🍪 #6 - Keeping up with information overload
Saving goodbye to Day One as my journal app and how to generate your 3D avatar
Hi,
and welcome again to Little Bites, my weekly bite on productivity, apps, tech, …
I hope you had a good weekend and first part of the week!
This week I would like to talk about how I manage to keep up with all information, a reflection on my journaling journey and creating your own 3D avatar.
Happy reading,
Steven
Reading time: 6 minutes to chew through.
📰 Keeping up with information overload
🏷️ Apps
Keeping up with tech and regular news is difficult. Everything is moving so fast and new sources of information are launched every day. I had my favourite bookmarks and Twitter but didn’t feel I was on top of things.
Earlier this year I stumbled on Artifact, from the creators of Instagram. An app that is designed to provide you with personalized news. While news-wise it is more tailored to Global and US topics, Artifact has become my go-to source for tech-related topics.
One is because of the curation of tech news and the fact you can quickly chew through them via AI summaries, but also since users can post recommendations of articles. And the AI is very good at recommending posts for me to check.
This feature has only been live for a few months, but in checking posts, I have already found very good app recommendations or discovered new ways to use my devices.
One of these recommendations was about using RSS feeds to stay on top of all information.
In case you’re not aware of what RSS means.
An RSS feed is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. You subscribe to a “feed” and via an RSS reader, you see all updated articles without the need to go to any website.
I’ve been using RSS feeds for some years, but stopped due to information overload as I was subscribed to too many feeds and didn’t have a system in place to manage them.
Following some Artifact recommendations I revisited the topic of RSS and started with Feedly, which I used in the past. However, while a good RSS reader, I felt it had too many “features” for my use case and it still required me to visit the website if I wanted to read the full article.
Next, I tried Reeder, and while Mac/iOS only and premium (4.99$ iOS - 9.99$ Mac), it does feel like the right tool for me.
First of all, it’s very minimal without too many bells and whistles, provides an easy way of organization, but most importantly, it’s able to get the full article (even from my paid news website) without leaving the app.
To me, that is a big advantage.
On top, I’ve created an iOS shortcut that I can invoke from within the app to get a summary of the article.
This combo of Artifact and Reeder is allowing me to stay on top of what matters to me without feeling information overload.
It’s 2023 (almost 2024) and yet with all the technology available, I feel that RSS is still extremely relevant.
What is your take on this? How do you keep up with information?
Are you using an RSS reader?
👋 Saying goodbye to Day One as my journal app
🏷️ Apps
My first experience with journalling was 4 years ago when I was hospitalized due to chickenpox where I went from fully immobilised through recovery treatment to fully walking again. This was a very emotional and impactful period so I decided to log my feelings and observations.
I did not really dig into what app to use, I just went for Day One.
14 days later I was fully healthy again, and with that, my journal habit also died.
About 1.5 years later, I was looking for a way to organize my work and notes and stumbled upon terms like “PARA” (from Tiago Forte) and “second brain”, pulling me into the PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) rabbit hole and on a journey of finding the best app for that (more in a later Bite). With this, I also saw the benefits of journaling and started to log each day again. This provided clarity and helped me create my second brain with knowledge I could easily turn to.
Following a Twitter post, Day One popped onto my radar again and having a great experience before, made me reconsider using it. It didn’t take long before I was logging all events for each and every day. I even went for the premium version to have multiple journals, and device syncing so I could start on the web and finish on my phone, but more importantly, I did it so I could store as many photos and videos with an entry as I wanted.
But I also kept adding information into my second brain. And one thing I did not realise was that I was putting some “fatigue” in my journaling experience. I was often copy-pasting from one to the other and even felt less focused on doing the exercise of writing down my thoughts and knowledge.
Recently, I went for an overhaul of how I use my iPhone via focus modes which was a major breakthrough and made me reconsider the apps I have and why I was using them.
This exercise also made me realise that while Day One is probably one of the best journal apps on iOS/Mac, I rather have everything captured in one system.
And that is why I chose my note-taking app over Day One, as that is where already all my knowledge is stored. Even more so, all my notes are available offline and not locked into an application, so whenever needed, I can just move them or use them with another tool.
In summary, your time is valuable. Always reconsider why you’re doing things. Optimise and don’t just keep doing things because you’ve been doing them before.
Only do what you feel is important and provides you with the best outcome for your time and effort.
🥸 Create your own 3D avatar
Following Twitter (sorry, I refuse to call it X), I see a lot of tweets pass by on AI, prompting and image generation, and while they are nice, many are promotional and often locked behind a premium license.
However, this one from Microsoft caught my eye, advertising the ability of image generation within their free tool Microsoft Designer.
Have a look and try it for yourself.
All you need is a Microsoft account and you’re ready to go.
https://twitter.com/yerawizardcat/status/1728959765588672755?s=12&t=e9qZcjTyLSliFr0WOHHnPQ
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