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A lot of people ask me how I take notes and write articles — even more so recently, since I shipped Tolaria.
I have often talked about this in the newsletter. I am quite opinionated about it, and a lot of these opinions made it into Tolaria.
One of these is about the (in)famous blank page.
There is this romantic view of writers sitting in front of a blank page and crafting their work through sheer inspiration. In reality, if you’re starting from nil, you’re doing it wrong.
About this, I love a famous quote from an Italian singer-songwriter, who once was asked how long it takes to write a song. He said:
“It takes me about 10 minutes — but only if I spend the rest of my life making sure that eventually it takes me 10 minutes.”
This applies to all knowledge work. Good writing is about connecting and refining ideas you already captured, rather than creating from scratch. The prep work is the work.
To make prep work easier, I am a big believer in dividing it into multiple steps:
Capture — store the thought on a durable support.
Organize — refine it, place it where you’ll need it, and connect it to other thoughts.
Express — use it to do something larger.
These are different tasks, and are best done at different times. Conflating them leads to predictable failure modes:
Capture + Organize leads to exhaustion (every note becomes a chore).
Organize + Express leads to chaos (missed insights, no scalability).
All three at once leads to writer’s block.
Luhmann’s Zettelkasten and Tiago Forte’s CODE system are both built around this separation. You don’t need to follow either to the letter, but the principle matters.
I wrote a full piece about note taking a while back 👇
One of the interviews I go back to the most often is the one I did last year with Annie Duke.
Annie is a former world-class poker player, author of Thinking in Bets, and one of the clearest thinkers on decision-making.
The conversation was packed with useful frameworks, and one that stuck with me was her four-principle checklist for high-quality decisions:
Speed assessment — before anything else, decide how much time this decision deserves. Ask: how long-term is the impact, and how reversible is it? Spend time and effort accordingly.
Make the implicit explicit — we often decide by “feel.” Annie’s view, instead, is to articulate what that gut feeling actually is. What are the real criteria? Making reasoning explicit helps you catch flawed logic before you commit, and makes it harder to rationalize a bad choice after the fact.
Quantify qualitative opinions — instead of calling a market “great,” rate it. Even in a shallow way, e.g. on a scale from 1 to 10. This forces precision and, in teams, surfaces hidden disagreements otherwise masked by vague language.
Collect opinions independently — never gather important input in a group setting. Anchoring bias and groupthink are real. Collect individual perspectives first, then compare differences without forcing consensus.
Here is the full interview with Annie:
📚 Weekly Readings
Finally, here are the best articles I have read this week:
Good leaders know when to stay out of the way — but great leaders also know when to step in and draw a hard line. Fantastic story by Rands, about how a major Slack outage led to a complete transformation of their development process, driven by strong leadership.
“Why can’t they just…” is a phrase we all use when frustrated with other teams or roles. Instead of dismissing it, Lara explains how to use it as a signal to dig into the complexities behind decisions you don’t understand, and turn frustration into collaborative problem-solving. Loved it.
Open source maintainers don’t bet on PRs, they bet on contributors. This is a great take by Zig and the best articulated thesis I have heard about banning AI-generated contributions. Worth a read.
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The Capture / Organize / Express separation is the underrated framing. Most knowledge-work failure modes trace back to two of the three getting bundled into one session. Capture plus Organize burns out the notes system. Organize plus Express produces chaos because no scaffolding gets built first.
One of the best skills a developer can learn is to refactor. It is even more important in the age of AI.
The Capture / Organize / Express separation is the underrated framing. Most knowledge-work failure modes trace back to two of the three getting bundled into one session. Capture plus Organize burns out the notes system. Organize plus Express produces chaos because no scaffolding gets built first.