Finn Schubert

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Rethinking Systems

Who invented habit tracking?

An informal continuation of Remember when habits were bad? I’m still surprised that I can’t find much on google regarding how habit tracking was invented. It seems like the kind of thing someone would pitch a deep dive into, especially given how easy it is to find articles

Casual experiments in productivity

I don’t know what I believe anymore about getting things done. I’m writing this while my toddler pushes trucks around on the floor, so I have one eye on him and an awareness that I don’t know how long I’ll have to work on this before

“What would it mean to be done for the day?”

Just as I was going to resign myself to not writing this evening (a huge disappointment, as I’m surprisingly susceptible to the smiley faces in this low-key habit tracker, I opened an email about being done for the day from Oliver Burkeman (author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management

“The detritus of our validation-seeking”

Tara McMullin’s post on overcommitting and the validation spiral was exactly what I needed to read today. She makes wonderful use of simple diagrams to show how we begin to overcommit, and then we don’t have enough resources to fully meet our existing commitments (disappointing ourselves and others)

Remember when “habits” were bad?

My first habit tracker app was called HabitBull and I think it was on my very first smartphone. It had a grid of habits, and you could select how often you intended to do them. It didn’t have to be daily, it could be three times a week, or

Duly Noted by Jorge Arango

I recently finished Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes, by Jorge Arango, an experienced information architect. (I spent most of the book drooling over Arango’s information processing approach, which uses several Mac-only tools, like DEVONthink and Tinderbox. Will my next computer be a Mac?) In some ways,

The false romance of knowledge management systems

All the smart people had a particular way that they processed and synthesized information, so I figured I should get one too. Maybe it started with Sarah Chappell’s series on how she researches. Maybe Tara McMullin had posted something similar about her process. Maybe I vaguely dreamed of having