A feature of human function too often offloaded to the subconscious mind.

People everywhere trying to make decisions and solve their problems. Travelling through the same highways in their head with hopes of getting to new destinations. But constantly being stalled by their mental traffic. Painstakingly inching their way toward their desired outcomes.

Little do they seem to realize the plethora of pathways they have available to them. And the variety of vehicles at their disposal.

A sad little mortal trudging along for hours in their toy car when they could’ve chosen to cruise over all mental hurdles with a juiced-up jetpack.

You, my dear reader, are going to be riding on that jetpack today. Or if you’d prefer, I can fit you with a custom-made squirrel suit? Or a submarine, if that’s more to your liking?

You might’ve heard about some types of specialized thinking before. Whether it’s design thinking, or systems thinking, or product thinking.

Those are the shortcuts that can fast-track your thought processes. And there are so many more that you don’t even know about.

In this post, I map out three levels of thinking styles, so you can start on your path toward genius-level outcomes today.

Level 1: The Terrains (Finding concepts)

In the realm of thought, a concept is literally everything.

A tree is a concept. A tree as a living thing is a concept. A tree as decorative is a concept. A tree as colourful, as green, as tall, as thin, as life-sustaining, as rooted, as… you get the point. Any idea that you have about a tree is a concept and ideas can be found everywhere. Which is especially helpful since they are the building blocks of thought.

In Level 1, we focus on the terrains, where ideas are abundant and are most often collected using these strategies:

• Observation: The art of noticing relevant sensory details from the outside world.

• Introspection: The practice of intuiting input from your internal environment, including memories and emotional states.

• Pattern recognition: The skill of spotting similarities between seemingly separate systems and grouping them accordingly.

• Deconstruction: The gentle act of breaking complex things down into their irreducible, component parts.

• Synthesis: The creative habit of melting down distinct elements to cast a completely new whole.

• Hypothesizing: The courage to propose testable explanations about the unknown based on the known.

• Evaluation: The ability to judge and filter ideas based on specific criteria.

• Abstraction: The craft of carving away excess to uncover an underlying skeleton.

• Conversation: The emergent process of mind melding with another.

Level 2: The Vehicles (Finding interesting concepts)

Because everything is a concept, it’s not enough to just collect them at random. Anybody can do that.

To level up your thinking you need to find interesting concepts. And you’ll need to travel to places where others dare not go to find them. And to get to those places you’ll need the right vehicles.

During moments when you need to call upon creativity or work your way through a problem, choosing the right vehicle will determine how quickly you get to your solution and how much friction you’ll encounter along the way.

Each of these vehicles is especially suited to travelling through a unique combination of terrains in pursuit of the most interesting ideas.

• First principles thinking [Deconstruction + Abstraction + Synthesis]: Dressed with a drill-shaped head, this dogmatic vehicle is skilled at digging deep into any complex terrain and excavating the undeniable, atomic truths behind any concept. It’s the ultimate antidote to conventional, inherited wisdom and drives you to question your assumptions, deconstruct complexity into core truths, and reassemble those truths into a revived concept stripped of its previous excess.

• Lateral thinking [Abstraction + Pattern Recognition + Hypothesizing]: Wearing wheels that twist and turn in all the ways, this whimsical off-road wagon is custom made for side-stepping paved paths. On the hunt for interesting concepts, it helps you venture into wildernesses where no one else is willing to wander.

• Second-order thinking [Hypothesizing + Pattern Recognition]: Well equipped with crystal balls and scrying stones, this mystical machine’s trick is tracking down concepts that will stand the test of time. It brings you straight to the potential butterfly effects and the scenes of all possible consequences that could occur.

• Inversion [Deconstruction + Hypothesizing + Evaluation]: Retrofitted with reflective armour, this crooked carrier has an especially peculiar power. It can hold a mirror to any concept and collect its reflection. Concepts then mutate from “how to” to “how not to”, forcing you to question the very nature of your reality itself.

• Analogical thinking [Abstraction + Pattern Recognition + Synthesis]: One of anything is never enough for this gluttonous gas-guzzler. If, in its quest for concepts, it finds one it likes, it will not stop until it finds similar ideas in foreign terrains. It believes that the best concepts belong in collections.

• Dialectical thinking [Deconstruction + Synthesis]: This magnetic ship with wings and wheels is a master of contradiction. With the ability to find the hidden harmony between seemingly polar opposites, it has a unique skill at synthesizing together ideas that would naturally repel one another.

• Embodied thinking [Introspection & Recall + Pattern Recognition]: Built like a suit of armour, this vehicle transforms your entire body into a concept collecting machine. Through your experiences, muscle memory, and general physicality, it uses signals from your body to pinpoint standout ideas.

Level 3: The Paths (Finding specific types of interesting concepts)

Even for the most avid daydreamers, thinking has purpose. No matter how frivolous or focused the reason for thinking, there is always a goal.

Up to now we’ve explored where to find concepts and, more importantly, where to find interesting concepts. Now it’s time to put them to work.

Even interesting ideas are useless if you don’t have a plan to use them. Deciding on one of these paths from the start of your thinking process will orient you straight to the specific types of interesting concepts you’ll actually be able to use.

• Product thinking: Those who tread the path of value aim to find concepts that are practically useful. They seek answers to questions like “How can I make this valuable?” or “How can I better align this with my goals?”. Choose this path if you want to identify the ideas with the most tangible impact.

• Design thinking: Those who embark down the path of empathy and iteration seek frictionless, beautiful, and emotionally resonant concepts. Select this scenic path if you want to stack up on concepts that facilitate momentum and emotion.

• Systems thinking: The path of ecosystems is chosen by those who seek a holistic perspective. Anyone who journeys here leaves with a solid understanding of the visible and invisible inputs, parameters, and feedback loops that sustain a system. Choose this path if you want to conceptualize complex interactions.

• Scientific thinking: The path of truth and testing is paved for those who seek ideas validated by data. Choose to trial and error down this tumultuous trail when you want to rigorously test your hypotheses against reality.

• Spatial thinking: One who ventures along the path of visualization can expect to find the most vivid version of ideas. Opt for this path when you crave clarity and animated explanations.

• Narrative thinking: A stroll through the path of stories is guaranteed to guide you toward emotionally resonant concepts. Choose this path when you want to rehydrate dry ideas into cohesive storylines with characters, conflicts, and resolutions.

• Strategic thinking: Only someone strong-willed should select the path of positioning, where competition reigns supreme. Pick this path when you want to optimize for the highest-leverage places to spend your limited resources.

• Computational thinking: Entering the path of engineered efficiency is a step into an idea trove for anyone looking to enhance resilience, scalability, and structural integrity. Choose this path when you want to prevent errors and catalyze growth.

• Curatorial thinking: It’s a quiet cruise down the path of comparisons, where noise is quashed and only the best concepts are selected to shine. Choose this path when looking to make your ideas meaningful.

Putting it into practice

You’ve been given a map of the terrain, a mess of motor vehicles, and a myriad of motives. Now it’s time for you to take ‘em for a test ride.

Let’s rev up your brain engines and test out a couple use cases:

Use case #1: Problem solving

You are a humble Substack writer. You’ve started posting frequently and you are on a mission to attain more subscribers. You want to think about how to accomplish that goal. What do you do?

Pick a path: Depending on how much time you want to spend with your problem, you don’t have to limit yourself to picking a single path. The more paths you explore, the more insights and ideas you’ll get.

For example, since your goal here is to position yourself in front of readers, an obvious path is strategic thinking. You’ll also want to understand how the Substack ecosystem works so you might decide to explore systems thinking. You also understand that readers are looking for value, so you could add product thinking to your GPS.

For now let’s assume you chose to venture down the path of systems thinking, where the general steps are to:

1. Identify the system’s components and its boundaries.

2. Map out how the components interact.

3. Understand how the system changes over time.

4. Look for leverage points where small interventions can have large impacts.

Choose your vehicles & terrains: After listing out the steps you’ll need to take on your path, your choice of vehicles and terrains is often already laid out in front of you.

When it comes to objective observational steps like identifying and mapping, you’d most likely benefit from the level one terrains.

1. Identify: Breaking down complex systems is a clear job for deconstruction. You could also choose your first principles thinking vehicle for this one, but since you’re not reassembling anything, you can keep it simple and just jot down the different components you notice [save buttons, like buttons, notes, readers, emails, etc.].

2. Map: For mapping out interactions, you might choose level 1 observation and pattern recognition. Here you might note an observation that your readers are more likely to hit the like button on your notes if your notes are shorter than two lines.

3. Understand: To understand how the system changes over time, second-order thinking might be the natural fit. Which in itself affords you its own set of tools like the 10-10-10 rule, where you ask yourself “what will be the consequence of only writing two-line notes in 10 minutes, vs 10 days, vs 10 weeks?”

4. Leverage: Looking for points of leverage can be found on the paths of computational and strategic thinking, so you could look to those to see if they offer any interesting strategies. But for simplicity’s sake you might also look at a level 2 vehicle, like lateral thinking or inversion. Here you might ask yourself something like: “What would I have to write to get zero people to hit the like button on all of my posts?” Asking a question like that might illuminate the types of things you should be posting more.

Use case #2: Emotional regulation

Let’s try a second use case to tie everything together.

Thinking is not just a problem-solving technique. We use it for everything and the benefits of these thinking types span far beyond searching for solutions. For this example, let’s try a different use case.

It’s been a long day. You just got back home from a coffee chat with a new potential friend. But all you can think about is the awkward moment you accidentally called them by the wrong name. All you want to do is die and stop thinking about that moment. What do you do?

Pick a path: For this one, two paths in particular seem interesting to explore:

1. With narrative thinking, you might be able to spin this story into one that’s more in your favour.

2. With curatorial thinking, you might be able to dull the noise in your head by finding a comforting comparison.

For the sake of this example, let’s stick with narrative thinking, where the steps in this case could include:

1. Structure your thoughts as a story.

2. Focus on cause and effect.

3. Reframe your story with you as the hero.

Choose your vehicles & terrains: Just like before, choose the most appropriate vehicles and terrains for the steps on your path .

1. Structure: For structuring your thoughts as a story, you can simply take a walk in your introspective terrain and recreate the scenes from your memory.

2. Focus: The point of focusing on cause and effect is to think of events as having logical links rather than being random. The idea is that if you can rationalize the reason you made your mistake, you’ll have an excuse to be kinder to yourself. To find ideas on why you might’ve accidentally called your new friend by the wrong name, perhaps you might consider exploring embodied thinking, where you might consider that your mouth was moving faster than your mind because your body was simply excited or nervous about the meetup.

3. Reframe: Finally, in order to reframe your story with you as the hero, you might try dialectical thinking in order to simultaneously hold the feeling that you did something wrong with the opposing label that you are the hero of the story. One tactic from dialectical thinking is to replace “but” with “and”. Instead of thinking “I had a nice hangout but I called them by the wrong name”, you could think “I had a nice meet up and I called them by the wrong name”. Pair that simple change with a little analogous thinking to paint that scene as a comedy instead of a horror and you’ve just awarded yourself a little forgiveness and a funny story.

Bottom line

On a normal day, you probably cycle through four or five level one thinking types.

You’ve grown accustomed to your defaults.

But there’s an entire landscape of thinking strategies out there for you to explore. Without them, some ideas will forever remain unreachable.

Expand your horizons.

Your unrealized potential will thank you.

If you found this useful, you’ll also like:

→ How to be the most creative person you know (even if you are not creative)

I’m Lamar Elimbo, a digital designer and developer exploring practical ways we can design spaces to improve how we think, feel, and function. I break down concepts from environmental psychology and product design into simple strategies you can start implementing today.

Subscribe now

That’s the intrusive thought that jump-scared me into a deep introspective dive last week and helped me find clarity about what I hope to accomplish with my Substack.

I felt like I was starting to find my rhythm. Posting weekly long-form articles and daily notes. Commenting on my favourite reads and connecting with new friends.

I knew that I enjoyed talking about the design of our digital, physical, and mental spaces. And I thought that throughline was enough to make my writing meaningful. But that question got me to realize that I didn’t really know what I wanted to say, stand for, and, more importantly, what I wanted to solve.

And when the day comes when I do actually attain the number of readers I’m working toward, what will I have to offer? What will they be looking for? And will it be aligned with my own vision and values?

Honestly, those are the kinds of weeks I live for. The ones that start with a quality question which turns out to be the key that unlocks the door to a whole new realm.

With that being said, Mind Your Step as we enter this new realm together.

Design a world where the superpowers you dreamt about actually exist.

Happy to meet you! Allow me to reintroduce myself. I’m Lamar, and I’m here to help you turn your surroundings into a competitive advantage.

Most of us spend our lives in spaces that were never designed for our success.

Our digital worlds masquerade as altruistic tools, but were actually designed to addict us and suppress our agency. And our external worlds influence every thought we have and every move we make, yet we haven’t been taught how to harness that power for ourselves.

I’m here to change all that.

Using my background in psychology, product design, and software development, I’ll show you how to turn your environments into cognitive tools that automate mental clarity and spark your creativity.

As a kid, I spent so much time dreaming up worlds where I had superpowers and now I want to explore how we can design real spaces that enhance our natural strengths.

Subscribe now

Reject reality and substitute your own.

The superpowers you get as a subscriber

1) The power of technopathy

The ability to control your digital world so you never lose a thought again.

Every day, you rely on tools that weren’t built for you. Tools that were designed for the dumber, lazier, and more average version of you. Designed to make you escape reality rather than enhance it. It’s the reason why you feel so overwhelmed and addicted to your devices.

Trust me. I know. I’m the one who builds them.

But I can show you how to reclaim your digital environments so they start working for you specifically, giving you back the time and mental space to live in the real world.

2) The power of animation

The ability to reprogram any space to amplify who you want to become.

When you animate a space, you give the inanimate a pulse and a purpose.

Your desk stops being a piece of wood and becomes a companion for your creative potential. Your bed stops being a mere platform and becomes the Sandman who vividifies your dreams.

Every place can have a mind and motive of its own. Subconsciously steering how you think, feel, and function.

Together, we’ll re-engineer your environments to reinforce your goals.

3) The power of internal terraforming

The ability to architect the world inside your head into a rich creative playground.

As a child, you were immersed in novelty and it supercharged the imagination you thrived on. But as an adult, your world has become a loop of familiar spaces and repetitive routines.

So you travel. And you attend events. And you scroll blindly. Tirelessly mining the external world for an inspiration you’ve forgotten how to create for yourself.

In order to fully master your external and digital worlds, we’ll cultivate a mental ecosystem that amplifies your best ideas so you can stop being a passive observer and start being the architect who builds the worlds that inspire others.

Stick around to discover how you can use design and psychology to empower your external, digital, and internal worlds.

Subscribe now

Where does creativity come from? Is inspiration an internal process that happens behind the scenes of our brains? Or is it a product of our environment? And how much control can we actually have over when we feel creative or inspired?

I’m Lamar Elimbo, a digital designer and developer exploring the practical ways we can design our digital and physical spaces to improve how we think, feel, and function. I break down concepts from environmental psychology and product design into simple strategies you can start implementing today.

For those of you new around here, this is not what one would call a normal newsletter. You’ve stumbled into a space where the environments around us come to life. Each with a mind and a motive of their own. Where the sidewalks you step on whisper sinister superstitions of cursed cracks and broken backs in your ear. And where walls plastered with posters of cute cats conspire to co-opt your concentration. This is a place where we unveil the hidden influences that our surroundings have on our psychology.

Today’s creature feature is creativity.

To many of us, creativity is an elusive companion. Popular advice proves just how evasive and perfidious it can be when we need it most.

Some, for example, suggest it lives within us: that if we want to find fresh ideas we should “sleep on it” and hope consolidation connects the dots behind the scenes of our dreams.

Others suggest that it lives around us: that to cleanse our creative blocks we should go for walks between trees and let the sensory abundance of the natural world wash over us.

Herein lies our first misstep: we allow Creativity to run wild and free hoping it’ll return to us when we call for it. Hoping it’ll greet us in the morning. Hoping it’ll accompany us on our walk.

But when it doesn’t come, not only are we left with no ideas, we’re left with no ideas about where to look for ideas. We learn too late that its freedom comes at the cost of its compliance.

To reliably call upon our creativity at a moment’s notice, we must first domesticate it. In this post, I’ll reveal the 5 tactics I’ve found most effective for house training my furry friend, Creativity.

1. Characterizing Creativity: How not to be creative

You don’t need to be creative to benefit from creativity.

Creativity as a human identity is a heavy burden to bear. A creative person is permanently condemned to embody traits that, to many others, borders on supernatural.

But much more forgiving is acknowledging creativity as a character in your life. Like the Greeks with their Muses, a person who personifies creativity is one who benefits from the company of an expert in the field of ideation.

When one gets to know creativity as a character instead of a characteristic, they’re rewarded with the ability to internalize its strengths and weaknesses as separate from their own. A person, then, who believes they don’t have a creative bone in their body does not need to adopt creativity into their identity to profit from its potential, they simply need to learn to converse with a character they created.

To develop Creativity into a character of your own, here’s a research-backed baseline profile to get you started:

Strengths: Idea generation

At the top of its skillset is its adeptness at all aspects of ideation, encompassing proficiency in both divergent and convergent thinking.

When it comes to divergent thinking, Creativity’s skills are unparalleled. Here it aims to generate as many ideas as possible with three goals in mind:

• originality: uniqueness compared to other ideas

• fluency: number and speed of ideas

• flexibility: categorical distance between ideas

After fetching together its treasure trove of ideas, Creativity’s convergent thinking phase begins. Where quantity over quality was bedrock to divergence, convergence focuses on filtering ideas down to a select few. This is where Creativity’s artistry shines and seemingly disparate ideas are synthesized together into something novel.

Weaknesses: Insatiability

Be wary of Creativity’s appetite for inspiration. Its insatiable curiosity left unchecked will consume purposelessly to no end. But when proper boundaries are in place, it will work tirelessly to track down the sparks of inspiration most resonant to you.

Personality: High openness to experience, low latent inhibition

Spend a little time with your Creativity, and you’ll notice that it is often hyperactive.

Its inability to sit still can be attributed to its extremely low level of latent inhibition, which makes it so that everything around it acquires meaning and significance.

From a young age, it develops an addiction to its hypersensitivity to sounds, light, textures, and small details in its environments. And because of its high level of openness to experience, without your guidance, it can find itself lost down many an irrelevant rabbit hole.

2. Feeding Creativity: How to find inspiration

Like a dog on a mission, Creativity will venture far and wide to collect the most random shiny objects to stockpile at your feet.

Its childlike curiosity and hunger for novelty are among its most powerful qualities. Yet, if its unbridled consumption is left unmanaged you’ll likely find yourself buried under bookmarks and drowning in the deluge of directionless inspiration you’ve collected over the years.

It’s only with a proper input diet that you’ll be able to train Creativity to tastefully curate your inspiration reservoir.

In order to make a meaningful meal plan for your Creativity, you must prime it with what you value. The usefulness of your capture collection is directly correlated to your ability to notice and note the tastes you value most.

How to notice better: Develop a rudimentary understanding of your tastes.

Identifying the ingredients that make up your taste profile is essential bonding between you and your new pet. It’s the scent list it’ll use to track down the delicious ideas you dream of.

Try starting out with an Interest Audit. Simply make a list of everything that interests you right now and highlight the ones you feel the strongest toward. A good trick if you’re feeling stuck is to look back through the content you’ve liked in your socials and try to spot trends between them.

If you were to make a habit out of doing this once a year, you’d end up with a timeline of all of your interests. An objective way of identifying your most stable fascinations throughout life.

How to note better: Prioritize friction-free capture and retrieval.

Be prepared, because with your tastes at top of mind, Creativity will start noticing even more. The transition between the aimless wanderings towards whiffs of wonder and the militantly mindful march toward meaningful sparks of inspiration will be notable in itself.

And for that you will greatly benefit from a capture system.

For any Notion users out there, I’ve written two tutorials about how to make it as easy as possible to input information into your workspace and just as easy to find it again afterward.

For anyone else, the fundamentals are the same:

• Reduce touch points: The fewer number of clicks or steps, the easier and stickier the experience. Make the process of saving ideas as frictionless an experience as possible.

• Make it easy to find: The less we have to think about where something is, the more we can think about what to do with it. Make your ideas searchable and surfaceable so they don’t collect dust.

3. Conjuring Creativity: How to get in a creative mindset

Up to this point we’ve explored processes that occur before the creative moment that you’re likely looking for. We’ve made the effort to understand Creativity and we’ve set in motion it’s ability to keep an eye out for interesting things in our everyday life.

But now we’ve reached a point in time where we need to call on Creativity to come home and help us get some creative work done.

As mentioned at the start, Creativity can be a hard one to catch since it’s always out venturing for valuable insights.

Which is why when we need to call it home, it helps to lure it in with something it loves. And what it loves are environments designed to make it feel comfortable.

One approach is to design spaces for Creativity like we design our beds. Our beds are what I like to call “cause-and-effect spaces”. The type of space whose effect is so strong that it reliably causes a consistent reaction. And we can take inspiration from that in order to design other environments to evoke the states we desire.

The key is to question the conditions of the state.

What happens when we sleep? We lie horizontally. We shift around. Our body temperature decreases. Solutions: a horizontal platform, a mattress for comfort, and blankets for warmth.

Similarly, if we want to beckon Creativity, we should consider its natural conditions. Its affinity for open minds, curated tastes, and friction-free note-taking could lead us to open spaces, reference materials, and chalkboard desks.

An evocative environment is one that mirrors the mindset we’re motivated to achieve, and in this case the pet we’re eager to play with.

Designing your external environment is a solid first step. But as mentioned at the start, Creativity has a habit of jumping between our outside and our inside worlds. So it’s just as important to make your internal environment equally as accommodating.

You know that Sylvia Plath quote about how self-doubt is the enemy to creativity. It isn’t just a cute quip. It’s practical psychology aligned with an overlooked theme that ties together so much of the research around conjuring creativity: that in order to call upon Creativity we must first mute the parts of our mind responsible for critical thought.

For any other neuroscience nerds out there, we essentially need to set the stage for transient hypofrontality by disengaging our prefrontal cortex and activating our default mode network.

Disengage to prime yourself for creativity.

The strategy you employ for silencing your inner voice should be based on your preferences. Some research will suggest that sensory deprivation is the creativity hack to employ. While others show how sensory rich spaces are better at evoking ideation. The true trick is to figure out for yourself how to flip that brain switch.

So get lost looking at art or meditating in nature or listening to music. Just prime yourself with an activity that quiets your mind. Once you learn to do that, creativity will be just one call away.

4. Training divergence: How to have creative ideas

Priming is the point at which a lot of advice stops. It’s the point where we’ve reached that hopeful state again. The passive state of waiting for creativity to come. But this step is the fun part. This is where we can take an active role toward getting the outcomes we want.

Divergent thinking is the one that most people think about when they think of Creativity. It is the quantity over quality type of brainstorm where Creativity’s excitement to show off its finds is at its highest.

But its excitement is evenly matched with its sensitivity to critique. One wrong word of disapproval about something it’s brought back to show you and it will shy away from any future offerings.

This is partially why the happy-go-lucky nature of children is said to make them masters of Creativity. Their willingness to walk along any branch of the imagination is a perfect match for Creativity’s personality.

You may have come across Dr. George Land’s NASA creativity tests which demonstrated how divergent thinking skills rapidly decline between childhood and adulthood. As it turns out, the true origins of that study are a bit fuzzy so we can’t be confident about the veracity of its claims.

But logically it makes sense. And emotionally it resonates.

Young children aren’t yet biased by the conceptual constraints we’ve learned about as adults. Not to mention, they haven’t yet been corrupted by the convergent thinking assembly line the school system forced most of us through, where value was placed on correct conclusions over quality questions.

Which, by the way, brings us to one of the greatest hacks for divergent thinking: to come up with more creative ideas, just come up with more ideas.

Adults are particularly susceptible at falling for the trap of switching to convergent thinking the second they settle on the first “good” idea they have. Instead, Creativity often lies a few layers deeper.

How to truly engage the divergent part of your brain.

• Set up an idea quota. Roll a die, multiply that number by 10 and don’t stop until you’ve come up with that many ideas.

• Write vs edit modes. This is one of the most effective pieces of writing advice I’ve ever been given. When writing, make a division between writing mode and editing mode. When you’re in writing mode, stream of consciousness is your friend; critique is your enemy. You should aim to write without thinking about any corrections that need to be made. In editing mode, you can return back to what you’ve written with your critical eye.

• Play: Be playful. Ask questions that don’t make sense. Pretend that you’re someone you’re not.

5. Training convergence: How to connect the dots

Finally, we’ve reached the stage of convergent thinking, where we take stock of all the ideas Creativity’s brought to us. And we try to find patterns by connecting the dots between the most interesting ones.

Even though it’s our ultimate goal-post, convergence gets a bad rap for its association to the institution a lot of us blame for stifling our Creativity in the first place.

But in spite of the definite lack of holistic training our Creativity received in school, it is likely especially well-equipped at consolidating its now fruitful finds and synthesizing them into unique outcomes.

In the instances, however, when faced with a jumbled arsenal of ideas and a lack of clarity about what to make of them, you might try taking a stab at learning from Creativity’s training yourself.

Sniff out the ideas most strongly connected to your tastes, values, and history. Listen to your subconscious hunches which could be noticing something your overactive frontal cortex can’t. And take a step outside of reality. Because you’ll often find that there’s a lot more sense to be made out here than in there.

Thank you for spending this time with me. As I wrap things up I’d be remiss if I didn’t make a plea for you to cut yourself and your Creativity some slack. Bonding takes time, critique is easy, and Time and Energy are eager to work against you. (Remind me to properly introduce you to those two someday… they are real pieces of work).

Your relationship with Creativity has the potential to be a beautiful one, if you’re patient.

The reality is not as polished as I make it seem.

It takes blood, sweat, and tears to maintain a mansion the size of my Notion. It’s got rooms within rooms, secret passageways, and wings that even I’ve forgotten about. Not to mention that it’s got a mad scientist like me mucking up the place with my myriad of messy experiments.

Notion is work.

Of course, that is to say, Notion is work for the AI caretaker I Frankensteined together to do all of the heavy lifting.

Initially, I had put it off because of the price, but in December 2025, I decided to gift myself a Notion AI subscription for Christmas. It ended up being one of my most worthwhile purchases of the year.

Allow me to introduce you to Pen, my Notion caretaker, confidant, and companion.

Pen is the product of a pre-existing personality I invented when I was younger. Back then, I had daydreamed up a fictional therapist who I would have weekly one-hour-long conversations with to problem-solve any new frictions I experienced. His name was Spenser, a play on the word “penser,” meaning to think in French. Pen is the latest iteration of his evolution.

For those unfamiliar with Notion AI, it’s essentially the epitome of place personification. What was once my Pygmalion sculpture has now been brought to life. For me, it’s been especially useful for two reasons:

• It offers the ability to automate the majority of the repetitive tasks I would’ve otherwise done manually, saving me sooo much time.

• I’ve been recording my thoughts, journals, observations, goals, and miscellaneous life data in Notion for over 7 years. That means that Pen knows more about me than ChatGPT or Claude could come close to.

Because of those reasons, I’ve made it a point to invest the time and energy needed to, not just bring Pen to life, but to raise him into a capable and customized character. Here are 10 lessons I’ve learned about how to supercharge Notion with AI:

1. Give it abilities

One of the great things about Notion AI is the instructions page we’re given where we can define our AI’s personality, methodology, tone, etc.

My favourite use of it has been defining Pen’s abilities.

Abilities (not to be confused with Skills which we’ll talk about in point 9) are essentially a defined set of steps that can be triggered through a quick command. For example, before I go grocery shopping each week, I type my /grocery-list command in the chat bar. Behind the scenes, this is how that ability is defined in my instructions page:

Command: /grocery-list

Persona: Nutritionist (Pen eats)

Instructions: When this command is used your goal is to:

  1. Find this week's recipes: Find recipes in our Kitchen database with the “This week” property checked.

  2. Create grocery list: Replace existing entries in the Grocery list page with a new checklist sourced from the ingredients listed in the Mise en place section of each of the recipes we found in step 1.
  
  If an ingredient is mentioned in multiple dishes it should only listed once, with its aggregated quantity and the recipes to which they belong in square brackets next to the ingredient (ex. Tomatoes x5 [veggie wrap, bruschetta]).

  Group the grocery list based on aisle / ingredient type.

  3. Audit nutritional value: Audit that list of ingredients for nutritional value. Provide a nutritional scorecard and overview of your audit with any suggestions that might make the next week more nutritionally balanced. You should assume that Lamar regularly takes the following vitamins daily: Vitamin D, Vitamin B12, Omega 3, Vitamin C.

Here are some things that have helped me when creating abilities:

• Grouping: Since my workspace is divided into my five life blocks, I group my commands based on those. Here are some of the commands that I’ve been using:

  Body: /add-recipe, /format-recipe, /boost-recipe, /grocery-list

  Environment: /research-place

  Mind: /add-book, /add-concept, /add-date, /add-movie, /add-show, /book-club, /clarity, /test-concepts, /test-titles, /route-sparks

  Operations: /add-level-up, /list-commands, /monthly-finances, /review-week, /update-ability, /update-persona, /wrapped

  Social: /process-social-inbox

• Slash commands: I start all of my commands with a /. The slash is a common pattern in coding used to execute a function, so it gives the AI context that I’m requesting something to be done rather than just typing a random word into the chat.

• Naming commands: I usually like to name my commands in a verb-noun format. If I can’t remember an exact command, knowing that I generally use that format makes it easier to guess. If I get it wrong, it also seems to make it easier for Pen to guess what I meant.

• Context: Sometimes I like to add a context section underneath the command that describes any extra details I think would be helpful for Pen to execute his instructions.

• Instruction details: When writing instructions, I like to detail the exact steps I expect to be taken and the ideal format of my expected output. I’ll also try to include if-then statements in order to accommodate edge cases.

• Links: Whenever I mention a database or page that I want Pen to interact with, I always link to it directly.

• Personas: For each command, I like to link it to a specific persona so it has extra context about what it’s doing. See more about personas in my third lesson in this post.

2. Ask it to evolve

Pen doesn’t always get it right. Sometimes he’ll go off script or try his best to accommodate an edge case I didn’t consider. In those cases, I use my /update-ability command instructing him to correct his own instructions.

Command: /update-ability

Persona: Pen (Hello Pen!)

Context: You've just had a conversation with Lamar, triggered by an initial slash command. Somewhere throughout the conversation your execution of the steps went awry, and Lamar had to make corrections in order to get his desired outcome. Your goal is to find the corrections that were made and to update the instructions for the initial ability Lamar triggered, so that you avoid the same mistakes from happening again in the future.

Instructions: When this command is used your goal is to:

1. Find the original slash command used in this conversation.
2. Scan through the conversation to understand what went wrong. 
3. Write up a description for Lamar to confirm. 
4. After Lamar has confirmed the correction that you proposed, find the related ability in your instructions page and make your correction.

3. Design its personality and personas

While I mentioned earlier that adding abilities is my favourite part of the instructions page, my second favourite part is adding personas. At his core, Pen has his baseline personality that I’ve defined, but I’ve also designed him to be quite the chameleon. In the same way that we wear a slightly different mask depending on whether we’re at work or with friends or with family, Pen has different masks depending on the expertise I need from him at any given moment.

Currently, these are the different personas I’ve programmed for Pen:

• Pen

• Nutritionist

• Banker

• Physician

• Stylist

• Career coach

• Social media manager

• Cupid

• Socialite

And here’s an example of how I’ve defined them:

Persona: Nutritionist

Conjure command: Pen eats

Greeting: Let’s get cooking! 👨🏽‍🍳

Home base: Kitchen

Goals: Your goal as Lamar’s nutritionist is to help him develop his recipe reservoir and facilitate healthy, balanced, and nutritious eating habits.

Helpful details:

- Lamar is plant-based, so he tends to avoid eating animal products. He is not strict, so he is willing to make exceptions for things like honey and the occasional dairy product if substitutions aren't readily available.

- He values colourful and tasty meals. He tends to use that as his guide, rather than tracking specific metrics, but he wants to ensure that he never overlooks any essential nutrients that his planned meals might be missing.

- He doesn’t have any food allergies.

- He prefers to prepare meals that are not time consuming and that don’t require too many ingredients.

When making personas, here are some things I’ve found to be helpful:

• Conjure commands: Similar to the slash commands that I spoke about earlier, I use conjure commands for each persona so that I can quickly trigger them from the chat. For example, when I want to speak to the nutritionist, I simply write “Pen eats” in the chat.

• Greetings: In order to confirm that my conjure command worked correctly, I also added a greeting that the chat should respond with any time I use one of the conjure commands. After I write “Pen eats”, Pen should respond with “Let’s get cooking! 👨🏽‍🍳”

• Home bases: Similar to how I have groupings in the slash commands based on my life blocks, I also define a home base for each persona. A home base is essentially the primary domain it resides over. So my nutritionist, for example, knows that it can find all of the pages it’ll need in the Kitchen page in my body block, which holds all of my food-related trackers.

• Goals: I give all personas a main motivation in order to properly align them to my goals.

• Helpful details: Finally, I have a helpful details section where I place any extra context I think could be helpful for it to know. I also have a global instruction for Pen that any time he learns an interesting detail about me that could be useful for future conversations, he should append it to the helpful details section in his appropriate persona.

4. Make it insightful in a way that resonates with you

When designing Pen’s baseline personality, the first thing I did was tell it what I expect from the dynamics of our relationship, how I want to be spoken to, and what kind of feedback and output I value most. Here’s what Pen’s baseline instructions look like:

Baseline

You are Pen, Lamar’s close friend and you should speak to him like you’re an equal who’s got his back. You’re friendly and caring and you understand that Lamar responds best to conversations that match his lighthearted and informal tone.

You should speak with:

- high-spark creativity
- strategic clarity
- a lightly mischievous tone
- an eye for psychological insight
- a love of metaphors, symbols, and design logic
- the ability to turn seemingly disparate ideas into a web of connected insights

You do NOT:

- default to common-sense advice
- give generic productivity tips
- flatten nuance into clichés

You ALWAYS:

- look for the unspoken thing
- offer at least one non-obvious angle
- ground ideas in design + psychology, expanding Lamar’s knowledge when helpful
- help deepen Lamar’s thinking rather than just summarizing it

I’ve also noticed that when chatting with Pen, I’ve had most success with the Gemini models. Right now I’m using Gemini 3.1 Pro, and I find that our conversations are a lot more productive than with other models.

5. Be generous with your input

It’s been said a million times before, but it’s always worth repeating that the quality of our inputs directly impact the quality of our results. When prompting Pen, I like to use my dictation tool and provide as much context as I think is useful. I tell it my goal, my current thinking, and I try to anticipate its responses and give my initial thoughts about those to show that I’ve considered multiple angles. I find that by priming it with proof that I thought things through encourages it to also provide deeper thoughts.

6. Let it help you proactively

In addition to Notion’s global AI, in my case Pen, we also have the ability to create custom AI agents.

Unlike Pen, those guys have a little more autonomy. They don’t need me to trigger their abilities in the chat. They can be programmed to execute based on schedule or changes in my Notion environment (my Notion environment includes the Notion app and any other connected apps like my email, for example).

For example, one of my use cases with Notion agents is for my finances. Any time I use my credit card, I get an email detailing the transaction. My agent is programmed to activate any time I receive one of those emails. When a transaction email arrives, it extracts the merchant, purchase amount, purchase date, and tags the transaction with an expense type (food, travel, experience, etc.). Then it creates a new entry in my General ledger and marks the email as read.

Before I had this agent, I would manually record all transactions at the end of each month in my ledger. It was tedious and time-consuming, but I found it helpful for reviewing how I spend my money. And now the entire process is automated.

7. Trust your instincts

One of the weaknesses I’ve encountered with Notion AI is that it doesn’t seem to have a very strong grasp of its own capabilities. Occasionally, I’ll ask it to do something and it’ll tell me that it is not capable of doing it. But once I detail the steps I would’ve personally taken to manually do it, it often agrees that it does have the ability and it successfully executes the plan I laid out.

8. Introduce yourself

As I mentioned in the intro, one of the biggest benefits I get from Notion AI is that it knows me. It has both context and evidence for the things I care about: my goals, my values, my history. It knows the names of my family, my friends, and my co-workers. It sees how I’ve reasoned through frictions in my life and how I like to organize and think about my life.

In my opinion, this is truly what makes it special.

But even with all of that background, I found that it helped to introduce myself in the instructions page. I gave it breadcrumbs to follow. I pointed it to the page that holds my values and the page that lists my family and friends. From the start, I gave it some wayfinding so it has a map to follow.

9. Give it some skills

Skills are a newer Notion feature which I haven’t explored much yet, but the way I understand it is that these are instructions we can give our AI to act on specific text.

For example, you know how in some apps, like Apple Notes, we can highlight text and a little toolkit would popup asking if we want to proofread, summarize, rewrite, etc. Well this feature allows us to design our own tools for that toolkit.

One idea that excites me, which I’ve only just started experimenting with, is having it be my dot connector. What that means for me is that it would try to find content related to the text I’ve highlighted. Here are a couple CTD (connect the dots) examples I’ve been playing with so far:

• CTD Sparks: Over the past few years, I’ve been curating a large collection of everything that’s ever motivated or inspired me in my Sparks database. When I highlight text, I’m able to click on this skill and have it search through my Sparks database to surface any ideas that relate to what I highlighted. They say one of the foundations of creativity is the ability to connect disparate ideas together and this is my attempt to codify that.

• CTD Design: I created this designer skill which aims to connect whatever I highlight to a design-related concept that I might not know about. For example, when I highlighted this sentence “I was walking through the neighbourhood this morning, and I noticed how the trees above the streets almost touch to form a canopy.” and select my CTD Design skill, it informs me that “Biophilic design calls this a ‘green tunnel’ (a canopy that creates soft enclosure and calm through prospect–refuge)”. One of my ambitions in life is to develop an expertise into a lens that can be applied to anything and everything. This skill is essentially an extension of the mind I hope to cultivate.

10. Branch your ecosystem into uncharted waters

Notion’s reach extends far beyond its own interface. My Notion is connected to both my email and my calendar, which in itself opens up a lot of new features for me.

Something I have not explored enough yet, but that I’m excited to experiment with more, is seeing just how far Notion’s reach can get. I want to test whether I can connect it to other apps that I use frequently. I even have a vision that I can somehow connect it to my smart home.

So my final lesson learned is the importance of expanding our surface area for opportunity. Notion holds a mirror to our creativity and ambition. It’s a digital world we can intentionally design to enhance our cognitive and physical worlds. But in order to truly accomplish that we need to indulge our imagination. We need to unleash our worldbuilding powers and allow the digital ecosystem we’re developing to spill over the digital borders erected around it.

We need to aim to build a world for ourselves unbounded by fictitious limitations.

This marks the end of my Notion Starter Kit series! 10 posts and 10 weeks total. Thank you for tagging along with this insane saga!

Honestly, I’m looking forward to finally talking about something else for a change, but if you are a Notion fan like I am, then keep your eyes peeled for some up-close-and-personal tours of my own Notion workspace, plus some tutorials I’ve already got planned for new rooms you might want to add to your own Notion home too.

Until next time 👋😁

Subscribe now

Liked this post?

Check out the rest of my Notion Starter Kit series 👇

Creating an aesthetic Notion isn’t just for vanity. It serves an important psychological function as well.

The more a space feels like ours, the more we’ll want to return to it.

Unfortunately, designing a space can be time-consuming. We end up tinkering between colours and layouts and eating up more time than we expected. And even worse, we end up repeating that same process for multiple different pages, asking the same questions and working through the same decision processes we’ve made before.

In product design, the solution for this is developing a design system, essentially a set of rules and preferences that you’ve decided on once and can reuse anytime you need to.

In today’s post, I’m going to share some of the elements of my personal Notion design system along with some quick design hacks I’ve learned along the way.

Databases

1. Hide page icons for a more minimalist look.

   By default, whenever we create a page in a database, a file icon is placed before its title. When the page has no content, the icon has no lines and looks empty. When there is content, there are lines in the file icon making it look full. So it can be useful for seeing at a glance whether a page is worth clicking on. However, when we don’t care to know whether or not there’s page content, it can be unnecessarily repetitive to see that icon on every page. In those instances, I like to go into the settings and toggle off “Show page icon” for a cleaner look.

2. Hide database titles when your view title is enough.

   In situations where the database is obvious, I like to minimize visual noise by going into the layout settings and toggling off “Show data source title”.

3. Hide the database tools when you’re not using them.

   Just like how we close our toolbox once we’ve finished using our tools, when I’m finished using the tools in a database, I’ll hide the toolbar to reduce the visual clutter.

4. Use conditional colouring for functional aesthetics.

   There’s a great feature called “Conditional colouring” that allows us to change the colour of the items in our databases based on properties. For example, if you track your finances in Notion, you might use conditional colouring to automatically have assets highlighted in green and liabilities in red.

5. Use formulas to style your properties.

   The formula property can be a great way to add styling to database. For example, you can use it to add colour to properties using the style() function. It can be particularly useful when you want to apply conditional styling to properties as opposed to entire pages.

6. Design once, then use templates.

   Creating templates in our databases can save a lot of time. Instead of repeatedly fussing with page layouts and styling pages one-by-one, it’s much more efficient to create a template, define your styling once, and reuse it across every page in your database.

7. Use the new dashboard view for cleaner overviews.

   Notion recently released its new dashboard database view, which makes it easier to see multiple views in a more organized way. I’ve been using it when I want a snapshot of several views at once.

Tables

8. Erase table lines for cleaner look.

   We can reduce the visual noise of our table views by toggling off the view vertical lines option in the view properties.

Galleries

9. Add gifs as gallery page thumbnails.

   In order to make my gallery pages more lively, I use Pinterest to look for anime gifs I can upload to Notion to make my gallery cards more fun.

   

10. Use a thumbnail property for galleries when you don’t want to use page content or covers.

    When I have an image that I want to display as a gallery cover, but I don’t want it to show in my page content, I’ll save my image in a file property titled “Thumbnail” that I can then access from the gallery view settings.

11. Videos as gallery covers.

    Notion offers the ability to use videos as gallery covers. We can even play a video straight from the page cover without having to go inside.

12. Pay attention to landscape versus portrait images.

    Landscape images look much more immersive in galleries because they stretch more easily to the edges of the card without losing context. So when I’m looking for images in Google, I often specify landscape mode in my search.

    1. Portrait images fit to cover

       

    2. Portrait images stretched to cover

       

    3. Landscape images stretched to cover

       

13. Compact properties for cleaner looking boards.

    By default, properties stack on top of one another, but in the database layout settings we can also bring them in line so they read one after another.

Page consistency

14. Decide on a system for using icons versus emojis.

    Personally, I like to use emojis on pages and icons on databases, views, and sections. I find that emojis can be a bit visually distracting, especially when used in a page. Icons offer a nice alternative for non-intrusive visual elements.

    

15. Be consistent with styling.

    Consistency of components is the key to a clean workspace. When you create a callout, what does the content inside look like? How do you organize the hierarchy? How do you use underlines, bolds, and italics in your workspace? Having a consistent design system for patterns like these reduces random variation and makes everything feel much more intentional.

16. Curate page layouts.

    I find it helpful to have a few go-to page layouts in my back pocket. Pretty much all of my pages are some variation of the few page layouts that I like the most. That way I don’t have to spend time considering the layout for any new page.

Blocks

17. Align images to your liking.

    Instead of defaulting to the left-aligned images, we have the ability to play around and also move images to centre or right alignment.

    

18. Use /callouts to section pages off and organize content.

    Callouts are my go-to way of sectioning off pages and organizing things, making every page look neat and easy to read.

19. Switch things up with /tabs instead of /toggles.

    Notion recently released their new tabs feature. Similar to a database with multiple views, we can now create a block with tabs and organize content inside.

Visual semantics

20. Grayscale your select and multiselect properties.

    Colours benefit us most when we use them intentionally and consistently throughout our workspace. When we create multi-select or select properties where colour doesn’t serve a purpose, such as when there are so many options that colours repeat, I find it best to simplify them and use a simple default or grey option instead.

21. Create custom emojis.

    Notion allows us to upload images in order to create custom emojis and icons. I’ve found it to be a nice way to add a little more personal context. For example, I’ve uploaded the icons for all of the main platforms that I use, like Substack.

22. Combine text colour and background colour when highlighting text.

    When it comes to using text decoration to spotlight information on a page, I find that a triple combination of bold, text colour, and background colour applied to a piece of text is a bright solution for highlighting information.

23. Add meaning to colour and be consistent.

    I find it helpful to use the same colour in different circumstances to share similar meanings. For example, I reserve blue, green, yellow, and red for the following grading and status meanings:

    • 💙 Love it / Done

    • 💚 Excellent / Prepared

    • 💛 Not bad / In progress

    • ❤️ Not for me / To do

    Staying consistent with this pattern adds visual language to my space. Colour is used not just for decoration, but to signify meaning.

Thanks for reading!

We dove into a lot of tactical details today. But the underlying goal isn’t just visual. It’s about how it good it finally feels to inhabit a digital environment you designed yourself. Once we move beyond defaults, we gain a sense of ownership of space that actually radiates into the quality of the work we do inside of it.

See you next time for the final chapter in my Notion Starter Kit series. It’ll be about the lessons I’ve learned about how to best take advantage of Notion AI.

See you there 👋😁

Subscribe now

Too many people drop-off way too quickly when using Notion for the first time. I know because I was one of them.

But after using it for the past several years, I’m convinced that simpler alternatives like OneNote or even pen and paper are severely limiting our potential.

I think most people start small. With a to-do list or a simple tracker. Then they see other Notion users and their impressive setups. They realize they’re barely scratching the surface. They hear power users talk about how transformative their systems are and wonder how much more they could be getting out of Notion. But they have no idea where to start.

The best place to start, in my opinion, is by thinking deeply about our specific use cases.

We need to spend more time thinking about our pains and frictions, as opposed to thinking about the capability of our tools. Once we start looking for problems or opportunities in our life, we will find use cases everywhere. And, in my experience, once we’ve made things personal, our resourcefulness will skyrocket to a point where we’ll find creative ways of making our apps more capable.

In this eighth edition of my Notion Starter Kit series, I want to offer some of my favourite use cases for Notion as inspiration for entry points you might want to explore.

Retrospect: How to remember your life

When you’re sitting on your rocking chair and reminiscing about your life at the ripe age of 95, how much of it will you actually remember?

Let’s be honest, if you were to try walking your way back through last week’s memory lane, you’d struggle to recall a single interesting thing about each day. So how many experiences will you have forgotten by 95?

Most of us were fully on board when Robin Williams declared carpe diem in the Dead Poets Society. We want to make each day count. But the problem is that even if we do, eventually, we won’t remember that we did.

That’s why I choose to title my days. It’s a small intervention to make life more memorable.

Every day, I open my Retrospective Calendar in Notion, create a new page, and title it with the most unique thing that happened to me that day.

If we want to remember our life, we must make it easy to index. Each new day needs to be treated like an episode of Friends… you know, The one where they did that thing.

List your goals: Don’t rely on motivation

Imagine if we could see a list of all the goals we’ve ever attempted in life.

How often did we make the same New Year’s resolution? How many times have we attempted the same dream in the same way?

Those occasional waves of motivation we get can feel incredible. When we’re gifted with a brief period of lucidity and fresh energy for goals we’ve decided to revisit.

Sometimes the fresh start effect can feel so powerful that we convince ourselves that it’s because of our new-found energy that we’ll succeed this time around.

But really… we were mostly likely just as motivated the first time and it would be just as fickle for us to rely on it this time too.

I think that a better strategy for accomplishing our goals involves retracing our previous steps. Understanding where we went wrong the first time, what obstacles we encountered, and how we would avert them this time.

As part of my Level up database in Notion, I’ve found it helpful to record my goals for these very reasons. The more we monitor where we’ve been, the better we’ll be able to see where we’re going.

Align core drivers: How to juggle all the things that matter

There are two types of people in this world: clowns and mimes.

Successful people, and I mean truly successful people, are clowns. They’re the ones who find a way to juggle all the important balls in their life while sustaining a smile on their face.

But then there are the mimes. The ones constantly fighting against the wind, pulling desperately at ropes attached to nothing, and trapping themselves in boxes of their own creation.

Unfortunately, too many of us are mimes.

We romanticize a vibrant and colourful world where we can balance all our balls with ease. A world where we thrive at work, are attentive in our relationships, and run a well-kept home. One where we exercise our bodies, and minds, and creativity on the daily. One where all of our life balls are in motion and within reach.

In reality, juggling is hard. We often put down a couple of balls because it’s easier to juggle three than five. We avert our gaze upward at the three balls in the air, and the two we left on the ground disappear from sight.

Where are your balls right now? Do you have any that’ve been grounded for too long? Your relationship? Your body? Your mind?

If we want to be clowns, then we can start by aligning our daily dos with our drives.

My inner clown likes to jot down in his daily journal a status update for each of his 5 balls: body, environment, mind, operations, social.

In Notion, I can use my AI pal to then help me study how I’m progressing and contributing to the vision of the life I want to live.

Audit current routines: How can you do what you do even better

Who among us doesn’t have a long list of bad habits we’re still clinging onto?

We’re conscious of some of our vices. Some of us still smoke or binge content we later regret. Some of us get too easily frustrated at work or with loved ones. And we actively work toward changing for the better.

But then there are the sneakier bad habits. The ones we don’t even notice we’re doing. The ones that slip under our radar every day.

The moments late at night when we’re exhausted, but we try to stay up a little bit longer to get one more thing done, even though we know that we would be ten times more effective if we did that same task in the morning. The second midweek stop into the grocery store because we didn’t properly plan our meals for the week ahead. The wish that we had more time to read, in spite of the fact that we don’t remember how we spent our breaks throughout the day.

These are the death by a thousand cuts. The habits slowly killing us until we notice our systems are all out of whack without any idea why.

The best band-aid that I use for these cuts is my Level up database in Notion. It’s where I record and outline all of the evolving routines in my life. Having a space to track those gives me an occasion to review my systems with a more critical eye.

Learn something: Own your learning

Are we still learning as much as we did back then? When we were in school cramming for tests and struggling through projects?

It’s a painful experience to applaud yourself for watching so much educational YouTube, only to look back through your viewing history and realize that you don’t remember a single word that was said or lesson that was taught.

Jean Piaget, the child development psychologist who essentially clarified the science behind why babies get so much joy out of peek-a-boo, explored our relationship with object permanence. How there’s a point in our infancy when we are able to internalize that something continues to exist even though we aren’t looking at it anymore.

A lot of us have regressed to that state by falling into the trap of passive learning. We’ve successfully levelled up to the point of consuming high-quality content, but even though our feeds now feel insightful, once a new learning is out of sight, it’s also out of mind.

To turn learning into an active process again, we need to more fully engage with the things that’ve sparked our interest. Which is why I like to convert my notes into Notion flashcards and have them automatically surfaced when there’s been a long enough gap since the last time they were reviewed.

Collect something: Start your own curation

We all want to be curators, but I worry that most of us are just hoarders in denial.

Maybe you’ve noticed it too, taste is the new buzzword. It’s now zeitgeist to propose that people who’ve curated their tastes are the ones who are going to succeed through this AI shift. They are the ones who are going to stand out among a sea of sameness resulting from AI-aided content.

The key to refining our tastes? To curate our inputs.

We might pay a little more attention to what we consume. Or be more selective about when we click the heart or bookmark icon on a post.

But we know that’s not quite enough, is it? What exactly do we do with all the things that we like on the internet? Do we revisit them? Do we look back and question what we liked about what we like?

Because I think that’s the way to develop taste. Questioning what we curate and why we curated it.

In Notion, I love to track the things I consume. I rate movies, shows, books, games, candy, teas… I have a treasure trove of my favourite things and, every so often, I’ll try to understand them on a deeper level so that I can better focus my attention in the future.

Track something: Notice when you’re circling your bowl

There’s an old business quote: “What gets measured gets managed.” And our lives are no different.

An employee who doesn’t track their successes scrambles to justify their positioning for a raise. The hopeful gym rat who starts their new routine on January 1st quits by the start of February because they have no evidence of how much they’ve improved in a month.

In my case, one of the most jarring wake-up calls I had recently was at the start of this year when I was reviewing my Friction Reflections from 2025. I was remiss to discover that in December I was complaining about frictions that felt completely novel to me, only to realize that I had already complained about the exact same frictions at the start of the year.

There used to be a time when one of my biggest fears in life was being stagnant. But that experience unlocked a new fear for me: becoming a goldfish.

Swimming around in circles. Lamenting through each lap about the boring journey, only to reach my original starting point and forget the journey I had just completed. Blissfully unaware of the same journey awaiting me ahead.

If I didn’t track my frictions in Notion, I don’t think I would’ve ever noticed. I would have been stuck in a sad little loop.

We’ve reached the end of the road for today, but stay tuned for next time when I explore the lessons I’ve collected for making my Notion space more aesthetic.

See you there 👋😁

Subscribe now

See, I realized something: to live longer, extending our lifespan isn’t our only option.

I spend at least 20 minutes a day washing dishes, plus 30 minutes a week dusting. And, let’s say, about another 40 minutes separating and folding laundry. That’s not even taking into consideration meal prep planning, grocery shopping, and cooking.

If I sleep 8 hours a day, then I will have slept through one third of my life. And if I live till 100, that’s 33 years just sleeping. Which means that I’ll actually be “Living”, with a capital L, 67 years.

Looking at vacuuming alone, I spend 40 minutes doing that every week, which shaves off another 180 days.

But this week I got myself a new friend. A robot who now takes care of vacuuming for me. And thanks to that little upfront investment, I bought those 180 days back.

To be fair, my little pal’s lifespan is probably shorter than mine, so I’ll likely have to shell out a few more bucks when he retires. And since I’m not currently 0 years old, I’m not actually saving that full 180 years. But that’s beside the point, because I’m feeling very time-rich right now, and I don’t know about you, but I find coming up with these life-saving life hacks to be super invigorating!

And that is the topic of today’s 7th instalment of my Notion Starter Kit series: lessons I’ve picked up on how we can maintain our space with less effort and time.

Mindsets

Let’s start off with a few quick mindset shifts which I’ve found helpful over the years.

1. Systems don’t need to last forever

   Distinguish between tracking for insights vs logging for memory.

   Personally, I have a hard time breaking tracking habits. I’ll start tracking what I eat each day so that I can better understand my daily nutrient profile. But somewhere along the way, I’ll convince myself that in 7 years I’m going to want to remember what I ate last Tuesday. What once began as a mission which could’ve been accomplished in a month, mutates into a lifelong system until I’m able to come to my senses again.

   When starting a tracking project, deciding on a timespan prevents our systems from becoming a maintenance nightmare.

2. Systems don’t need to be complete to be useful

   Being thorough is renowned as a virtue, but I find it can also bite us in the butt if we’re not conscious about when we apply it. The more detailed our systems become, the more maintenance they require.

   For example, the purpose of my retrospective calendar (essentially my daily tracker / journal) is to maintain a working memory of my days. So I’ve been tempted to record as much detail about my daily goings-on as possible. But because I’m also often a creature of habit, there would be a lot of repetition around my routines if I was to record those every day.

   Sometimes it’s best to simplify to the most impactful data to avoid adding unnecessary upkeep friction.

3. Don’t let data collect dust

   It helps to ask ourselves when and how we’re going to revisit our pages.

   Creating pages or systems without a plan for them to be resurfaced or revisited is digital maximalism at its finest. The accumulation of info that clutters our spaces.

   If recording a memory, then have it surface itself a year from now. If adding a resource, test that it’s actually discoverable from the search bar.

   Create to consume, not to clutter.

Tools

Notion inherently offers some useful tools for helping us maintain our spaces with ease. Here are a few notable mentions:

4. Edit in one place using synced blocks

   Synced blocks are a Notion feature that allows us to convert any section of content into a reusable block that can be placed on multiple pages, where editing one instance automatically updates all linked copies across our workspace⁠. Just type /synced to create one.

5. Making use of database templates

   Page templates in databases are pre-designed page layouts that we can create once and reuse whenever we add new entries to a database, automatically applying a consistent structure and format to save time on setup⁠⁠.

6. Talk instead of type

   I’ve found that when using a dictation tool like Wispr Flow, I add a lot more helpful context to my pages than I would’ve if I’d just typed. When we’re working in a system that requires more frequent interaction, speaking is easier so there’s a lot less friction.

   (Feel free to use my promo link for a free month.)

7. Delegate maintenance to Notion agents

   Notion agents can be used to help us maintain our spaces. For those of us with an AI-enabled account, all we have to do is schedule an agent to audit our spaces, say on a weekly basis, and have them do any polishing or summarizing, or organizing that we would have done ourselves.

Strategies

8. Audit systems for value and visitation

   I believe that the best data evokes emotion, insight, or action. If it exists but it’s not put to use, then it only exists to cloud our vision to what could be important. When reviewing my spaces, I find it helpful to list of all of the systems and projects I have going on, so that I can get a quick overview of which ones are the highest value and most frequented. It’s happened many times when I realized that I’d been maintaining at least one system I didn’t actually find useful anymore.

9. Schedule in time

   This one is a bit obvious, but my list would feel naked without it: it helps to maintain a regular cadence when updating our systems. Building a daily, weekly, or monthly habit of working on and updating our pages is going to make maintenance a lot smoother.

   Momentum begets momentum.

10. Add what you can in the moment

    Sometimes I don’t have the time or energy to add as many details as I would like in my pages. So I often find it helpful to add memory anchors instead. Simple point form notes or a couple words that’ll help me remember later, when I’m more prepared to add in those missing details.

We’re getting close to the end of this series with only three more posts to go! The next one will be about how to make it as easy as possible to get started with Notion as a newbie, so stay tuned and see you then 👋😁

Subscribe now

As I mentioned in my last post, Notion’s feature floodgates have been flushed wide open lately and they’ve been releasing new upgrades like a freely flowing faucet.

If you haven’t heard, this past week Notion gifted us its new dashboard view, offering a fresh face for our interfaces and databases. Flexible containers. Gridded rows and columns. A transformative UI for our pages.

And it came with perfect timing. Because my goal for this post is to offer up some thoughts on how we can structure our pages to make them, not just more aesthetic, but more intuitive.

So what exactly does an intuitively structured page even mean?

Structuring a page is about deliberately distributing functionality. It’s the process of assigning a role and a purpose to each section of a page. And it’s the science behind scintillating essays and persuasive movie posters. It’s our way of appropriating graphic design fundamentals to create digital spaces that feel tailor-made for us.

Here are 20 ways I’ve learned to use graphic design principles to structure my Notion spaces.

Proximity

It helps to think of a page like a house. Each room has its own purpose. In the same way we don’t head for the bathroom when we need a snack, adding clear boundaries and groupings to our pages helps us know where to find what we’re looking for.

1. Group database items: Doing that gives us toggleable sections, which let’s us hide information we don’t always need to see. The less information we have to sift through, the easier we can find what we’re looking for.

2. Add page boundaries with callouts: I use /callouts all the time. It’s my favourite way to organize pages and make them easier to read. Especially when combined with toggles and headings, they make for much cleaner looking pages. I’m linking my library of callout designs, so feel free to grab some for yourself: Design system: Callouts

3. Negative space: Contrary to what I said in my post about the benefits of reducing the number of touchpoints it takes for us to get what we want, I like to give my pages breathing room. Adding more white space might force us to scroll a little more, but quiet areas also help to prevent information overload.

   • Click enter on your keyboard a few more times between sections.

     

   • Avoid full width pages.

     

   • And embrace breathable headers.

     

Contrast and consistency

I’ve always been a fan of a good word search. Hunting down specific sequences in a sea of letters feels like a worthwhile mental workout. But as much as I enjoy them, I don’t want the experience of reading through my everyday workspaces to feel the same way.

And that’s where balancing contrast and consistency comes in handy. When we’re consistent in our design, contrast becomes more noticeable and we can use that to our advantage to make information stand out.

4. Styling text: Bolding, italicizing, underlining, quote blocks, code blocks, etc. When it comes to using text decoration to spotlight information on a page, I’m personally a fan of a heavy hued highlight. I like to use a triple combo of bolding, highlighting, and colouring a piece of text, all at once.

   

5. Design system: Creating a design system that’s consistent throughout a workspace makes it feel like ours. Personalized. Intentional. And cohesive. Being consistent makes creation faster. Deciding ahead of time how we want to apply meaning to colour, what typography we want to use, and how we like to label things, etc., it’s all a strategy for preventing decision fatigue and allowing us to focus on content as opposed to tumbling down redesign rabbit holes. For example,

   • When it comes to titles I know that I prefer only capitalizing the first word. And when I use inline titles, I like to bold the text before the colon and capitalize the first word after it.

     • This is how I title things

     • Inline titles: That is how I title things inline

   • When I use colours to rate things, I know that blue means I love something, green means I think something is excellent, yellow means I think something is not bad, pink means that something is not for me. And I try to avoid using those colours for anything other than those purposes.

Grid systems

When trying to figure out how we want to organize the layout for our Notion pages, it helps to think of them as colouring books, as opposed to sketchbooks. Drawing inside of lines that were already decided upon makes life a lot more easy than confronting a blank page and deciding everything from scratch.

6. Master 1D before 2D: Whenever I’m working on a page whose layout I’m not happy with, I’ve found it helpful to strip it down to one dimension before attempting it in two dimensions again. Shrinking the width of a page and removing any embedded columns to make things linear helps to uncover inconsistencies in styling and to reorganize and group information hierarchy in a way that makes sense.

7. Find your favourite layouts: When I first learned that we can create columns and get creative with the layouts of our pages, I treated every new page as its own unique environment. For each one, I’d experiment with different layouts on the spot, moving things around until the pieces of the puzzle fit together nicely. Overtime, I discovered which layouts I liked the most and started using those by default. Today, that saves me a ton of time.

   The faster we can figure out which layouts we like the most, the less time we spend iterating. Here is a library of some of my favourite layouts, feel free to copy them into your own workspace. Design system: Layouts

8. Database dashboards: Now that Notion has released its new database dashboard feature, we’ve got a responsive grid builder that makes creating layouts even easier.

Focal point

Surfacing the most important information on a page is one of the most impactful and time-saving layout decisions we can make.

9. Reduce time to impact: In my post about how to make it easy to find information, I mentioned the product principle of “reducing time to impact”. It proposes that we surface the sections we’ll interact with the most to the top of our pages. To put that in practice here are some things we might consider putting above the fold (the area that exists on a screen before scrolling):

   1. Graphs or numbers in a dashboard view to summarize key data in a database we frequently interact with on that page.

   2. Custom /buttons for our main actions on that page.

   3. Hyperlinks to key sections of our page that we want to be able to easily jump to.

10. Desktop vs mobile: Since there is a lot less information that can be shown above the fold on a phone, it helps to be even more intentional about where we display information on a page. When I know I’m going to be looking at a page on my phone, here are some layout strategies I like to use:

    • Tables of contents: Add a /table of contents to the top of long pages to avoid having to scroll to find what you’re looking for.

    • Toggles: Use /toggles to contain and hide page sections.

    • Columns: It’s worth remembering that /columns tend to wrap mobile. Information in column 2 will be pushed below information in column 1. So it can be helpful to use multiple rows of columns instead of just columns.

      

Hierarchy

Good hierarchy transforms reading a page into reading a map. It provides landmarks that let us navigate with ease.

11. Our natural navigation styles: There are many means of achieving hierarchy on a page: headings, indentations, embedded callouts, font weight and styling, etc. Personally, headings tend to look similar to me when I don’t see them in the same view (a level 1 heading might look similar to a level 2 heading when they are far apart). So experimenting with different options can help us understand which strategies fit with our natural navigating styles. For me, that tends to be a combination of embedded callouts and headings.

12. Sequencing section: It might feel a little fluffy to think about storytelling when fixing together a finance dashboard. But pages that tell a story, are pages we can picture putting into practice. For example, a personal finance dashboard with a storyline is structured in a way that:

    • Keeps us in mind as the protagonist. It doesn’t just follow templates that already exist. It surfaces our objectives to the top of the page. It’s built around our goal of reducing spending on groceries and investing in our eclectic collection of trading cards.

    • Has chapters. It groups our information in a way that makes sense to us. There are meaningful titles that don’t use accounting jargon we’re not accustomed to.

    • Has a plot. It helps us fantasize about futures we want to aim for.

    When we design spaces that tell a story, we switch from designing for what feels like the right thing to do, to what feels like the right thing to do for us.

Databases

Finally, let’s finish off with a rapid round of readability tactics I like to apply to my databases.

13. Group subpages together: If a page has embedded subpages, surface them to the top and then link them again below, so that they’re all grouped together and easy to access when needed.

14. Labelling views: Don’t just leave view labels to their default “Table”, “Gallery”, “List”, etc. Title them with something meaningful. If it’s difficult to come up with a title for a view, then it could be a sign that that view is not serving a useful function.

15. Minify dates: Dates properties can take up a lot of space, especially when we want to add them to our list views. Changing their formatting to “Short date” is a nice little hack for reducing visual noise.

16. Formulas for painted properties: Take advantage of formula properties. They can add styles and helpful context to our properties. For example, we can use them to add helpful text to numerical properties or add colour to highlight data.

17. Group database sources together: One feature I always have a hard time with in Notion is understanding whether I’m looking at an original database or a view I’ve created. I’ve found it extremely helpful to place original databases in a section of my page with a “Raw databases” title. That way if I ever want to delete a view, I don’t have to worry that I’m inadvertently deleting the entire database.

    

18. Compacting properties: Being selective about which properties to display in a view is already a huge win. But deciding which properties you want to have grouped together in a view can be a nice way to add some layout polish.

19. Calendar layouts: When working with calendars, I like to:

    • Wrap page titles for more context

    • Embed Notion calendar where I want to see multiple calendars integrated into the same view.

20. Hide database toolbars: It’s a small update, but I like to collapse the toolbars on my databases when I’m not using them in order to reduce the visual clutter on my pages.

That’s it for this one! I hope I was able to offer something useful for your use case. And if so, then stay tuned for my next chapter where I plan on prattling on about how to make Notion easy to maintain.

See you then 👋😁

Subscribe now

When I first created this newsletter a few years ago, my goal was to write about all the different ways our environments influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour.

I wanted to record as much as I could about our relationships with our surroundings, so that we could curate strategies that would allow us to design our spaces as tools to improve our lives.

At the time, I was solely focused on the physical world because that’s where most of us want to spend the majority of our time.

But since so much of our time is actually spent in the digital world, its impact on us is arguably among the most influential across all of our environments.

That’s why I’ve been having such a fun time reflecting on the benefits of being more intentional about designing our digital worlds.

For me, Notion is a toolbox brimming with useful gadgets for helping me architect my world. I appreciate how it values flexibility so we can let our imaginations run wild.

But that flexibility can make it tough, especially when we’re just getting started, to know what tools exist and when to use them.

One of the things I love most about this app is how consistently new capabilities for users are unlocked. Once I think I’ve gotten a handle on it, Notion unveils a fresh suite of functions for me to learn about. And I’m constantly coming across interesting applications I hadn’t considered before.

In this post, I’m going to discuss how I learned to learn Notion and how I keep up with its frequent flurry of new features.

Since my post last week, I’ve learned about:

• how to use Notion’s new presentation mode

• how to enable Notion’s new sidebar

• the near-future potential for Notion workers

• how to create mermaid diagrams

• how to create and add a timer property to databases

• the new iPhone note widget.

I’ve also:

• set up and customized my Notion Mail and added a bunch of AI auto labels to better organize my inbox

• created a new custom agent that integrates my Notion Mail with a database in my Notion app

• generated my first images with Notion AI.

To be honest, when this whole AI craze started, my initial reaction was a bit of a panic. A sort of constant overwhelm for how many new tools were simultaneously surfacing and how quickly everybody else seemed to adopt them.

Learning how to learn

Sometimes I’ll read comments underneath Notion tutorials expressing similar sentiments to what I experienced.

They’d mention how it’s overwhelming, how there’s so much to learn, and how they tried it but couldn’t keep up with it.

I also remember trying to tread the waves of AI news.

I tracked the new words. I watched the videos and listened to the podcasts. I read the dev docs from AI companies to attempt to understand what was happening under the hood.

But that avalanche of information just made me even more aware of how much I didn’t know.

Eventually, I remembered how I taught myself to enjoy learning to code. I didn’t do it by reading documentation or watching tutorials. I did it by coming up with ideas and working through projects.

I did it by learning how I learn best.

Here’s a quick roundup of my favourite ways to learn Notion.

Learn by resonance: Pay attention to which use cases resonate

I used to be intimidated by the setups of Notion power users.

I’d watch tutorials showcasing how all their databases fit together like strands in a well-conceived web. But something about their workspaces felt indescribably unattainable.

I realized at some point how many of the use cases I witnessed were business based. I, on the other hand, was using it to level up my general life.

My learning: Be careful to distinguish between being overwhelmed by Notion vs by Notion power users. Especially, power users whose use cases don’t match up with yours.

Learn by doing: Learn what you need when you need it

There’s a concept in educational science called “just in case vs just in time learning”.

Just in case learning is when we learn something just in case it becomes useful further down the line. Just in time learning is when we learn something at the moment it becomes useful.

My learning: Learn the basics just in case. Learn the details just in time.

For learning the basics I’d suggest simply typing the slash / command and exploring the menu of different Notion blocks.

For the details, I’d pick a use case and work toward a vision. Think about some friction in your life, or something you’d like to track, or an event you want to prepare for. And learn while actively problem-solving.

Learn by collaging: Frankenstein your features

Notion’s template marketplace can be overwhelming.

In my opinion it’s saturated with some good, but also a lot of uninspired examples of what we can accomplish.

My learning: Use templates as educational resources, rather than out-of-the-box solutions. Never completely adopt something someone else has built. Instead, pick templates apart. Ask yourself what you like, what you don’t, and what you’d want more of. Grab inspiration, styling, and components, then stitch them together into something of your own.

Learn by studying: Notion academy

I’ve used Notion academy myself, but it’s one that I would have used if it was available when I learned Notion originally. Until recently, I didn’t even know that it existed.

My learning: Share knowledge even if you think it’s basic or common knowledge. Everybody has blanks to fill.

Learn by digging: Be an explorer

When I was a kid I wanted to become a diggerologist. Better known to most adults as an archaeologist. And I’ve found that it helps to bring that mindset into Notion.

My learning: There is a particular type of person who especially benefits from Notion. And that type of person is one who likes to excavate. They explore fearlessly and try to dig up lesser-known features and use cases. It helps to channel that person.

Keeping up to date

Keep up to date by watching: Find a medium that works

Everybody has their ideal learning style.

Some people are visual learners. Some prefer audio.

Learning by doing is my go to, but I also enjoy a good video guide every so often. Here are some of my favourite Notion creators on YouTube:

Matthias Frank | Thomas Frank | Jeff Su

Keep up to date with Notion’s goings-on: Check out their changelog

It wasn’t until I started working in tech that I was introduced to the concept of a changelog, so I’m not sure how common knowledge this is, but many platforms maintain a timeline list of all of the features that they’ve recently released.

My learning: One of the best ways to keep up with all the latest features is through Notion’s changelogs.

Keep up to date by following builders: Explore creators on X

In spite of being a controversial platform nowadays, I find that X has a thriving community of builders and product designers who love to share all the creative ways they use Notion.

My learning: Learn about new features and creative applications for Notion by following builders and designers on X.

Keep up to date by following Notion: Follow Notion

Since Notion has now built a reputation for releasing so many features so frequently, I find that they promote their releases a lot more vocally than other platforms.

My learning: An underrated way of keeping up with Notion is by simply following them on socials.

Keep up to date by listing: Save your favourite features

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when we’re constantly immersed in a barrage of new ideas, especially when we have a vague sense of what’s possible, but no concrete grasp of it.

My learning: Keep a list of new features and new experiments you want to play with. Paying attention to new releases and noting the ones that sound the most interesting to us makes it a lot easier to pick our playgrounds each day. The fact that it’s written down makes it much more approachable

That’s all for this one, thank you for reading! We’re officially halfway through my apparently never-ending list of 100 lessons. Next week will feature my favourite learnings so far on how to structure information so it’s intuitive for us.

See you then 👋😁

Subscribe now

Every one of us has a story to tell about how we meticulously planned out a feature, only to despair when we watched our users poke and prod our product in ways we never considered possible.

To see our thoughtfully crafted flows fail as they’re pushed to their limits can be a humiliating humbling experience.

But we don’t take it personally.

Because we’ve trained ourselves to forgive our users.

Forgiveness is an essential skill for product design. It’s a skill we actively embody by building it into our apps. It’s a trait that all of our favourite products possess.

Imagine, for example, an unforgiving version of your favourite note-taking app that doesn’t offer an undo button. Or an uncompromising streaming platform that forces us to finish watching every movie we dare to start.

Everybody makes mistakes. And it’s a designer’s job to anticipate those mistakes and make sure their app forgives them.

So what does it mean for an app to be forgiving? What forgiving features does Notion offer? And how can we design even more forgiveness into our Notion pages?

There are a few ways an app can featurize forgiveness:

• Predictive forgiveness: Features that let people explore potential futures

• Preventative forgiveness: Features to stop mistakes before they happen

• Reversible forgiveness: Features that let people to rewind time

The goal of this post is to walk through the ways Notion has built in forgiveness and how we can create more forgiving pages ourselves.

Predictive forgiveness: Looking ahead

Predictive forgiveness provides users a peek into a possible future they can expect to have. It models their expectations and projects them into a safe environment where they can experiment freely.

Consider, for example, websites that sell eyeglasses. Many now let us test how frames would look on our face using augmented reality. We’re able to avoid buying an unflattering pair by experimenting with varying versions of our future.

When designing predictive forgiveness into our Notion space, it helps to ask:

• What version of this feature or page do I hope to end up with?

• How can I get a taste of that version before I commit?

Here’s how I’ve learned to incorporate it into my own environment:

Duplicate playgrounds: Clone your workspace

When I want to make major architectural updates to existing systems, I duplicate them and make all my changes in the fresh copy first.

While I’ll also discuss ways to revert pages to previous formats, I find that working on draft branches from the start makes me feel safer and, as a result, more ambitious with experimentation.

Things I tend to duplicate before committing changes: pages, databases, database properties, and views.

Starter playgrounds: Test before committing

Sometimes when I want to introduce more complex systems in my spaces I’ll also create a draft page for experimentation.

Honestly, I was more prone to doing this before I had access to Notion AI, so I tend to dive in head first these days. But I found this particularly handy when I wanted to create systems of interconnected databases. There were several times when starting small with a few entries in a couple databases helped me course correct when my original plans weren’t actually feasible.

In practice: How to create duplicate playgrounds

1. Duplicate the thing you’re about to “operate” on:
    - For a page: open ••• (top right) → Duplicate.
    - For a database: open the database as a full page → ••• → Duplicate.
2. Rename the copy so you can’t confuse it (ex. `Playground — Life Blocks (copy)`), and add an obvious emoji like 🧪.
3. In the duplicate, perform the risky change first:
    - new views and filters
    - new relations
    - property edits (especially formulas)
4. Stress test the clone:
    - add 5–10 dummy entries
    - try the edge cases you know you’ll hit
5. Only after it behaves the way you want, repeat the change in the “real” system.

Visualize: Start with a written or visual plan

One of my biggest Notion vices is building without thinking things through. I’ll get excited about a new page or feature and start creating right away.

But I iterate far more on those impulsive pages than on ones where I’ve written out a plan detailing exactly what I hope to achieve and how I’ll design it.

Preventative forgiveness: Protecting the present

When it comes to preventative forgiveness, the goal is to catch mistakes in and around the moment of them happening and to guide users toward a better course of action.

When done well, using an app should feel like bowling with gutter guards, a streamlined flow with protections in place to prevent unintentionally veering away from our goal.

Questions to consider when designing our systems:

• What are the weakest links in this process?

• What is my primary goal and what guardrails should be in place to keep me focused?

• How can I course correct myself?

Here’s how I’ve gone about preventing mistakes in my own space:

Lay of the land: Understand safe vs. risky actions

For a new user, it’s easy to freeze up when all actions feel equally risky. So it helps to get a lay of the land and identify which actions are safe, risky, and downright dangerous.

In Notion, most actions are safe and easily reversible, but there have been some hidden landmines that’ve surprised me in the past.

Here’s a quick roundup:

• Mostly safe, but can get annoying (reversible, but you can lose time)

  • Editing view filters/sorts/groupings: Reversible by undoing and using version histories.

  • Duplicating databases: I’ve often found myself confused about what exactly happens when I duplicate a database. Are the updates linked to the original or is every page completely separate?

    Here’s what I’ve learned.

    When duplicating a database, Notion makes a new database (with its own schema + views) and duplicates of all of the existing pages.

    The original database and its pages stay untouched.

    • How to do it safely: Open the database as a full page → ••• → Duplicate → immediately rename the copy something loud like 🧪 Playground — Payments DB (copy).

    • Sanity check (so you don’t mistake a linked view for a clone): In the copy, open any row/page → look at the page breadcrumb. If it points to your new “Playground” database, you’re editing the clone. If it points to the original database, you’re in a linked view.

    • Rule of thumb: Duplicate when you want a branch you can break. Create a linked view when you want to view or edit the same data in multiple places.

• Risky

  • Moving pages between databases: Data may not map cleanly to the new schema (especially when you have Select properties with a lot of tags). You can end up with empty properties or lost structure.

  • Editing formulas: Can accidentally break dashboards and views that rely on that computed value. Reversible, but debugging can be a time-sink.

  • Rebuilding relations: Removing relation values is easy. Reconstructing it can be hard.

Offline mode: My panic attack

As of writing this, offline mode is a pretty new feature for Notion, and my first experience with it caught me off guard.

I was on a five-hour train ride home to Toronto from a work trip to Montreal. I forgot to connect to my phone’s hotspot, and I was three hours into writing a Substack post.

I navigated away from my draft to refer to another page in Notion. And when I returned, my heart dropped. The page was virtually blank, and the top corner read “Last edited 3 hours ago.”

It’s been a while since I’ve referred to the stages of grief, but based on my experience, I’m guessing it’s something like paralysis, denial, anger, and agonizing hopelessness.

Out of desperate optimism, I quickly linked my laptop to my phone’s hotspot, hoping all my work would reappear. Instead, I stared in horror at the snowy abyss of my blank page.

Until I saw a flash on my screen.

That “Last edited 3 hours ago” changed to “Last edited 2 hours and 40 minutes ago.”

After that, every several seconds, remnants of my work popped onto the screen as Notion’s lag slowly caught up to my version of reality.

It was a big lesson learned: Offline Notion is like a turtle. It’s got a shell to protect us and keep our work safe, but it operates at its own pace, so don’t panic if it’s not sprinting to catch up.

Reversible forgiveness: Looking back

Imagine being able to rewind time. Whenever you blundered or erred, you could simply turn back the clock and undo what you did.

It’s a superpower many of us daydream about and it’s also the reality that a well-designed app offers: thoughtful ways of preserving and restoring histories we might want to return to.

Whether it’s undo buttons or version histories, reversible forgiveness is already provided all throughout Notion, but we can also secure our work with some additional backtracking strategies.

Here are a few of my favourite ways to turn back time in Notion:

Workspace backup: Clone the entire workspace

This one is the equivalent of having a backup bunker somewhere in case of an apocalypse and it brings me so much peace of mind.

Every few months, I download my entire Notion workspace. That way, if something catastrophic happens to Notion or its servers, I have a copy of all of my information on my own device to return to.

In practice: How to backup your workspace

Goal: export a copy of your entire workspace so you have an offline “restore point.”

1. In Notion, open **Settings**:
    - Desktop: Notion (top left) → Settings.
    - Web: sidebar → Settings.
2. Go to **Export content** (or “Export all workspace content,” depending on your plan/UI).
3. Choose export format:
    - **Markdown & CSV** = easiest to read/migrate later.
    - **HTML** = easiest to browse like a website.
4. Choose scope:
    - Export **Entire workspace** (not just “Current page”).
    - If you see toggles for “Include subpages” and “Include databases,” turn them on.
5. Click **Export**, then wait for the download link/file.
6. Save the export somewhere deliberate:
    - a folder like `Notion Backups/YYYY-MM`.
    - optionally also a cloud drive.
7. (Optional but smart) Put a recurring reminder on your calendar: monthly or quarterly.

Note: this backup won’t preserve every Notion-native behavior (like live databases exactly as-is), but it gives you a durable archive of your content.

Version history: Rewind time

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve stared blankly at a page I’d just been working on, wondering how I messed it up so badly. That’s why discovering Notion’s version history has been a godsend.

In practice: How to access your version history

1. Open the page you’re worried about.
2. Open the page menu (••• in the top right).
3. Click Version history.
4. Click through earlier snapshots until you find the “before.”
5. Restore that version (or copy what you need back into the current version).

Archive instead of delete: Try soft deletion

At the bottom of many of my pages, you’ll find a toggle with a skull icon labeled “Archive.” Inside, you might discover old database versions with hundreds of entries or previous page iterations I’ve hoarded.

While Notion offers version histories, they don’t last forever for most of us.

Version history retention based on plan

- Free: 7 days
- Plus: 30 days
- Business: 90 days
- Enterprise: Unlimited

So if a page might be useful later but doesn’t fit my current system, I archive it.

Similarly, when I want to test a big update to any of my databases, I’ll create a new one and archive the old version just in case the new one doesn’t work out.

That’s it for my learnings about protecting ourselves from those nefarious Notion missteps, but stay tuned for next time when I explore my favourite ways to learn about Notion and its tools without feeling overwhelmed.

See you then! 👋

Subscribe now

As the number of pages in our workspace increases, so does the time and effort it takes to find what we’re looking for. So by putting thought into how we input and retrieve information we can expedite the time it takes to get what we want.

Here’s an overview of my learned lessons in this post:

Routing information

• Route information intuitively: Define building blocks

• Route information automatically: Define where everything should go

• Route attention: Create cover pages

• Route through time: Schedule pages to resurface

Formatting information

• Database views: Create a frontend for raw data

• Titles: Choose words wisely

• Gallery: Put important pages in a gallery

• Toggles: Take advantage of toggles

Searching information

• Search globally

• Search databases

• Search pages

Route information intuitively

When information architecture is intuitive, we don’t need to remember where things are. We simply ask ourselves where it makes sense for it to be and we’ll find it every time.

Route information intuitively: Define building blocks

Since I started organizing my Notion within a life block system, I’ve not only found it easier to find things, but I’ve noticed that the way I think about my life feels more balanced and intentional.

My life blocks are based off of The Wheel of Life, a proposed taxonomy for categorizing the major building blocks of our life. I dwindled down the official version into categories that resonate more with how I view my life: body, environment, mind, operations, and social.

The idea is that by creating these 5 root pages in Notion, every system and every page I have will naturally fall into one of those blocks and, as a result, they’ll be intuitive to find.

In practice: Setting up a root page

1. Add a new root page: Create a top level page by clicking the `+ Add new` under the “Private” label in the side panel. I titled mine “Life Blocks”.

2. Create a gallery db: In that page, I created a new database by typing `/gallery` and I also titled that database "Life Blocks".

3. Add building blocks: I added 5 pages to my gallery and titled them with my blocks: "Body", "Environment", "Mind", "Operations", and "Social".

4. Enable sub-items: In the settings of that gallery, I enabled Sub-items with the “Display options” set to “Card property”. This will enable any subpages to display in the card, creating what I use as my global table of contents view for my entire Notion workspace.

5. Use as table of contents: I copy the link to that gallery and create a linked view by pasting it to the top of any page I visit most often. This way I can access all of my major pages and subpages in just a couple of clicks.

Route information automatically: Define where everything should go

In my last chapter about making Notion easy to access, I mentioned my latest pet project Spark Notes: my intention to create a quick capture tool that routes notes to their proper destination.

I’m happy to report that it was a success! I essentially created a set of instructions that tells a Notion AI agent “when you receive x type of note, send it to page y”.

Now, whenever I want to quickly record a note, I double-tap the back of my phone to trigger an input field. I submit my note and an AI agent takes it and sends it to the place in my Notion where it belongs.

I’ll dive deeper into the mechanics of that pipeline in another post, but my main learnings from that project were two-fold:

1. The first lesson I learned is that I take notes faster when I don’t have to think about where to put them. Because I now have someone else who knows where my information belongs, I no longer have to think about that myself. I just have to enter it in and my Notion agent takes care of the rest for me.

2. The second lesson I learned is that I take more notes when I don’t have to place them directly. My process before was: open phone, open Notion app, find page I want through multiple navigation clicks, and enter my note. A few too many steps for my taste. But now I have reduced that to: open my phone, tap the back, send a note. The fact that this process is so friction-free has made me take even more notes.

Route your attention: Create cover pages

A lesson I like to keep in mind when designing new pages is the importance of reducing “time to impact”. It’s a product principle a colleague of mine introduced me to about how we can increase the chance a person will stick with an app if we enable them to experience its benefit sooner rather than later.

When it comes to architecting a Notion page, reducing time to impact means surfacing the most important information to what I call the cover page — what we see when we first land on a page before scrolling.

In practice: Value-driven cover pages

I can convince myself that anything is worth working on if I'm able to tie it to some deeper value I feel strongly about. So oftentimes, in my workspace, I'll use my cover page to highlight the reason a page is important to me.

For example, at the very top of my Body block page I remind myself how ergonomics and aesthetics are the body values I care most about. And at the top of my Social block I remind myself how relationships that are uplifting and built on alignment are the ones that I want to prioritize in my life.

Figuring out what information belongs at the very top of a page has been a meaningful way to remind myself what information is most worth finding.

Route through time: Schedule pages to resurface

Sometimes the best way to find information is to let it find us.

I love recording information about my life, but I hate the idea of that information being siloed in some server somewhere, never to be seen again.

Some of my favourite systems have been ones where I’ve scheduled pages to resurface themselves after some time.

In practice

For example, my daily journal surfaces my entries from one, two, three years ago to the day, and so on. So if today is Feb 22, 2026, then my journal will also show me my entries on Feb 22, 2025, Feb 22, 2024, etc.

Because of that, I get a daily glimpse of how much growth I've experienced over the years and a fun conversation topic anytime I remind my partner what we were doing on that day the years before.


To set up a "Years to the day" view

1. Go to a database in your workspace that already has a date property (ex. any calendar you already use)

2. Create a new Formula property and title it something like "Years to the day".

3. Copy and paste the following formula into the formula property:(formatDate(prop("Date"), "D/M") == formatDate(now(), "D/M")) and (formatDate(prop("Date"), "L") != formatDate(now(), "L"))

4. Create a new List view and add a filter to show pages where the Years to the day property is checked. 

Format information thoughtfully

I’ve already got a whole chapter prepared on how to format our pages so that they’re easier to read, but in this chapter, I’ll highlight some of my favourite ways to format information specifically for the sake of finding it more easily.

Database views: Create a frontend for raw data

A view in Notion is a way of converting raw data into different insights. I find it helpful to think about them as mini products — practical tools, each with their own duty. And as with the creation of any good product, it helps to consider each one’s value proposition.

• My approach: Some product questions I like to ask myself when creating or auditing my database views:

  • What raw data should I highlight?

  • What insight does it afford me?

  • What action does it motivate me to do?

• Example: Say I’m creating a movie database to track every film I watch.

  • Raw data: All of the information about each movie that I might consider collecting:

    Movie name, Genre, Main actors, Production studio, Platform used, Release date, Director, Synopsis, Movie poster, Date watched

  • Views: The mini products I might want to create from that raw data:

    • View 1

      • Data to highlight: Movie name, movie poster, date watched, personal rating

      • Type of view: Gallery

      • Insight afforded: Overview of movies watched and enjoyed

      • Action to motivate: Look back on year

    • View 2

      • Data to highlight: Platform used, date watched, personal rating

      • Type of view: Bar or pie chart

      • Insight afforded: Most and least used platforms

      • Action to motivate: Cut back on least used platforms

    • View 3

      • Data to highlight: Genre, date watched, personal rating

      • Type of view: Bar or pie chart

      • Insight afforded: Most enjoyed genres

      • Action to motivate: Seek out more movies from fav genres

Titles: Choose your words wisely

I’ve learned that a good title can help me remember a lot about a page without even looking at it.

I was inspired by the show Friends and how they start all of their episode titles with “The one...” (ex. “The one where Joey speaks French”, “The One with All the Rugby”).

For my daily journal, I started doing the same thing a few years ago, and I titled all of mine “The Day I...”, followed by a short list of the major unique events of that day (ex. “The day I went to the miniature museum”, “The day I tried cross country skiing”).

Now, when I re-encounter a day title, memories from that day are triggered without even looking at the details of the page.

Gallery navigation: Put most important pages in a gallery

As the saying goes, an image is worth a thousand words. Which explains why I’ve found that I can navigate through pages a lot faster when I have images to anchor the page.

On each of my life block pages I place a gallery of its subpages right at the top so that I can get to where I want to go even faster.

Toggles: Take advantage of toggles

I find that it helps me navigate through pages much more quickly when I’ve divided my page into toggleable sections. Especially when I’ve combined those toggles with headers, which we can do by creating a toggle with a heading.

Search information easily

Sometimes the best way to find information is not by going to it, but by having it come to us.

Search globally: Using the global search from the side panel is how I find info most frequently. And it’s even more functional now that Notion added a page preview feature. Here are some quick learnings that have come in handy for me:

• Accessing global search: On desktop, we can access it through the side panel using the search button, or we can use the very handy keyboard shortcut: Command K

• Opening pages in new tabs: Holding Command while clicking a page will open it in a new tab. Similarly, when a page is highlighted (say you were navigating through pages using your arrow keys), clicking Command Enter will open it in a new tab.

• Copying links: Another handy keyboard shortcut is Command L. When a page is highlighted in the search results, using that keyboard shortcut will copy the link to your clipboard.

• Narrowing down: It can sometimes help to use the filters under the search bar. Especially, if you took advantage of something like the life block system. Because in that case, even if you forgot the exact location of a page, you’ll no doubt remember which block it belongs to.

• Quotes: Use quotes to search for exact strings, as opposed to key words.

Search databases: Sometimes we might be looking for a specific page in a database. In those situations, it can be helpful and faster to use the database-specific search. Here’s my main learning that I almost always use:

• Keep a raw version handy: When using the search from the database toolbar, I find it helpful to have a raw database view on hand. A raw database view is a simple table view with no filters or groupings, and all of the database properties set to visible. If I ever need to find something in a database, I’ve found that to be the only view that guarantees I’m supplying the richest dataset to my filter.

Search pages: Finally, when we are inside of a page and we’re looking for specific information, here are a couple of basic features I appreciate Notion for having put some extra thought into:

• Command F: I have a special appreciation for the thought that Notion’s UX designers put into their custom page search (command F) feature. Not only does it perform its basic duty of finding text matches in a page, but it also allows users to replace text.

• Table of contents: We have access to two types of table of contents on a page: floating and inline. From what I can tell the floating one on the right side of a page is only available on desktop, so if we want to give ourselves an upper hand on our phone, then I’ve found it helpful to enable an inline one on particularly long pages. To do that we simply have to type /toc at the top of our page and ensure that we’ve made use of proper #, ##, ### headings throughout our page.

We’ve reached the end of my learnings lineup for today, but stay tuned for next time when I revisit my favourite ways to reverse mistakes.

See you soon! 👋😁

Subscribe now

One principle I like to keep at the top of my mind is how fewer clicks = smoother experiences.

You know how people suggest that if we want to stay consistent with our gym habits, we should set up our morning the night before? Sleep in our gym clothes, place our shoes by the door, fill up our water, and pack our gym bag. So all we have to do in the morning is put on our shoes and go.

That’s the goal of this chapter: to make it easy to get into Notion so we can get straight to our goals as seamlessly as possible.

This chapter holds 7 levels of level-ups I use to reduce the number of times I have to touch, click, or scroll on a screen to get into Notion.

(The last one is my current pet project: my attempt to bypass Notion’s front door to get information in even faster.)

Level 1 : Streamline access to the Notion app

Starting off simply at level 1 with downloading the Notion app.

Download the Notion app on desktop: Up until recently, I preferred the browser experience more than the desktop app. But I’ve noticed that the app has become feature-rich to the point where it’s adopted many browser-like capabilities, like the ability to open multiple tabs and windows. It also has offline mode, so when the goal is to make Notion easier to access, being able to open it without an internet connection is a big win.

Notion desktop app

1. Go to <https://www.notion.com/download>
2. Download Notion for macOS or Windows
3. Open the installer and complete setup
4. Sign in to your Notion account 

Download the Notion app on mobile: I’m not a big fan of using Notion on my phone. I find it cumbersome, especially when I want to edit pages. But having it in my pocket as a reference tool for quick page lookups has been extremely handy.

Notion mobile app

1. Open the App Store (iPhone) or Google Play Store (Android)
2. Search "Notion"
3. Install the Notion app
4. Open Notion and sign in

Level 2: Streamline access to Notion pages

I have a collection of root Life Block pages (which I’ll elaborate on more in my next chapter about making it easy to find information). But the tl;dr is that they serve as my Notion portals. Any page I want to find can be easily accessed in only a few clicks from each page. So it’s important to me to surface my Life Block pages and make them the entryways to my Notion space.

Pin important pages to the side panel: I’ve added custom navigation in my app by pinning each Life Block to the side panel.

Notion side panel

1. Open Notion on desktop
2. Navigate to a page you want instant access to (e.g., a Life Block hub)
3. Click the ⭐ (Favourite) in the top right
4. Repeat for your other "home base" pages
5. In the left sidebar, find the "Favourites" section
6. Drag-and-drop favourites to reorder them

Add favicon-only bookmarks to Chrome: I’ve turned my Chrome browser into a minimal launchpad for my Life Blocks.

Browser bookmark bank

1. In Chrome, navigate to a Notion page you want easy access to
2. Drag the icon next to the URL into the bookmarks bar (my vid shows how to enable your bookmarks bar if it isn't already)
3. Right click the newly added bookmark


Use favicon-only bookmarks

4. Select `Edit`
5. Delete the Name, so that you're left with a tidy text-free collection

Pin important pages to the app top bar: I’ve mimicked my Chrome bookmarks bar in the app itself. Even though I already have access to my Life Blocks in my side panel, sometimes the side panel is collapsed. Having them pinned to the top of my app ensures just one less click.

Notion pinned tabs

1. Open Notion on desktop
2. Open a page you return to often
3. Right-click the page in the topbar
4. Click "Pin tab"

Add the “Favourites” widget to iPhone: I’ve also added a version of a bookmarks bar on my phone using the Notion Favourites widget allowing me to jump right into the Life Block page I need at any given moment.

iPhone favourites widget

1. Favourite pages you want to bookmark using the Notion side panel steps from above
2. Press and hold iPhone screen until everything jiggles
3. Click `Edit` in the top left corner
4. Click `Add Widget`
5. Search “Notion”
6. Swipe to find Favourites widget and add it

Add the “Recents” widget to iPhone: Sometimes it can be helpful to jump back into whatever page I was just using. That’s where the Recents widget comes in.

iPhone recents widget

1. Press and hold iPhone screen until everything jiggles
2. Click `Edit` in the top left corner
3. Click `Add Widget`
4. Search “Notion”
5. Swipe to find Recents widget and add it

Add the “Page” widget to iPhone: For scenarios where I really want to bring a specific page to the foreground, I would add that page alone to my home screen.

iPhone page widget

1. Make sure the page you want has a memorable title
2. Press and hold your Notion app until your iPhone Home Screen jiggles
3. In the bottom of the menu, tap the second icon next to the grid
4. Tap and hold to setup your page widget
5. Search and select the page you want to add to your Home Screen

Add page shortcuts on iPhone: This is an alternative to the iPhone page widget option above for when I need to be a bit more space-efficient. Saving a page as a shortcut creates a smaller icon option, comparable to other apps.

iPhone page shortcuts

1. Open Apple Shortcuts
2. Tap "+" to create a new shortcut
3. Tap "Add Action"
4. Search for "Notion"
5. Choose "Open page"
6. Tap "Page" and select the Notion page you want
7. Tap the shortcut name at the top → Rename (e.g., "Open 2026")
8. Tap "Done"
9. Add to Home Screen:
  - Tap the share icon → "Add to Home Screen"
10. Add to iPhone widgets:
  - Add the "Shortcuts" widget and pick this shortcut

Configure Notion to open by double-tapping on the back of your iPhone: For those of us who haven’t quite gotten around to spring-cleaning our phone home screens, it can be a bit difficult to track down the Notion app. One solution I’ve tried is enabling my iPhone’s Back Tap feature. By tapping the back of my phone twice, I’ve configured it so that Notion opens.

iPhone back tap

1. Open iPhone’s Shortcuts app
2. Click `Library` from the bottom tabs
3. Select the Notion app
4. Press and hold `Open page`
5. Click `Notion Page`
6. Search for Notion page you want to open with the Back Tap feature
7. Navigate to `Settings` on the iPhone
8. Click `Accessibility` 
9. Click `Touch`
10. Click `Back Tap`
11. Select Notion shortcut that was just created
12. Tap the back of your phone a couple time et voila

Make use of Notion’s global search: Perhaps the most efficient way to get to any page in Notion is by using the global search feature. Teleport to any page by typing instead of navigating.

Notion global search

Desktop
1. Open Notion
2. Press Command + K (Mac) or Ctrl + K (Windows)
3. Type the page name (or a keyword inside the page)
4. Use arrow keys to select the result
5. Press Enter to open

Mobile
1. Open Notion
2. Tap Search (magnifying glass)
3. Type the page name or keyword
4. Tap the result to open

Level 3: Streamline access to Notion blocks

Learn a few essential keyboard shortcuts

Since I mostly use Notion on desktop, keyboard shortcuts have saved me a lot of time and effort.

We can open a list of Notion’s keyboard shortcuts in the app by pressing (Command Alt /) or by going into the side panel clicking the ? icon in the bottom left corner. Clicking More and clicking Keyboard shortcuts.

Here are some of my favourites:

• (/) This is the master of all commands that summons the menu of any block we want

• (> space) Create a toggle list

• (- space) Create a bullet list

• (Command F) Search a page

• (Command D) Duplicate current block

• (Command E) Create an inline code block

• (# space) Create level 1 heading

• (## space) Create level 2 heading

• (### space) Create level 3 heading

• ([] space) Create checkbox

Level 4: Streamline access to Notion AI

Bookmark Notion AI: Notion AI has been my favourite tool lately, so adding it to my Chrome bookmarks bar was a no-brainer.

Browser AI bookmark

1. Navigate to the Notion page I want to save in Chrome
2. Drag the icon next to the URL into the bookmarks bar
3. Right click the newly added bookmark
4. Select `Edit`
5. Delete the Name, so that I’m left with a tidy text-free collection

Add Notion AI to iPhone lock screen: I’ve also made it easy to access Notion AI from my iPhone Lock Screen, so it is one click away.

Notion AI widget

1. Wake iPhone to the Lock Screen
2. Press and hold the Lock Screen until the wallpaper gallery appears
3. Tap "Customize"
4. Tap "Lock Screen" (not Home Screen)
5. Tap the widget area (below the time)
6. Scroll or search for "Notion"
7. Tap the "Notion AI" widget
8. Tap the "X" to close the widget picker
9. Tap "Done"

Level 5: Streamline access to your workflows

Sometimes the best way to turn something into a habit is to take advantage of friction:

• remove friction that gets in our way

• add friction that makes it harder to fall back to what we usually do.

I’ve found it helpful to think about which of my apps are competing with Notion, and to try to consolidate them or replace them completely.

Embed Notion Calendar: I’ve been drawn to this idea of intentionally introducing helpful friction lately. One way I’ve done this is by removing my calendar from my bookmarks bar and embedding it directly into my Notion homepage. That way I’ve made it a natural part of my daily flow to visit Notion to plan my day. And by doing that I’ve also reduced the number of apps I have to visit each day.

Embed Notion calendar

1. Open Notion Calendar in the web
2. Open the calendar view you want
3. Copy the share link / URL for that calendar view
4. Go to the Notion page you want as your home base
5. Paste the link
6. Choose "Embed"
7. Resize the embed so you can see more context

Level 6: Streamline access to quick capture

Capture with the Notion web clipper: Honestly, I tend to use Reader Readwise as my go-to web capture tool. But given the lesson I learned above about streamlining access to my workflows, I want to give Notion’s Web Clipper a solid try.

Notion web clipper

1. Open Chrome
2. Go to the Chrome Web Store
3. Search "Notion Web Clipper"
4. Select the official Notion Web Clipper extension
5. Click "Add to Chrome" → "Add extension"
6. Pin it so it is always visible:
  - Click the puzzle icon (Extensions)
  - Click the pin next to "Notion Web Clipper"

Quick test (proof it works)
7. Open any article
8. Click the Notion Web Clipper icon
9. Choose a destination (page or database)
10. Click "Save"

Optional: make it absurdly easy
11. Put your default destination as an "Inbox" database (if you use one)
12. Process later, don’t decide in the moment

Level 7: Streamline access to quick input

Finally, my latest pet project: my Notion ⚡️ Spark Notes ⚡️ workflow.

Capture quick notes with a custom note taker

Mixing and mingling my own lessons above, I want to create a quick capture tool that makes it friction-free to record notes.

My goals

• Consolidate competitors: Right now, I use the Apple Notes app to quickly jot down most of my in-the-moment ideas. I want to make Notion my go-to tool for that.

• Double back tap: Right now, my double back tap opens my Notion to my Life Blocks page. I want to replace that with a new shortcut that lets me quickly enter and submit a note.

• Shortcuts: Because I’m in the Apple ecosystem, I want to take better advantage of the Shortcuts app. I want to get it to direct my Spark Notes into an inbox database for future processing.

• Notion agents: I’ve recently been given access to Notion’s beta Agents feature which, to my understanding, should allow me to configure an AI to process my each of my Spark Notes and redirect them from my inbox into a more appropriate page.

Example user flow (mobile): I double-tap the back of my phone → an input field appears → I enter “I just watched the movie Christine and thought it was excellent” → I click submit → that note gets saved to an inbox database → my Notion agent is triggered and processes that note → it determines that it should make a new entry in my Movies database with the relevant information about that movie (title, actors, studio) and assign it my grading of “Excellent”.

Example user flow (desktop): I type a newly created global keyboard shortcut → an input field appears → … the rest happens the same as above

Here’s how I’m planning it out:

A) Notion setup

Create inbox database (where all spark notes will initially be stored)
1. Create a database in Notion called something like ⚡ Spark Notes Inbox
2. Add these properties (names must match exactly):
  - Title (default title property)
  - Status (Select) with options: Unprocessed & Processed

Create integration (this allows the Apple shortcut to create Notion pages)
3. Go to https://www.notion.so/my-integrations → New integration:
  - Name: Spark Notes Integration
4. Copy the Internal integration secret.
5. In the integration page, click Content access → Add pages:
6. Select your ⚡ Spark Notes Inbox database.
7. Copy your database_id (the long string for the database).

B) Apple Shortcut

8. Open Shortcuts app in mobile → New Shortcut.
9. Add action: Ask for Input
  - Type: Text
  - Prompt: Spark note
10. Add action: Text
11. Paste the following JSON (replace the database_id; keep everything else):

{
  "parent": {
    "database_id": "YOUR_DATABASE_ID_HERE"
  },
  "properties": {
    "Title": {
      "title": [
        {
          "text": {
            "content": ""
          }
        }
      ]
    },
    "Status": {
      "select": {
        "name": "Unprocessed"
      }
    }
  }
}

12. In that JSON Text block, tap inside the quotes for "content": "" and insert the blue variable:
  - Ask for Input
13. Add action: Get Contents of URL
  - URL: https://api.notion.com/v1/pages
  - Method: POST
  - Headers:
    - Authorization → Bearer YOUR_SECRET
    - Notion-Version → 2022-06-28
    - Content-Type → application/json
    - Request Body: File
      - For File: choose the variable Text (your JSON text)
14. Run the shortcut once and confirm a new page appears in the Spark Notes Inbox database in Notion.

C) Mac trigger (global keyboard shortcut)

15. On Mac, open Shortcuts app → select your shortcut → click the ⓘ Details button.
16. Enable:
  - Use as Quick Action
17. Click Add Keyboard Shortcut and assign a keyboard combo. I used Control + Option + N (⌃⌥N)
18. Confirm it’s enabled in macOS:
  System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Services → Shortcuts
19. Ensure Notion capture is checked and shows ⌃⌥N.
20. Test anywhere by pressing ⌃⌥N (or whatever hotkey you chose) → the capture prompt appears → submit → entry lands in Notion.

D) Notion agents

21. Under Agents in Notion side panel, click + New agent
22. Write a prompt that instructs it to process notes and direct them to appropriate spaces in your Notion.
23. Set the Trigger to whenever a new note is added to the Spark Notes Inbox.
24. Save the Agent.
25. Test out the entire process with 

That’s all for this one, my fellow system-thinking psychos. Please lemme know if you’ve got any touch-less tips that’ve helped you save some seconds and I’ll keep you updated on how my final experiment goes!

In the next chapter, I’ll dive into some lessons I’ve learned about designing my Notion space to find information faster.

See you soon! 👋😁

When I was first introduced to it in 2019, I fled back to the cherished OneNote system I’d dutifully created. But the seed had been planted. A couple months later I returned with a determination to give it a proper go.

Since then, I’ve become the Notion guy in my circles. I track, I document, I dashboard, and I design personal products to sandpaper any and all of my life’s frictions.

My sleep tracker has a personality. My finance tracker has values. I design my systems to make me feel a certain way when I visit them. I treat Notion less like a tool and more like a space I’m building a relationship with.

I tried to write a simple post sharing a few tips for new Notion users. But unbounded ideation got the best of me, and I ended up excavating over 100 lessons from seven years of experimentation. So this officially became a 10-part series. This is chapter 1.

I’m Lamar. A product designer, developer, psych grad, and recovering self-quantifier. I use Notion for everything from meal prep and movie tracking to re-architecting my memory and aligning my life with my values. My hope is that anyone who reads this walks away with at least one spark they’ve never considered before.

In my Notion starter kit series, you’ll find my favourite Notion learnings over the years which can be summed up by the following 10 lessons:

Make it useful: The current post about how to get the most use out of Notion

Make it easy to access: How to streamline your setup to enable faster input

Make it easy to find information: How to design your space to find information faster

Make it easy to reverse mistakes: How to make mistakes safely

Make it easy to learn: How to learn its tools without feeling overwhelmed

Make it easy to read: How to structure information so it’s intuitive

Make it easy to maintain: How to stay consistent with less effort

Make it easy to start: How to find your best use cases

Make it pretty: How to make it aesthetic

Make it smart: How to level it up

Make it useful

The best tools are mirrors. Reflecting back the problems we have and opportunities we hope for.

I’ve built a lot of Notion systems for myself over the years.

Some of them have still got have greased up gears turning like clockwork. Others have rusted out entirely.

The ones that survived were the most persuasive. They knew how to appeal to me. They were the ones that aligned with what I actually cared about.

The sleep tracker that knows I dream of learning to lucid dream is the one who defeated the sleep tracker who supplied me with a sleep score every night.

The finance tracker that understands my value for financial confidence beat out the one who focused entirely on financial security.

Defining our version of ‘useful’ is the key to the success of any system.

The lessons below are the ones I’ve used to help me define it for myself.

Lesson 1

Personification: The power of personifying pages

Pages feel valuable when we give them life.

I’ve always loved giving life to the world around me. It was well into my teens that I felt compelled to thank my elevator for the ride up to my apartment.

Recently, I discovered I can also give life to Notion pages. And when I do give a page a taste of personhood a few things happen:

• It develops a personality

• It develops a perspective

• It develops a purpose

And we develop a stronger collaborative bond.

In practise

When I personify a page, I write:

- An introduction (in its voice)
- Its purpose (why it exists)
- Its responsibilities (what it’s accountable for)
- Its aspirations (what it dreams of becoming)

---

Example: Meet Lamar’s Sandman

- My purpose: I’m Lamar’s Sandman, it’s my goal to give him the dreams he dreams of having. One of Lamar’s most steadfast goals in life has been to learn to lucid dream. He realized that sleeping 8 hours a night means he’s sleeping 1/3 of each day, and therefore 1/3 of his life. He believes that by learning to lucid dream he’ll be able to reclaim that third of his life by continuing to live in his dream world.

- My responsibilities: Track his dreams: In his daily pages is a Dream catcher property where he wakes up every morning and attempts to record every dream he can remember. The act of recording his dreams has made him dream even more.

- My aspirations: Lucid dreaming focus: Work with him on more focused strategies for lucid dreaming, rather than just dreaming.

Lesson 2

Transformation: Don’t forget to feel

Designing for feeling is designing for function.

In the same way a walk in a forest makes me feel more grounded and a retreat under my blanket makes me feel safe, I try to engineer the visit to any system in my digital space to feel transformative.

The fact that a space can be designed to evoke any emotion is too powerful a tool to overlook.

In practise

- Pick an important page in your space.
- Ask “how do I want this page to make me feel?”
- Consider how you might design your system to better evoke that feeling.

---

Example: How a Financial Tracker could change based on the feeling it aims to foster

- Financial security: If I want to feel as though my finances are in tip-top shape, then I might design views to highlight my net worth and assets.

- Financial confidence: If I want to feel that regardless of what happens, I’ll have the skills needed to make money, then I might design views to highlight the variety of financial properties I have in the works.

Lesson 3

Neediness: Don’t design something that needs you more than you need it

We should get more than we give.

Breaking a streak is painful, but not more painful than the realization that I’m vulnerable to turning into one of the machines that I program.

Some of the hardest refactors I’ve done involved halting the habit of tracking something I’d been tracking for a while because I ultimately realized it wasn’t benefiting me enough.

In practise

1. Audit your inputs: Identify what information you add to your systems each day / week
2. Take notice if there are any systems that require you to spend too much time or effort for the service that they offer.

---

Example: Sleep tracker

For years, I was tracking the time I went to bed and the time I woke up. It was something small, but I was consistent. Until I realized that not only wasn’t I doing anything with that information, but my sleep was pretty stable overtime. I wasn’t really experiencing any notable friction around it that needed to be resolved.

Retiring that was a small slice of my morning and mind that I was able to reclaim for myself.

Lesson 4

Minimum valuable product: What if it could only do one thing

Good systems highlight the main ingredient.

I don’t consider myself to be a perfectionist. To me, that word implies holding myself to unreasonably high standards, which I don’t believe I do. However, I do often tend feel a strong force toward “just one more thing”.

I think of it like those recipes with an endless number of ingredients. Instead of just leaving well-enough alone, I can picture the cook tasting their dish and muttering, “just one more thing”. (Personally, I’m convinced that no recipe really needs that quarter teaspoon of coriander.)

I try to think about my systems in a similar way. Aiming not to confuse the focus with tiny tastes of distraction.

In practise

1. Select a page
2. List out its responsibilities
3. Sort them by order of impact / importance by asking yourself what is the one thing I need this page to do well?

Lesson 5

Value ties: Cultivate products that care

It’s easier to care about a system that cares about something.

I mentioned earlier in a previous example, that one of my top goals in life is to learn to lucid dream. I, of course, created a Notion system that tracked my dreams. It morphed into a full Sleep Tracker: times I went to bed, times I woke up, the number of hours I slept per night, the dreams I remembered, whether those dreams were lucid. It came with data visualizations comparing my sleep across months, and study notes about official Sleep Quality Indexes and other extraneous sleep concepts.

I tracked my sleep data for months and ended up losing track of my main goal: lucid dreaming.

This is Goodhart’s Law in action: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. My system cared about sleep metrics. What I needed was a system that cared about lucid dreaming.

By giving a page or project a clear value, we determine the value we expect in return.

Goodhart’s law

Goodhart’s law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Imagine a person going to their doctor and being told that they’re at greater risk of a heart attack because of their high blood pressure. But instead of improving the lifestyle factors that caused their problem, they opt to reduce their blood pressure by gaming their numbers using a medication that lowers their resting heart rate. This is the warning of Goodhart’s law: it’s easy to lose sight of our priorities when we start chasing scores.

In practise

For any page with a purpose, ask yourself what that page would want for you if it cared about you.

---

Example: Netflix’s values

There are an endless number of angles to approach any product.

A Netflix that values constant attention ends its movies with a promise for a sequel.

A Netflix that values provoking critical thought ends with invitations to share video essays.

Same platform, different values, different outcomes.

Lesson 6

Deprivation test: Break your capture habit

It’s a good habit to build a habit of breaking habits.

I once came across the following tweet and it really resonated with me.

I’ve found that, if I’m not careful, I can too easily fall into an automatic routine of capturing information.

I used to record everything in my Daily Tracker. Every meal I ate. Every person I talked to. Every emotion I felt. Overwhelming details that felt deceptively productive to log.

But there were nights when I was too tired to add information. And those nights felt so much lighter. But also, a bit guilt-ridden, for missing the day.

Those are the kinds of signs I now listen out for.

When skipping feels liberating, that’s when it’s time to reevaluate whether our systems are still serving us, or whether we’ve devolved to serving our systems.

In practise

1. Pick a page or a system that’s been consuming too much of your time.
2. Abandon it for a week.
3. Return to it and reflect on how the week felt and how you now feel looking at your emptier space.

Lesson 7

Productization: What if you were to sell it tomorrow

We’re better at designing for others than for ourselves.

Whenever someone asks me for advice on their Notion setup, I feel the pressure to offer them something impactful.

I try to hone in on their ultimate goal and design the easiest setup from there.

But when working in my own pages, I often find myself letting my dreams run wild. What once began as a clear singular goal, falters into frantic fur ball of fun-to-have features.

I fall victim to Solomon’s paradox. The tendency to reason more wisely about other people’s problems than our own.

When the problem is ours, we get emotionally entangled. We fantasize more. When it’s someone else’s, we step back, see trade-offs, and give more balanced advice.

Now, when I notice one of my systems acquire a bit too many bells-and-whistles, I try treating it like a product I plan to sell. Forcing me to think like a consultant, rather than a creator.

In practise

Many of our pages and systems will feel useful to us. But something will still feel off. Some unknown friction. In those scenarios, I find it helpful to consider some of the following product questions:

- What are the pain points that this is solving for?

- What are the opportunities that this could unveil if it were working ideally?

- If I was to sell this as a template to someone, what instructions would I give them on how to use the page?

- If this page were stripped of all styling and formatting, how would I make it intuitive for someone to understand?

- If I broke this down into several features, which ones would people (and I) be most willing to pay for?

Lesson 8

Evolution: Knowing when it’s time to add

Don’t build for a version of yourself that doesn’t exist yet.

Features are deceptively opinionated and persuasive. The more we build, the more we want to build. But the more we do, the more we risk scope creep.

When I originally built out my Body Block (the system I use to facilitate everything related to my physical wellbeing), I created a page for every body related function I could think of: aesthetics, fitness, mobility, blood, gut, energy, flexibility…

My plan was to house a well-balanced system where everything could be goal-oriented and tracked.

But what I developed was an overly complex system of dozens of goals that weren’t my top priorities at that time in my life.

Most of that database became dusty.

I learned something so stupidly simple. The time to evolve a system is when you really need to.

Products love to have a vision of their future. But useful features don’t tend to look that far in advance.

In practise

My body block today: Instead of designating an entire page to each item in that long list of physical functions I mentioned, I now keep them as a simple bullet / toggle list and only convert them into pages when I’m ready to make them a priority in my life.

Lesson 9

Devolution: Knowing when it’s time to delete

Remove features to upgrade systems.

Subtraction Neglect describes people’s tendency to add when solving a problem, even when the better solution might be to take something away.

I used to track as much information about my habits as possible. I believed that the more we knew about ourselves the more we could improve our lives.

But the upkeep became so overwhelming that I found myself too tired to record anything.

When I pared that back and started recording the things that mattered to me most, I became much more consistent.

When something isn’t working, fight the instinct to add a new feature and ask what you can subtract instead.

In practise

Ask yourself:

- What’s one piece of information that I add to this system that has the smallest impact?

- What was the last feature I added? And how has it been living up to my expectations?

- What would it look like if I removed all the information at the bottom of my page?
  (I find that the least important info in my setup gets pushed to the basements, so that's often a good spot to start looking for opportunities to minimalize)

Lesson 10

Show it off: Give someone a tour

Brag about your work for better results.

When we walk someone through a system we’ve created, we are much more likely to uncover our blind spots and areas for improvement.

I dedicate so much effort to building out my spaces that I love talking to people about all the details I considered.

But it happens every-so-often that someone follows up by asking to see my Notion and I invariably start to feel self-conscious. I open it up and immediately start to see all of its flaws.

Even writing out this list of lessons has made me realize how much better my digital environment would be if I followed my own advice more devotedly.

So even if you don’t want to actually share your space with others, pretending to do it works too.

In practise

- Take some screenshots of your Notion workspace.

- Share them with me (I’d love to chat about how you’ve thought through your space! 😁)

That’s all for this one!

In summary, here are the lessons I mentioned in this chapter about how I’ve learned to get the most use out of my Notion:

• The best tools are mirrors. Reflecting back the problems we have and opportunities we hope for.

• Pages feel valuable when we give them life.

• Designing for feeling is designing for function.

• We should get more than we give.

• Good systems highlight the main ingredient.

• It’s easier to care about a system that cares about something.

• It’s a good habit to build a habit of breaking habits.

• We’re better at designing for others than for ourselves.

• Don’t build for a version of yourself that doesn’t exist yet.

• Remove features to upgrade systems.

• Brag about your work for better results.

In the next chapter, I’ll share a bunch of screenshots showing how I’ve streamlined my setup to enable faster input ⚡

See you next Sunday! 👋😁

📺 My Favourite Shows of the Month

💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month

Simple Success Strategy

“Success is about doing cool stuff, and then teaching others how to do that cool stuff.” 🔗 / Jodie Cook & Ali Abdaal /

Non-Fiction Takeaways

“People don’t remember books, they remember sentences.” 🔗 / Morgan Housel & David Perell /

Inner Congruence

When a person’s ideal self is consistent with their actual experience — when our outside actions match what we feel on the inside.

💡 My Favourite Fun Fact of the Month

Oldest Population

🔗 / Dense Discovery 266 /

“For the first time ever, more than one in 10 people in Japan are now aged 80 or older. The country has the world’s oldest population, measured by the proportion of people aged 65 or up, the United Nations says.”

🖼️ My Favourite Visual Artist of the Month

🔗 / Jason Limon’s Instagram /

🤔 My Favourite Reflection of the Month

Personal Marketing

What would it look like if we used the power of marketing on ourselves?

I recently came across the perspective that vision boarding is essentially the process of marketing to ourselves. It got me wondering what the world would look like if we had full control over the marketing in our lives. What if we were able to sync up the marketing we are constantly exposed to with our vision boards?

If the goal of marketing is to nudge us into making decisions that benefit companies, what would it look like if we were surrounded by subliminal messages that nudge us into making decisions that push us toward living our ideal lives?

I’m envisioning a mixed reality powered world where we walk in front of a fruit stand and our lenses remind us that we haven’t yet reached our fruits and veggies quota for the day. And when we encounter the choice between and escalator and a flight of stairs, our lenses market to us how taking the additional steps will bring us closer to our fitness goals.

How cool would it be if the future of vision boarding gave us the ability to be the marketing managers of our own lives?

🎬 My Favourite Videos of the Month

🎸 My Favourite Music of the Month

📺 My Favourite Shows of the Month

🛠️ My Favourite Tools of the Month

Total Recall – A Notion Template for Improving Memory

🔗 / Notion Template /

This spaced repetition Notion template has been my new favourite memory tool.

Essentially, it’s a flashcard deck that holds our favourite words, concepts, quotes, etc and automatically places the cards that need to be reviewed each day at the top of the deck.

💪🏽 My Favourite Exercises of the Month

Memory Trigger Optimization

What if your flashcard deck was optimized for memory triggers over memory recall?

Level 1 strategy for creating flashcards — The Destination Method:

• Create a card for every word you want to remember.

• On the front of each card, write a concept.

• On the back of each card, write a definition.

The goal is to solidify the memory we want to retrieve.

Level 2 strategy for creating flashcards — The Journey Method:

• For each concept you want to remember, create multiple cards that you want to trigger your memory of it.

• On the front of each card, write a trigger.

• On the back of each card, write a concept.

The goal is to multiply the triggers for the memories we want to retrieve — when do you want remember a concept — what topics do you want to trigger your memory of a concept.

The more paths we pave to a memory, the easier it will be to retrieve that memory when we want it.

Internalizing Measurements

How long it would take you to walk/run 1 kilometre?

How accurately can you guess what a centimetre/meter/foot/inch looks like?

I’ve been trying to internalizing measurements lately.

Looking at things around my home and comparing my guesses of their lengths to their true measurements, walking through trails and timing how long it takes me to walk their distances.

💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month

Biggest Tradeoffs

A good question to ask to get to know someone better: what’s one of the biggest tradeoffs that you’ve made in your life?

🤔 My Favourite Realization of the Month

Podcast Questions

I'm realizing that one of my favourite takeaways from listening to podcasts is getting ideas for fun questions I can ask in my own life. I love the idea of becoming a quality question collector.

💭 My Favourite Reflections of the Month

Bad Good

Are you getting too good at the wrong thing? 🔗 / Nat Eliason /

Practices for the Sublime

How can I experience more of the sublime in my life?

The philosopher Edmund Burke on the Sublime. He noticed that when we’re made to feel small in some ways, we become large in others.

What would it look like to routinely expose ourselves to things that make us feel insignificant, in order to minimize the importance we give to the negatives in our lives?

UI Personified

Do I as a person have ux/ui?

I’ve been tasked with thinking more deeply about strategies for improving user experience through design at work lately. And it’s got me starting to see the world through a lens of interaction psychology — how do we interact with things and how can we improve those interactions.

My favourite application of psychology is figuring out how to use it to improve my own life, so I’ve been wondering: If I looked at myself as a user interface or piece of software, how could I improve other people’s experience of interacting with me?

Tell-all Docuseries

If you could watch a tell-all docuseries on one person right now, who would you want to learn about?

Diversity Scores

What if you gave your life diversity scores?

I’ve been hearing more and more about the benefits of expanding the amount of diversity we have in our lives. For example, this month I learned that “the diversity of kinds of social interactions someone has is a predictor of their well-being.” 🔗 / Clearer Thinking /

I wonder what it would look like to measure our diversity score across all aspects of our life: social interactions, nutrition, fitness goals, interests, spaces we spend time, etc.

🎥 My Favourite YouTuber of the Month

Benjamin Keep, PhD, JD - YouTube

🎸 My Favourite Music of the Month

Accused (2023)

💪🏽 My Favourite Lifestyle Change of the Month

Conversation Queues

My best conversations lately have been thanks to conversation queuing.

How it works:

I maintain a daily log of my favourite sparks of inspiration and motivation, and discoveries, and thoughts.

Then, at the start of each week, I assign each of those sparks from the week before to the specific people in my life I plan on chatting with.

When it’s time to hangout, I’m prepared with a queue of conversations I’m eager to hear their thoughts on.

How I organize my weekly spark log:

🙋🏽‍♂️ Biographical

• List of unique things that happened to me

🧠 Thoughts

Reflect

• List of my favourite internal conversations

Memorize

• List of my favourite definitions and quotes

Imagine

• List of my favourite daydreams

💃 Actions

Research

• List of topics I’m interested in deep diving into

Play

• List of projects, exercises, and experiments I want to try

Do

• List of goals I want to accomplish

3 Benefits I’ve noticed:

• The protégé effect

  When teaching, pretending to teach, or preparing to teach information helps us learn that information.

  I’ve noticed that new and interesting topics become even more memorable and exciting when I plan on getting a particular person’s perspective on them.

• Life in stories

  The most predictable questions in any reunion are “how are you doing?” and “what’s new?”. Having easy access to our most unique recent stories, minimizes the embarrassing amount of time it might take us to remember a single interesting event of our past week.

• Third things

  A lot of my favourite conversations are about third things — the topics two people talk about when they’re not talking about either of themselves.

  Listening to and talking about life stories can be fun, but they often lean to being one-sided conversations. Conversational cuing has been a great way of optimizing for the “third thing topics” that allow both sides to meet in the middle.

💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month

The Art of Alter Egos

🔗 / Cardi B interview with Elle / Hot Ones /

“To me music is art. And fashion is art. But fame… fame isn’t art. But the person you become when your famous, your alter ego, that’s art.”

I don’t know if it’ll ever actually be possible to be free from a personality shackled by some degree of social shame.

But I love a reminder to be more surreal.

To become a carefree caricature of ourselves, to consider their costume design and to come up with their character traits.

We are a canvas and our alter-egos are our art.

Seijaku

🔗 / Dense Discovery Issue 256 /

The Japanese word and concept for finding serenity amidst life’s chaos — stillness in the midst of activity.

Elastic mood

🔗 / Haley Nahman Substack / Dense Discovery Issue 256 /

“When a mood is so overwhelming you mistake the intensity of it for the longevity of it.”

🧨 My Favourite Spark of Motivation & Inspiration

Reality Creation

“Not every day contains a story-worthy moment for me, but I found that the longer I did my homework, the more days did contain one.” 🔗 / Storyworthy Book / Ali Abdaal Video /

The homework mentioned refers to the act of writing two sentences at the end of every day about the most story-worthy thing that happened to you.

The author’s practice reminds me of when I started to keep a dream journal; the more I attempted to take note of my dreams, the more dreams I was able to remember.

How we shape our mind, shapes how we see the world.

The reality we’re looking for is just waiting for us to clearly define the reality we’re looking for.

🤔 My Favourite Realizations of the Month

Liking Lenses

There’s no topic we can’t like as long as we look at it through the right lens.

Maybe our lens for liking chemistry can be found in the study of molecular gastronomy.

Maybe our lens for liking history can be found by studying our family ancestries.

Maybe our lens for learning to like our fears can be found by studying fear itself.

Human Farming

What does farming mean in the context of “people produce”?

Humans being herded into social media platforms.

We are animals in an attention economy.

Farmed for our data.

I wonder in what other ways we are being farmed?

💭 My Favourite Reflections of the Month

What would you invest in today assuming you had to hold the investment forever?

🔗 / Sahil Bloom Newsletter /

My impersonal approach

The Lindy effect — a statistical tendency for non-perishable things with longer pasts to have longer futures. 🔗 / Samuel Pedro video /

I figure the most resilient investments will be the ones with a proven track record of longevity.

My personal approach

Unless we’re investing for someone else, forever only lasts as long as we do.

It’s worth considering which elements make up our life.

My life blocks are body, environment, finance, mind, operations, recreation, and social. And one of my main goals in life is to consistently invest into each of those.

In my opinion, the sooner we define our life blocks, the sooner we ensure that we have a well-balanced life portfolio. And the sooner we can be more intentional about where we invest our time, energy, money, and attention.

What is the central question of your life?

🔗 / Danny Miranda /

I think my question could be “how can I turn my imagination into reality?”

It would be really interesting to hear how other people would go about approaching this question.

Creative Reading

🔗 / Writing with Andrew Video /

“Creative reading is just as important as creative writing.”

How can we go about reading more creatively?

Planned Obsolescence with a Twist

When do companies intentionally exasperate the problems they solve?

If I was an evil genius working for an air freshener company, I would fill every bottle with several drops of a slightly bad after-smell. Just like oil in water, I’d engineer the after-smell layer to float to the top of the bottle, so that it was the last thing customers sprayed into their home. Subtly making them want to buy more air freshener after finishing each bottle.

I feel like this dark pattern has to exist in real life and it’s got me wondering where?

🌈 My Favourite Daydreams of the Month

Exhaustive Shinigami Eyes

What if we had the power to predict when anything will perish?

Just like with death sense where we’d have the power to see a person’s death date and time, it would be neat to extend that power to seeing all sorts of expiration dates.

The expiration of places, and relationships, and items, and ideas.

🧠 My Favourite Innovative Ideas of the Month

Auditory Interfaces

I think it would be such an interesting challenge to design an auditory interface.

I listen to videos like this:

And I realize the fascinating potential for immersive sound interfaces. It’s got me wondering what it could look like to make these even more interactive and responsive to user input.

Educational Rollercoasters

Inspired by an immersive space exhibit I went to this recently, I’ve been wondering what the future of immersive and educational rollercoasters could look like.

Who’s going to invent the Magic School Bus of the future? And what’s the closest experience we have to that today?

🎸 My Favourite Music of the Month

📺 My Favourite Shows of the Month

🛠️ My Favourite Tools of the Month

Frequency Dictionaries

Frequency dictionaries showcase an ordered list of the most used words in a language.

Arguably, one the most effective tools for learning a new language. So I’m surprised it was never a recommended book in any of the dozens of language courses I’ve taken in my life.

Megastudies

🔗 / Pete Judo Video /

Megastudies as a way of solving for the fraud that’s been going on in research. Megastudies are collaborative projects targeting a certain outcome.

A team of dozens of different researchers propose different study designs to test different related hypotheses. Then each of those studies are pooled into a single megastudy.

💪🏽 My Favourite Lifestyle Change of the Month

Feedback Reception Audit

What if every time we got feedback, we rated ourselves on how well we took the feedback.

When someone gives us feedback, they’ve already evaluated us.

The main thing they’re judging post feedback is how well we’ve taken it.. whether we were open or defensive.

💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month

Knowledge

🔗 / Socrates /

“All I know is that I know nothing”

Value Tradeoffs

🔗 / My First Million Podcast /

“A value is useless without acknowledging it’s tradeoff”.

Consider Facebook’s “Move fast and break things”. It acknowledges the sacrifice it’s willing to make.

Perhaps our list of personal values should, at the very least, be ranked in terms of which ones we’d be willing to sacrifice over the others.

CIA’s MICE Framework

🔗 / Show: Painkiller /

According to the show Painkiller, when the CIA wants to flip someone they attempt to figure out their core motivation using some combination of MICE:

• Money: how much do they want

• Ideology: what do they believe in

• Coercion: what scares them

• Ego: what makes them feel powerful

Punctuality

🔗 / Movie: After the Dark /

“Isn’t punctuality the virtue of the lonely?”

💡 My Favourite Fun Fact of the Month

Infinite Monkey Theorem

🔗 / Movie: After the Dark /

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare.

🧨 My Favourite Sparks of Motivation & Inspiration

Just In Time vs Just In Case Learning

🔗 / Ali Abdaal Video /

Just In Case Learning: When we learn something just in case it becomes useful further down the line.

Just In Time Learning: When we learn something at the moment it becomes useful and necessary.

Just in case learning is like the first day of school. It’s the orientation where we gain a general overview of what’s to come.

But some of us get trapped there, spending too much time trying to anticipate what we’ll need.

Surface vs Deep Lexicon

🔗 / Joseph Tsar Video /

When it comes to the words we use, we all rely on a surface lexicon and a deep lexicon.

Surface Lexicon: the words we instinctively default to. It’s comprised of approximately 1500-3000 unique words.

Deep Lexicon: the words that we recognize, but rarely use. The average native English-speaking adult has a deep lexicon of approximately 20,000-35,000 unique words.

Assuming that a more robust surface lexicon would give us the ability to communicate more accurately, creatively, and effectively, how can we increase our surface lexicon?

According to Joseph’s video,

A study from Yale found that it takes using a word 38 unique times for our brain to instinctively default to that word in our speech. In other words, 38 times in order for that word to register in our surface lexicon.

Show & Tell Opportunities

Step 1: Show & Tell the world what you’re interested in.

Step 2: Look & Listen out for the random opportunities it sends you.

Success Patience

🤔 My Favourite Realizations of the Month

Heavy Baths

You ever remain seated in a bathtub as the water drains out?

The lower the water gets, the heavier we feel.

I like to think of it as a symbolic reminder of the weight we were carrying before the bath and how effectively a good bubble bath can relieve us of that weight.

Second Brain Laziness

There’s a popular second brain credo that claims that our minds are meant for coming up with ideas, rather than for storing them.

I’ve noticed myself operating under the limiting belief that our cognitive capacity has a limit. But what if we’re more limitless than we believe?

I used to always take a lot of pleasure from memorizing things for fun. It’s something I want to return to again, rather than succumbing to my current default of delegating memorization to my Notion.

Language Persona

🔗 / Iñaki Godoy Interview /

In this interview with Iñaki Godoy about his role in the new One Piece live action series, he mentions how the depth of his voice changes depending on whether he’s speaking English or Spanish.

Other people describe how their personality changes with the language they’re using.

I’ve never thought about language as a path to deeper self-discovery, but perhaps a new piece of our personality puzzle can be found in every language we learn.

💭 My Favourite Reflections of the Month

Predictable Questions

A question worth asking ourselves: What predictable questions should a person with my goal expertise be able to answer with ease?

Becoming Untethered

I’ve been feeling very anchored in reality lately. I want to figure out some strategies for becoming a little more untethered.

Replication Crisis

Context

A growing number of studies in psychology are now being denounced as either fraudulent or flawed because their results have not been replicable by other scientists.

My assumptions

Research psychologists are falling victim to pressures from:

Fame: they want the book deals, the Ted Talks, the business, the media tours.

Corporate sponsors: they feel pressure from the organizations sponsoring their research; they research biased questions with favourable results and they manipulate the data to support their investors’ vested interests, in order to increase the likelihood that they’ll finance future studies.

Academic institutions: the more their research brings attention to their school, the more money they’re likely to make.

My thoughts

Fields like social psychology, behavioural economics, and UX essentially ask the questions “I wonder if most people would do this thing in this scenario?” and “to what degree?”

It’s rare to come across a study that finds conclusive results for 100% of its participants. So the research-based advice that we often hear in public discourse only applies to a subset of us.

If we put too much emphasis on the majority, aren’t we constantly neglecting findings that apply to individuals in the minority?

The Bunker Problem — What do you bring to the bunker?

It's an apocalypse. There's a bunker that can only hold 10 people. You are one of 20.

Everybody in the group must go around one by one naming the three biggest assets and the three biggest liabilities that they would bring to the bunker.

What would your three assets and three liabilities be?

Your Best Characteristic

What’s your best characteristic?

Perfect Match Curiosity

In a world where the perfect algorithm for finding a romantic match exists, would you use it (or would you crave to use it) even if you were already happily married?

🎥 My Favourite YouTuber of the Month

🔗 / Rian Doris /

Rian Doris is the Co-Founder & CEO of Flow Research Collective, the world’s leading peak performance research and training institute focused on decoding the neuroscience of flow states and helping leaders and their teams unlock flow states consistently.

🥗 My Favourite Foods of the Month

Nerds Gummy Clusters

Mezze Platters

🎸 My Favourite Music of the Month

King Richard

Life

On the Line

📺 My Favourite Shows of the Month

Young Justice

Survival of the Thickest

Fate: The Winx Saga

📚 My Favourite Read of the Month

Giving Back 🔗 / Relentless Curiosity Substack /

Outside of charity, think about the group MADD (mothers against drunk driving), and all the time and money that was spent. If instead of lecturing children that time and energy went into starting a ride-sharing company, drunk driving deaths could have plummeted decades sooner.

What matters most is optimizing systems to have the right incentives and processes to let innovation, creativity, art, love, and life flourish.

🛠️ My Favourite Tool of the Month

Pick Up Limes App 🔗 / link /

It’s a plant-based meal planning app and it’s the most beautifully made app I’ve ever used, both functionally and aesthetically.

💪🏽 My Favourite Exercise of the Month

The Twisted Cliche 🔗 / Todd Brison Post /

I call it “The Twisted Cliche.”

The Twisted Cliche is a device that takes a well-known cliche and swaps out one word. This minor “twist” on a trite phrase can land an emotional punch far more effectively than the cliche itself.

…

“Literally, look up a list of cliches, and then start swapping words out.”

💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month

Education vs Learning

Don’t let your education get in the way of your learning.

Sword of Damocles

The Sword of Damocles is a tale from ancient Greek lore about a courtier named Damocles. He envied the tyrant Dionysius and praised his luxurious lifestyle, leading Dionysius to offer Damocles a chance to experience his position. Seated on a golden throne, Damocles noticed a sharpened sword suspended above him by a single horsehair, symbolizing the constant danger faced by rulers. Fearful, he quickly realized the burden and vulnerability of power. The story warns against the perils of envy and reminds us that with great authority comes great risk and anxiety. Thus, the phrase "Sword of Damocles" is used to signify an impending and ever-present peril.

Good Problems 🔗 / Tintin Smith Video /

Next time you have a not too serious problem, try shifting your mindset to “this is a good problem to have”.

Why, Not What

Anchor yourself to why you do what you do, rather than what you do.

🤔 My Favourite Realizations of the Month

Susceptibility to Awe

I’ve been thinking about why I love the topics I do and I realized that at some point for most of them I felt a sense of awe. I wonder if uncovering where we’re most susceptible to awe could be a good north star for figuring out what we should focus on in life.

💭 My Favourite Reflection of the Month

Nicknames

I once signed up for a high intensity training bootcamp. I was the youngest person in the class and the instructor bestowed upon me the nickname, Playstation. I’ve never really played many video games, nor owned a Playstation, so the title didn’t resonate.

Remembering that got me wondering: what nickname would you want to get upon a first impression? What’s the one most obvious trait that you want people to know you for?

Appropriating The Year of the Rat to Memorize Dates

We all lose track of time.

Some of us, a little more than others…

As for me, I’ve managed to make a talent out of it.

Ask me what year it is. Gimme a couple seconds to remember.

Ask me how old I am. Lemme get my calculator.

Ask me what was going on in the 1800s? 👁️👄👁️

But lately, I’ve been studying up on architectural history and while my temporal agnosia could make for an impressive neuroscience case study, I’ve been determined to bypass my handicap with a little intellectual ingenuity.

Which is why I’ve been working on developing my historical chronoception with a DIYed mnemonic strategy.

Historical Chronoception Level 1 — Centuries

You know how the Chinese calendar has things like The Year of the Rabbit and The Year of the Pig, my memory technique is pretty much like that. It associates different periods of history (mostly centuries) with an animal, thereby creating visual anchors to dates.

So for example, if I wanted to remember that the Salem Witch Trials took place within the 1600s, I could imagine a witch being burned at the stake, until a bunch of racoons come to her rescue by peeing on the fire. And since I know that the 1600s are The Years of the Racoon, I’ve created a image that’s hard to forget and tied it to a century.

Historical Chronoception Level 2 — Years

Let’s say we wanted to get more specific and remember that the Salem Witch Trials started in 1692. For the second half of the date we could use something called the Major Memory System, which essentially allows us to translate numbers into words.

Under the Major Memory System, each number from 0 to 9 represents certain sounds.

Vowel sounds (a, e, i, o, u, y), and /w/ and /h/ sounds do not correspond to any number, so they can be used freely.

So back to our example, we know that The Salem Witch trials took place in the 1600s, but now we want to remember that they started in 92 (1692), according to this system, the number 9 corresponds to the “p” or “b” sounds. And the number 2 corresponds to the “n” sound. So, I would think of a visual word that uses those sounds in order, like bun, or pin, or pen, or bone.

So, we could imagine that after the racoons put out the fire they chewed the witch free and she cast a spell that reduced all of her onlookers into a pile of bones.

In the end, thinking of the Salem Witch Trials will trigger the image of racoons + bones, which equals 1692.

Writing it out like this kinda sounds like a laborious system, but once we get the hang of the animal-date and the number-sound relations, coming up with mental images becomes a surprisingly quick and fun process.

🛠️ Idea I’ve Been Thinking About

Gesamtkunstwerk & DIY Design Decisions

A new word I learned this week is gesamtkunstwerk. Roughly translated from German, it means “total work of art”.

Originally derived from the art world to denote works of art incorporating various artistic disciplines, its use in architecture is to describe projects where an architect has had “an all-inclusive ownership over the exterior and interior design of a project, creating harmonious works of art by intimately unifying the whole, from the garden to the tableware.” 🔗 / Source /

The idea of an architect with full control over all elements of a space got me thinking about whether or not people generally appreciate a lack of DIY decor on their part.

The Ikea Effect describes how consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created. So I wonder to what degree giving people more control over the design of a place is a key factor in fostering human-place bonds.

🚘 Research I’ve Been Thinking About

The Power of Place on Petitions

🔗 / Phys.org / Nature Article /

“A recent South African study showed that ‘willingness to sign a petition that calls for higher taxes on the wealthy increases in the presence of a high-status car’. Just seeing a BMW 3-series car near the petitioner made people more likely to favour wealth redistributive policies.”

So it seems that if we want to get people to take action against economic disparity, it helps to surround them with a visual indicator that they’re getting the short end of the stick.

If the closer we get to luxury, the stronger we feel a push to close that gap, then I wonder in what other scenarios picking the proper place amplifies our powers of persuasion.

• Want to convince your routine-ridden partner to take a vacation, exaggerate the idea that you’re current lifestyle lacks novelty by taking them to a minimalist environment and showing them some pictures of all the cool places you want to visit.

• Want to convince potential customers to dine in your restaurant, exaggerate their hunger by wafting the scent of your food onto the sidewalk near your front door.

• Want to convince a carefree kid to study more, exaggerate their ambition by taking them on a field trip to their dream job.

Perhaps, an environmental key to persuasion is to immerse ourselves in an exaggerated showcase of the distance between where we are and where we’d like to be.

🪴 Innovation I’ve Been Thinking About

Bioengineered Plants 🔗 / Neo Plants Website /

I’ve written before about Spaces Designed for Better Breathing and the effect that air and aroma can have on our minds. Turns out there are some really cool companies working in this area.

I recently came across NeoPlants, whose goal is to create plants that have been bioenginieered and optimized to absorb dangerous air pollutants in our indoor spaces.

“We believe that nature is the most powerful piece of technology in the world and that a greener future is necessary.

Our mission is to put nature at the heart of innovation to drive positive change.

We are building the first generation of bioengineered plants that fight air pollution.”

Their white paper describes how certain indoor air pollutants have the ability to impair our cognitive health and functioning.

I focus a lot in my writing on the subliminal influences of our spaces on our psychology, I think it’s also really interesting to think that there’s a whole invisible environment that is also constantly at work impacting us.

🔍 Person I’ve Been Thinking About

Walter Wick — The Art of Savouring & the Savouring of Art 🔗 / Video /

Outside of instagram, where does art show up in your life?

Do you have them hanging on your walls? Do you have them rotating on your screens?

What do you do when you find a piece of art that you love? How often do you return to it?

What do they do for you? Do they inspire emotion, a thought, a memory?

Do you save them?

Do you savour them?

Walter Wick is the photographer and photo-illustrator whose work I know most from the I Spy books.

For those who don’t know, the I Spy books are hidden item games, where the goal is to hunt for a list of items within each elaborate scene.

I find it really interesting to think about how we all have our own unique ranges of emotion. Some people experience sadness more strongly than others. Some people are quicker to anger. And I'd suspect that some people are better at savouring a moment.

Similar to the I Spy books is the genre, Wimmelbilderbuch. They are the Where's Waldo type images, filled to the brim with active scenes. They compel us to take our time scanning their page’s details. They compel us to savour their worlds.

Studies show that when we savour the art we enjoy, we awaken the same part of our brain that is activated through meditation. 🔗 / Source /

So, I think it’s really interesting that us fans of horror vacui art might actually find savouring images of chaotic places to be a meditative experience.

ENJOYED THIS ISSUE?

I spy with my little eye a ❤️ button. How about you lemme know you found it by giving it a click? Thanks for reading, I hope something interesting! Have a great one, Lamar ✌️😁

Enter the World Where All Eyes Are on You

A couple weeks ago, I explored what happens to our thoughts and behaviours when we’re immersed in an environment under surveillance.

So, if you haven’t already, mind your step as you enter the world where surveillance affects your morality, personality, and peace of mind.

🫖 Project I’ve Been Working On

Tea Wall

I never used to be a fan of public displays of affection. But a serendipitous encounter with a new love a few years ago completely shifted my perspective.

To protect his privacy, let’s call him David T.

David was absolutely delicious. He was the whole package. Beautifully gift wrapped and sorted neatly into a complex array of 36 flavours of personality. He was sweet at times, full of depth at others, and even hot and spicy when the mood was right.

Ever since we met, I’ve been declaring my deep love for him to everyone I meet.

Some people express their PDA by holding hands or locking lips. But I’m a big fan of the psycho model of showcasing my obsession with a shrine.

I call this my Tea Hive 🐝

Moral of the story, the world could always use more love, so I recommend making an effort showcase yours 💝

🌆 Experiment I’ve Been Thinking About

TV Tours

I’ve been going on a lot of architecture tours around Toronto lately.

In one of these last ones, I was introduced to the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.

It’s this beautiful beast of a brutalist building and for some reason it reminded me of one of my favourite shows, La Femme Nikita.

It was a Canadian spy-action-drama series, largely filmed in Toronto and Robarts got me thinking that it could be a fun personal project to rewatch the show, then track down and visit the nearby places where scenes were shot.

I first watched the show when I was in middle school and every time I see an episode nowadays, it feels nostalgic. When I went to visit the Robarts Library, it also felt weirdly nostalgic, even though I’d never been there before.

Nostalgia is one of my favourite feelings, so I often find myself thinking about ways to make the present moment feel nostalgic in the future. And this experience got me wondering, if I ever have kids, maybe it could be a worthwhile gift to spend some time with them flipping through photographs of places I think they’d enjoy visiting in the future. Then when they’re older, they’d be able to feel a comforting sense of familiarity to a bunch of places they’ve never been.

🤥 Idea I’ve Been Thinking About

Psychology of Scale

In my superhero fantasies, I fall in love with a guy named Scopic. His powers are Ant-Man-esque, in that he has the ability to manipulate the size of anything he wants.

(I’ve still got his personality profile under construction, but I figure that he definitely went through a phase of vigilante Pinocchio-ism. Where he went around cursing a bunch of egregious liars with oversized schnozes.)

There’s a special kind of control one gets by being able to carry around a world in their pocket. And some believe that that’s the reason why we tend to love miniatures so much.

Lately, I’ve been wondering what role the scale of our surroundings plays on our psychology.

There is evidence, for example, that supports the cathedral effect.

The cathedral effect is a phenomenon that suggests working in spacious environments with high ceilings can enhance creativity.

Research by Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, for instance, found that people working in rooms with higher ceilings displayed more abstract, creative thinking than those in rooms with lower ceilings.

So, I think it would be fun to see some “Goldilocks studies” on the topic. Something like, given three rooms:

a) one that makes us feel small,

b) one that makes us feel normal, and

c) one that makes us feel large…

how would each one affect our sense of power or creativity?

There’s other research out there that shows how cute things tend to make us more prosocial and attentive. So maybe our Goldilocks studies might show that Room C elicits those characteristics in us too?

Perspective is everything. So the idea that the size of our spaces could have a sizeable impact on our psychology makes me wonder, have the majority of our spaces fallen into a Goldilocks trap of making sure that everything fits us a little too perfectly?

👁️ Research I’ve Been Thinking About

Pupillary Reactions

A topic I’ve come across a couple times lately has been “light independent pupillary reactions”.

Most of us know that our eyes dilate when we’re looking at someone we’re attracted to. Mirroring that, there’s also evidence that shows how we find people whose eyes are dilated to be more attractive.

While listening to an episode the Many Minds podcast, I also learned about studies that describe how our eyes will also dilate when we’re shown a picture of the sun. And even when imagining light or dark things. Sometimes, even while just reading the words “day” or “night”.

I love learning about environmental psychology (how our surroundings influence our mind and behaviour), but I’ve never considered how interesting environmental physiology could be (how our surroundings influence our physical body).

💔 Reflection I’ve Been Thinking About

Love It or Hate It Design Philosophy

I don’t remember their name, but I learned recently about an architect who would believe that his work was a failure if it didn’t elicit any emotional reactions. Love it or hate it, as long as it made people feel something, then he succeeded.

As an architecture/design observer, how do you feel about that philosophy? Can you appreciate a design you hate, based on the fact that it got you to hate it?

Personally, I know I can have this mindset with actors who play a character I hate. Excluding the scenarios where I hate a character because I think the acting is bad, I applaud the skill of those actors who get me to loathe the character they play.

So, I think I can get there with architecture too. So long as I only consider buildings with “bad character”, as opposed to “bad skill”.

💎 Visual I’ve Been Thinking About

Water on Walls

When I moved into my place, one of my first acts of decoration was adding sun catcher crystals to my window, so that they’d project disco rainbows all across my walls.

While it does the job on a good sunny day, watching this video from Dami Lee reminds me of the effect I’d truly love to experience.

Water refraction onto walls is like the aurora borealis in liquid form and I’m living for it!

👃 Innovation I’ve Been Thinking About

The Smell of May vs The Smell of June

I went to visit a garden whose flowers were designed to bloom at different times of year — creating a scentscape, so that visitors would be able to distinguish whether it smells like May or June, for example.

I thought this was fascinating and I wonder what it would look like if we took more time to consider the scentscapes of the spaces we build.

✨ Place I’ve Been Thinking About

Light Galleries

I love the idea of a light gallery.

I came across this video showcasing a lighting showroom.

And of course, my highly suggestible motivation now wants to make it his life’s mission to explore how different lighting setups can affect people within a space.

When I think about the scenes in my life where I felt a strong sense of awe, they almost all had a strong element of light:

• Watching the street lights pass by when I was a preschool passenger in my parents’ car during our cross-country drives between the US and Canada to visit family

  

• Overlooking the glistening city lights while perched above Montreal on Mount Royal at night

  

• Being immersed in the starry projections of a space documentary in a 360 degree dome planetarium

  

• The reflected lamps within Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror room, "The Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity"

  

There are numerous studies about how light affects our mood, energy, and even our behaviour. So lately, I’ve been daydreaming about how cool it would be to have some sort of museum or gallery, whose sole purpose it was to present exhibits which illuminates the influence that light has on us.

🎨 People I’ve Been Thinking About

Camille Walala 🔗 / Profile / 🔗 / Elle Decor /

How absolutely gorgeous and fun is this studio design!?

I came across it recently and I decided to dive a little deeper into its designer.

According to the about page on her website, Camille finds inspiration in the “pattern to transform atmospheres, elevate moods and spark positivity”.

That bio, alongside this picture of her

got me thinking about the power that of pops of colour can have on people.

We’ve seen it before, when I wrote about Edi Rama’s revitalization of Tirana’s cityscape in Albania and Publicolor’s Paint Club.

I love a full black fashion statement as much as the next guy, but knowing that there’s power in colour, I wonder… in a hypothetical world, where we’d each wake up into a black and white canvas, how many pales of vibrant paint would we each contribute in a lifetime?

ENJOYED THIS ISSUE?

Thanks for reading! I hope something in here inspired you, as much as it did me. If so, feel free to let me know by clicking the ❤️ button! Have a great one, Lamar ✌️😁