AYOE 12 / A Season of Curiosity and Growth
OMG you guys!
I did not expect when I chose this month’s experiment that I’d get the urge to blow everything up, but here we are.
You may have noticed that things looks a little different around here (oh how observant you are!) and that’s because I did a little sprucing up.
Also, and this is exciting news, I MADE A TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO TWITTER this week and it’s been an absolute blast to catch up with all my tweeps (hi to all my tweeps reading this! 👋🏼)
Obviously, I’ve replied more than I’ve tweeted because that’s how I roll, but I did make sure to fit in a tweet reminiscing about the good old days of social media (vaguebooking anyone? 😂) since our modern social media landscape looks very different.
In fact, my exact response to someone else was, “It feels like stumbling into a really boring but aggressive marketplace on accident.”
But thankfully all it took to clean up my feed and fill it with awesome people sharing interesting things was a little bit of engagement with said people and voilà.
Ok now on to the update…
May Experiment Progress
It’s been a mixed bag of results so far, honestly.
I tested out Bear for a little more than a week and the writing experience is pretty good, but it just didn’t feel right for me. The folders and tags and all the sidebar panels kept distracting me.
Plus I really felt like my notes were all separate and kind of siloed. It for sure could just be user error, but the point is it didn’t feel right so I moved on.
I’ve used Reflect in the past, but I stopped when I started testing out Tana. I still love supertags in Tana, but I have such trouble using a tool that isn’t polished and aesthetic, and Tana looks like a backend tool.
Good aesthetics equal more creativity for me.
I don’t know why, I just know it’s true. And Reflect is SEXY.
The long scrolling daily notes page 😍, the calendar, the calendar events listed for the day, the pinned notes, the simple task manager that scoops up tasks added to any note and gives me a central list (I use a separate task management system, but this helps me get them out of Reflect easily)!
It’s safe to say I’m a little bit in love with Reflect. The writing experience is so so good.
My only trouble in regards to the whole system is that it’s not as good for seeing connections between ideas as they grow and evolve. So I plan to move some of my writing and ideas over to Notion to keep track of atomic ideas, and then content ideas, but I haven’t exactly found the right workflow and timing.
So it’s a work in progress. 😬 And I’m really not sure I’ll solve this problem entirely this month, but it’s still been worthwhile to focus on it.
2 others things I’ve noticed:
Snipd is a needlessly complicated tool. I tried listening to a couple podcasts using it and the snip function is not good. I ended up with a bunch of snips that had overlapping parts of the transcript so I had no idea what I was actually trying to highlight. It’s a great idea, but the execution isn’t great - at least for me.
I started using Glasp and am going to see if it can help me cut down on things I save to Readwise Reader (and then don’t go back and read 😂) With Glasp I can just skim/read whatever it is right then and save any highlights and notes and move on with my life. PLUS their YouTube transcript tool is FANTASTIC. I read pretty fast and my reading comprehension is better than listening or watching so I’m excited to keep testing that feature.
The AYOE to UC Substack Update
If you’ve been here for awhile you know we started out on Ghost and then moved AYOE here to Substack.
In my reading/writing/thinking time this month I’ve realized there are more things I want to explore and share than just about my monthly experiments. I can do some of that on Twitter, but I’m, ahem…a bit verbose and those character limits are brutal, y’all. 😂
My solution? Make space here where I’m already writing you updates.
When I made my triumphant return to Twitter I decided to give my handle a refresh and I just extended that over to Substack. You’ll still get my AYOE updates plus I’ll share anything else that’s sparking my curiosity (hopefully you don’t get sick of me! 😅)
So there you have it. The first edition of Unfiltered Curiosity is in the books. I’m excited to see where it goes next!
If you’re doing an experiment this month OR learning something cool, hit reply or leave a comment and let me know. I LOVE when you guys reach out because then I don’t just feel like I’m blabbing on and on about myself.
Happy Almost Summer!
xoxo - Nic ✌️