done."
As for that Mario voice? You'll finally be able to hear the full performance when the film hits theaters next month. The Super Mario Bros. Moviereleases on April 5, 2023.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-final-trailer-for-the-super-mario-bros-movie-looks-more-like-a-game-than-ever-231926362.html?src=rss
Super Mario Bros. Movie
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
There's a new op-ed in The New York Times from Noam Chomsky and two of his academic colleagues — Dr. Ian Roberts, a linguistics professor at University of Cambridge, and Dr. Jeffrey Watumull, a philosopher who is also the director of artificial intelligence at a tech company. — Read the rest
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