A couple weeks ago I suggested repeating your message twenty one times for it to sink in. That might seem excessive, but my old manager Viacheslav Kovalevskyi has used this tactic to get senior leaders at Google to consider his proposals.

He shares his tactics in the The Nonintuitive Bits podcast, episode 31

And now your nuggets for the week:

  1. Write down what you did at work. It pays at perf time.
  2. Focus on a few things to get anything done
  3. Your ideas are limited by where you express them

#1 Write down what you did at work

How can I expect my manager to remember everything I did all year when I barely remember what I did last week?

Andrew Yu suggests writing a quick email to your manager each week with a sentence on what you did, what you're going to do, and any problems you're running into.

It makes a huge difference

What to put in your message to your manager

#2 Focus or flounder

If focus is critical when a few people can share the load

What happens when you only have yourself?

The benefit of focus, excerpt from

#3 The medium limits the message

My friend Najla had an epiphany: The internet freed communication from the limits of transportation

And the idea is broader than that, there are numerous ways in which knowledge has been limited by the medium it was stored on:

  • Books were limited by the speed a scribe could copy them at.This limitation was removed by a printing press.
  • Equations were limited to those who could understand what was written on the paper. Now they're available to anyone who can click buttons to run a simulation.
  • ML teaches computers to understand information so complex that humans can only understand it at an intuitive level.

And we're not done yet.

Ideas are still limited by the limits of the software they're expressed in.

Licklider noticed this potential half a century ago:

Licklider's insight about information

New note taking tools like Roam are removing some of those limits, but there's still a lot left to be decoupled.

What tools have have you discovered that help you think? Reply back and let me know! I'll share them in next week's newsletter.

Till next week

--Zain