Do you use keyboard shortcuts?

If you do, I’d love to know what your favorite app with keyboard shortcuts is...

Reducing the Pain of Context-Switching 🔀

Context switching is a huge pain as both a dev & dev advocate and makes it hard to be creative!

Three things that help:

📥 Centralize your capture
🤔 Review regularly
🤖 Automate where you can

Let's dig into each of these!

📥 Centralize your capture

"Cognitive setup" is the big drain of context-switching. Try @fortelabs' "slow burns 🔥 vs heavy lifts 🏋️‍♂️".

Trade 1 big block of cognitive setup + creative work for short sessions that keep the project context fresh. More:

First "slow burn" strategy: centralize where you capture ideas, take notes, & track project status. You might gather:

- Links to relevant docs or websites
- Ideas
- Notes or caveats
- Dated status updates

You can put these in physical journals, 1 app, or multiple apps.

For me, no 1 app can do everything so I use:

- @NotionHQ for status updates
- @draftsapp for jotting down ideas/notes to categorize later (not having to think about where to put an idea as you're having it is 💯)
- @obsdmd for archives/notes/research ("knowledge management")

You can go really deep into knowledge management; just google "Zettelkasten" and you'll see what I mean. If you want to check out Obsidian for yourself, here's a great intro tutorial:

I decided to stop lurking & take Twitter seriously around 6 months ago.

Grateful for a place to share ideas & to have grown from 900s to 7.1k since then.

Learned a lot about Twitter's algorithms over this period.

Sharing 1 tip to grow your Twitter per every 2 likes 📈 🐦

All your reach on social media is dependent on Network effects.

If you're below < 2k followers most of your tweets should be helpful replies to other larger accounts.

Don't be a "reply guy" tho. The audience of a large account can tell & the large account holder my block u.

When you borrow reach from a large account & someone clicks on your profile you should ->

Specify why people should follow you in your bio.
Give people a reason to follow you.

Titles & Social proof do help, unfortunately.

Good Format:
I Tweet About / Explore X
I Do Y
I Am Z

Your Pinned Tweet is the next possible point of converting someone into a follower.

Ideally, your pinned tweet should have a lot of social proof (likes) & summarize the essence of your bio & expand as a thread.

This is where you start to have an umbrella for your brand.

Each tweet you make should add value.

It should either:
1. Educate
2. Inspire
3. Entertain
4. Connect
5. Dispute

10 Excel Formulas To 10x Your Productivity:

You have a table of cookie sales and have to answer:

• Who sold least / most cookies by month
• Who are the top 25% / bottom 25%
• Who has the most winning months
• Who has the most losing months
• Who sold the most cookies
• How is each girl trending

Let's dive in.

• Format & shortcuts

Before you start, format your worksheet and lay out what you want to build.

Shortcuts used:

• Ctrl + space bar = Insert Column
• Shift + space bar = Insert Row
• Ctrl + shift + + = Insert
• Ctrl + R = Fill Right
• =Sum(G8:G17)

• Min and Max

Min and Max are helpful when working with large data sets.

Min returns the lowest value in a series of data.

Max returns the highest value in a series of data.

Min Formula: =Min(number1, number2...)

Max Formula: =Max(number1, number2...)

• Concatenate

Concatenate will bring strings of data together.

When you want to combine a first and last name into a single cell, it's your tool.

The formula is:

=concatenate(text1, text2, text3)

Remember to add a " " between the first and second name as text2

1/ Productivity tip: when I keep procrastinating on something I often trick myself by saying, "ok just work on it for the next 20 minutes" or some short period of time, "and then you can chill/relax guilt free" and give myself some treat (sugar, netflix, etc)

2/ Usually at the 20 minute mark (sometimes I set a timer) I'm so engrossed in what I'm doing that I don't want want to stop and end up working on it for the next hour or two. But getting started seems to be the hardest part.

3/ Key to this: you have to actually be ok with stopping after 20 minutes and being guilt free if that's how you feel. So it's not a trick, i have the option every time, I just often don't want to use it once i'm in the zone.

I increasingly believe that the only successful approach to productivity is treating yourself like an addict

If you want to stop drinking alcohol, don't keep it in the house 🙅

Here's how I keep myself productive:

1. Clean Out The Cupboards 📱

I use iOS Screen Time to block all social media, news, and yes, EMAIL, from my phone.

I also remove the ability to install new apps.

My wife set the code, so I don't have any easy way to get around it.

2. Add Guiderails 🚆

On my Mac, I have an automation that quits all apps each morning before I get to work and pulls up OmniFocus on the screen, so it's always the first thing I see when I open my computer and can't go down a rabbit trail.

3. Reduce Dopamine Hits 🥱

I use to spend my entire day in my inbox.

As I'd send emails, new ones would stream in constantly, and before I'd know it I'd spent 4-5 hours just responding to emails instead of moving important projects or individual work forward.

I setup @Mailman_HQ, a Gmail plug-in @mohitmamoria and I built, to only deliver email once in the morning and once in the early afternoon, and to automatically batch any emails from anyone I hadn't emailed with before at 7AM...