I run a group chat which is a space for in-depth discussions about long-form articles/blogs/books or anything else that fascinates us. Unfortunately, since the group chat is on WhatsApp, new members can’t access old entries, so this post is a compilation of all the suggested links posted in the group so far.

Personal Productivity

  • An argument for logging off
    Loved this writeup. That frame of trying to reduce your “influence gap” - I’d read about this before in other places but I connected way better with the way he describes it here.

  • Somebody has already figured it out for you
    I used to obsess over his articles in college. He doesn’t say anything very novel or outworldly (rarely does anyone in personal productivity space), but I’ve found him to consistently hit the mark with a precision. If someone is unfamiliar with the work, I’d recommend giving his “Essential Raptitude” section on the sidebar a look.

  • Seeking the Productive Life
    The mecca of productivity. His productivity has definitely paid off as well; he’s Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. This man works on his laptop while walking, for goodness sake.

Wolfram walking in the woods while working on his laptop

  • Discussion on HN on “Sleep on it”
    Argues how the brain processes many experiences, even when offline and that sleep is an integral part of learning. This was a good discussion full of anecdotal experiences which is harder to carry out scientifically. This comment in particular is pretty interesting to ponder.

  • Skill from a year of Purposeful Rationality Practice
    Some techniques on how to learn more effectively. Lesswrong in general is full of interesting discussions, sometimes quite esoteric.

  • How is Felix Today
    If you want to see how it looks when someone takes the idea of personal tracking to an extreme. A fascinating exploration.

  • The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings
    Found the ideas here very compelling. That Scott Adams excerpt is gold.

    “Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more ‘pretty goods’ until no one else has your mix.”

  • How to be more agentic
    Found this to be a really good framework for how to live your life. Pairs well with the “skills from a year of purposeful rationality practice” post shared earlier.

  • Structured Procrastination

  • Laziness death spirals

  • How I got my attention back
    A gentle reminder to disconnect. Nothing earth shattering and we would’ve heard about the ideas elsewhere as well, but a good reminder nonetheless.

  • Explore More: a bag of tricks to keep your life on the rails
    Found this to be a pretty good framework. Have a general sense of which direction you want your life to go in -> explore a variety of things but keep trying to tie it to that direction -> if it fails, try random search until something sticks.

  • Act fast
    An argument for acting fast with your ideas

  • Huberman Lab Essentials
    This is a good crash course on how to work with your brain, body and emotions. With one caveat though: ignore the discussions on supplements. These are distilled episodes from a larger pool of much longer episodes, but better in a sense that everything is curated.

    Another caveat: many of the so called “peer reviewed” studies are flimsy and inconclusive at best, so if something feels like too good to be true, exercise your judgment.

  • De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness
    I found this to have a pretty compelling argument for living a “multi-sensory” life.

    “There’s something more fun about complex fun, even if the individual moments might score lower on the hedonometer.”

  • On becoming a day person

  • Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket
    Loved this framing.

    Also aligns with Umberto Eco’s views - he had a personal library of 30,000 books, a number which is impossible to read in a lifetime. And his views were similar - that you maintain this collection not because you wanted to accomplish something by reading everything, but because you can always dip into this river to read something whenever you wish to.

    PS: The author of this post, Oliver Burkeman, is also the author of Four Thousand Weeks, which is one of the better books on personal productivity.

  • Good Sleep, Good Learning, Good Life
    This is one behemoth of an article (I wouldn’t even call it an article, this is at least a short book). Highly recommended if you can find the time to read it.

    PS: The author, Piotr Wozniak, is the creator of Supermemo and invented the SM2 algorithm on which Anki SRS is based on.

  • There are only four skills: design, technical, management and physical
    Really interesting take. Author’s main point is that if you’re good at any task within any of these four categories viz. Design/Technical/Management/Physical, you can become expert-level within 6 months at any other task in the same category.

  • How to Just Do a Thing
    Raptitude says it again in simple words.

  • The Applicability of Spaced Repetition
    This touches on a point which I’ve been thinking about lately. Spaced repetition system is a huge part of how I remember things in life. Writing effective prompts is a central part of that process. Recent advances in LLMs should (theoretically) allow you to speed-run this process but a lot of empirical and experimental data suggests otherwise.

    Why is it so hard to steer an LLM to write good SRS prompts?

    Andy Matuschak did an excellent study on this recently, and the conclusion is that the current systems are incapable of doing it. And as such, it remains an open problem.

  • Don’t be too Clever to Take Obvious Advice

  • Human Bottlenecks

  • Books are subjectivity-merging devices, not efficient information transfer devices
    I loved this framing. Oftentimes I wonder if reading books is an “inefficient” way to learn something; this article makes the case that this premise itself is wrong.

Society and Culture

Economics/Finance

Writing Advice

  • My writing process, and how I keep it sustainable
    I like this guy’s blog posts which are mostly about programming. This post is about how he structures his writing practice to be able to write almost 1 article per week. Got some useful takeaways.

  • Writing as fitness exercise
    A good lens to think about writing being the same as fitness exercise. I’ve seen lots of people getting disheartened by the impact of AI tools on writing, including myself, and this comes as a good reminder to shift your focus on the first principles - the act of writing itself.

    “v1 is 635 words and took 8 hours to write and edit.” Loved this part!

  • Writing is an Inherently Dignified Human Activity
    Loved this!

Food for Thought

Literature