Storyworthy  is a book by Matthew Dicks about the craft of telling stories. This post is an experiment created over the course of three days. My ultimate goal was to create a single-page sketch note summary of Storyworthy. To achieve this, I first wrote a summary of the book using Tiago Forte's  Progressive Summarization  approach. I then created three one-page sketches for each of the main sections in the book. I finally distilled the three one-pagers into a single summary sketch - you'll find the single-page overview at the very end. Introduction Stories are personal narratives of change that others can relate to, and are shared with the purpose of connecting to other people. The book covers three topics: Finding stories to share. Crafting these to be engaging and entertaining with a long-lasting impact. Telling them to family, friends, or larger audiences.

I'm exploring ways to take Personal Knowledge Management to the next level. I'm learning to think more visually, integrating Excalidraw into my Obsidian knowledge graph. My drawings have become more than just illustrations. They are self-standing documents, interlinked with everything else in my PKM system.

It has been roughly a year since I first came across Obsidian. After careful consideration trying out Tiddly Wiki, Obsidian, Roam and TheBrain, I opted for Roam. I chose Roam because of its friction-free, browser-based user interface, its product vision and the vibrant community which I was sure will drive significant innovation - and it has! After one year, I was curious to see how Obsidian has evolved. This post will walk you through my second first-impressions comparing Obsidian to Roam.

SEX IS GOOD. But as with all things, sex also has its "dark side". If you are not careful, you can get hurt. ROAM IS GOOD. I am a firm believer in Roam's vision. But as with all things... This article is about information security. While I will focus my discussion on roamresearch.com , my points are broadly relevant in today's online/digital world.

This post is about the "intrauterine" phase of project development, about that ambiguous period between the inception of an idea and the birth of a project. It is easy to overlook the importance of early project framing because problems tend to be more noticeable during project delivery and post-go-live. However, the difference between hugely successful projects and disappointments is determined by early framing. I will show you tools to improve how you frame opportunities into projects.

  I am releasing the MVP version of the Roam-Excalidraw Plugin. Over the past two weeks, I have been super focused on getting to this point. As a consequence, this post is going to be shorter and more utilitarian than usual. I had to make a choice whether to release the plugin this weekend or to write a detailed blog post. I opted for the first.

Conor ( @Conaw ) pointed me to Excalidraw last week, and I was blown away by the tool and especially about the opportunities it opens up for  Roam Research ! It is a full-featured, embeddable sketching component ready for web integration. This post will showcase key Excalidraw features and discusses some of the issues I still need to solve to complete its integration into Roam. I spent most of my free time during the week integrating Excalidraw into Roam. This article will introduce Excalidraw by showcasing its features.

This post summarizes my learnings from the Roam Agile project. I present the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version of the Agile Development Template. Here you will find the link to the Roam EDN archive containing the template, instructions for how you can get started, YouTube videos showcasing the solution, and a link to the graph I used for my project with my backlog, user stories, sprints, daily standups, customer feedback, etc.

I spent the last week working on a Roam template for Agile Product Management. My goal is to create a step by step how-to guide and a full-featured template database, that a product development team can pick up to kick-start their process using Roam. I assume that Roam will be the only task and user story management tool used by this team, and I am developing a fully self-sustained solution built 100% around Roam's capabilities.

Which are the longest paragraphs in your graph? Which pages did you edit or create last week? How many paragraphs of text do you have in your database in total? Which pages do you have under a given namesapece (e.g. meetings/)?

This is an evergreen note that I will be revisit regularly to develop a comprehensive list of note-taking approaches including their practical implementations in various software tools. This post will serve as an elaborate table of contents, including a brief introductory discussion on the importance of note-taking, followed by a high-level walkthrough of each method. Links to posts and videos with detailed examples and descriptions will follow over the coming weeks and months.

Why is it that even your most honest and committed attempts to change, often lead back to the status quo? Why are outcomes so frequently pale compared to the vivid color of the aspiration? How can you avert the grip of your immunity to change? Imagine what would be possible if, for a change, you could live up to your New Year's Resolutions?

I have perfected the process of importing ePub books into Roam. I was able to create an almost frictionless experience for reading a book in Roam. Put aside the issue with reading on a tablet screen instead of a kindle, this solution is much more comfortable and efficient for reading and note taking at the same time then the Kindle. I have also develop a solution to automatically maintain full traceability from my notes to the source text even though the ePub book sits in a different Roam graph compared to my literature notes. This post is a detailed how-to guide for setting yourself up to read books in Roam. Here is the link to the Python program you need for converting your ePub books: Colab Notebook Here is the link to the Book-base.json that will be required to achieve the full experience. This is how the end result looks Detailed how-to walkthrough This second video explains the full process from the beginning to the end in 27 minu...

How much time, money, energy, etc. do you waste by solving the wrong problems ? What if you could get better at solving the right problems ? What's your Problem by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is one of the best books I have read on the subject of solving problems. He asserts, that it is critical that we pay attention to how we frame problems. If we misframe problems, we may be at risk of coming up with a solution to the wrong problem (i.e. a wrong solution) and wasting tremendous amount of time, money and energy or even worst, creating additional problems that may be even tougher to solve later on. The way you frame a problem determines which solutions you come up with.  By shifting the way you see the problem - that is, by reframing it - you can sometimes find radically better solutions. A personal example  I remember when our son started kind...

What tools do you use to create quick sketches of ideas? How do you co-create with others in a visually engaging way? How do you balance traditional text based expression with visual thinking?  I have a whiteboard in my office. I can feel the energy level of any meeting increase when someone stands up, takes the pen, and starts explaining his/her idea at the whiteboard. Collaborating around a whiteboard always unleashes creativity. Home office, virtual working and social distancing have made this experience somewhat more challenging to achieve. The other problem with the whiteboard in my office is it has to be cleaned. Yes, I take pictures before wiping it, however the next time we want to continue the same discussion, our drawing is gone. I would need a larger office and more whiteboards to keep track of all the different discussions that happen around my board. I love visual thinking tools and have always been a mind map junky. Over the years I have used Freem...

The objective of this post is to introduce the concept of lateral thinking and to share four simple and fun exercises for creative thinking. The post is based on Edward De Bono's work.  The lateral thinking model is based on his book The Mechanism of Mind: Understand how your mind works to maximise memory and creative potential , and  The four exercises are based on How to Have Creative Ideas: 62 Exercises to Develop the Mind . How thinking patterns are formed Imagine a bed of nails, except that instead of nails we use pins with blunt heads and we lay a thin plastic film on the heads covering the entire bed. Now imagine that we spray water on this surface. As you can imagine, because the film is laid on the pins loosely, water will start to collect in puddles. The puddles will form in arbitrary locations largely depending on luck. It is not hard to see, that the next time we spray water on the surface it will gravitate towards the existing puddles, making those larger....

Photo by  Lukas  from  Pexels Being effective at work is like a martial art . The difference between the novice and the master is often not the actual moves, nor the detailed sequence of their execution, but the efficiency, elegance, precision, and speed of delivery. There is no silver bullet , just radical common sense and a persistent drive to improve. It is also true, that the same outcome may be achieved more elegantly with a different set or sequence of steps. Take for example typing. If you use two fingers, you may spend years practicing and perfecting your technique, however you will likely never achieve the same level of speed and perfection as if you had learned to type with ten fingers, and had spent your time perfecting those moves. For most of my career I have worked in large matrix organizations. I have read and learned about work. I was trained. I have picked up best practices from colleagues. In this post I lay out a summary of some of the key patterns...

Photo by  Markus Spiske  from  Pexels Three Sentences - a disciplined way to deal with email Source: http://three.sentenc.es/ The Problem:  E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot. The Solution:  Treat all email responses like SMS text messages or Tweets, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, count sentences instead. Three Sentences is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be three sentences or fewer. It’s that simple. Photo by  Anna Tarazevich  from  Pexels Advice hack - ask the Master In a high stakes situation, when the other party is a master at his / her game. e.g. when selling your used car to a dealer.  Ask for advice from the master as to answer his/her own question. Salesman: "What is your asking price?" You: "You are ...