I agree that those are impressive skills that are becoming rare and make us compare unfavorably to old schoolers. But I am also impressed by trackers who can follow a trail in the bush by observing clues invisible to ordinary people. All kinds of skills fell into disuse when the problems they solved lost importance.
But we will never run out of problems to solve and new problems will call for new competencies.
I wonder what are some of these new competencies. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Can you?
Socrates thought that writing contributed to brain rot.
If I AI rots my brain than so did Google before it, and printed encyclopedias before that. In reality, the fact I can get my questions answered quickly only makes me think of more and more questions to ask, more things to wonder about, more problems to ponder.
I found out about this book from the recommended reading section at the end of one of Ogilvy’s books (Ogilvy is a famous advertising man from the Mad Man era).
I keep the inbox.org on dropbox, that keeps it synced.
The shortcut is called “longdictate” because previously I had a version that didnt require me to press stop after finishing my thought. Instead it was set to stop recording when I stopped talking. But it misfired too frequently, cutting me off, so I added the button.
I imagine there must be something similar to iphone shortcuts on Android?
The most seamless capture-from-anywhere workflow I struck upon is to have a shortcut on my phone's home screen. When tapped, it takes my dictation, transcribes it, and saves it to an inbox.org file with an org-syntax timestamp, synced to my main computer.
Basically the notes have the same format that org-mode uses to save notes placed in the logbook. But you can also make them as individual TODO headings or whatever. It's all plain text anyway.
I try to empty the inbox.org every morning, I typically have 20-30 entries to go through. Some things matter and are revised and refiled appropriately. The rest gets dumped into a chronological log file for just in case.
edit: btw, it would be cool if I also made a version that would append the content of the phone's clipboard to the transcription, so that I can also catch links and/or bits of text. Or maybe even multimedia, thought I am not sure how I would accomplish that.
The issue I'm having is that the daily file is sometimes a running log of notes I jotted down, other times a structured journal entry written the next morning. I wish I could separate the two so that I could export all my proper journal entry into a pdf.
My stack is org mode plus the Denote package which has a nifty journaling feature. Each day has its own file. The date is in the file name, but more useful to me, the file name also includes a signature that looks like this today:
2025q4w40thu
I find that the week number and day of the week is a more meaningful coordinate than the date itself to orient myself when browsing through the files.
I often use timers and alarms either on my casio or on my laptop as reminders for this or that. I routinely get so carried away by whatever I'm doing that I don't notice when the sound alert plays. Sometimes, when I realize later on that the bell already went off, I can recall hearing it earlier, as if it were a faint memory from a half-forgotten dream.
I also switch between my macbook keyboard and my external ortholinear keyboard. In my case, getting used to the ortholinear actually improved my typing on the macbook keyboard, as it taught me to use my pinky finger more, and also fixed some other bad habits of reaching across with the wrong finger to type certain keys. But I have an ordinary rectangular ortholinear, not a moonlander-type layout.
Living in the northern hemisphere, it bugs me that standard north-up, west-left maps don't match up with the sun and with our clocks. It's neat that both clock hands and the sun are "up" at noon. It would be even neater if that upward direction corresponded to south, since that's where the sun actually is at midday. With south-at-top, east-to-the-left, maps would sync with both our clocks and the sun's daily arc. But then we would lose the west-left rhyme.
I spent my 20s searching for the perfect todo solution but my search ended when I discovered org-mode. It's not that I'm the most productive person you'll meet, it's just that there's nothing further to look for. Should I decide to be my productive self for a while, I know org-mode will support me and not stand in my way :)