Wonders Untold

A blog about life, arts and culture

Of life, arts and culture.

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In praise of Notion templates

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Three cheers for whoever invented the software behind Notion templates, in particular the button that allows you to create your own templates.

I’m a massive fan of this feature. One way I use it is to create a weekly goals sheet, which sets out all the things I want to achieve in any particular week.

My goals sheet has different categories relating to my personal and work goals, and also shows how these tie into my quarterly goals. As this is a document I fill in every week, I have created a Notion template in the form of a questionnaire. At the start of every week, I simply click a link, and a brand new questionnaire automatically appears. I then fill this in with my goals for the week.

Without the ability to create a template, I’d have had to create this questionnaire from scratch every week. I’m glad I don’t have to do that, and can simply focus on filling in my goals for the week.

Notion is an amazingly versatile app, and the ability to create templates does wonders for creativity. Five golden stars for this incredible feature.

How I use my iPad

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I use my iPad mainly as a consumption device (i.e. for consuming content). From time to time, I might write a few emails or short articles on it, but that’s not its main function. Also, because of the weird camera placement, I never do video calls on it.

Here are the main ways I use my iPad:

  • watching videos;
  • reading long-form articles;
  • reading sheet music while playing the piano;
  • as a “teleprompter” for my speeches and lectures;
  • playing music while exercising (the iPad Pro has amazing speakers).

In my experience, the iPad is great as a companion device, i.e. next to a laptop. I’m very much of the philosophy that an iPad should do “iPad things”, and a laptop should do “laptop things”.

Of course, if pushed, the iPad (and certainly the Pro models) could also do tasks that are best done on a laptop. However, if one had to do these laptop tasks on a regular basis, it would be more efficient to do them on a laptop. To coin a phrase, “give to the iPad the things that are the iPad’s, and, to the laptop, the things that are the laptop’s”.

Three cheers for GoodNotes 5

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I’ve recently resumed reading long-form technical articles on my iPad.

Not quite sure why I had stopped reading this way, but it’s good to be back doing that.

GoodNotes 5 is an amazing app. I simply import my long-form PDFs into the app, and read them from there. It’s great because the app has amazing markup functionality – you can highlight, take handwritten notes (with the Apple Pencil), add links, add images and other elements, convert handwritten notes into text, search handwritten notes, and a whole lot more.

I really love reading this way. Three cheers for GoodNotes 5.

Writing apps – 2022

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I’ve experimented with writing apps for as long as I can remember (e.g. see here). Not all of them stick, though. Many are downright unusable, some do not fit my workflow, and a lot tend to be quite distracting – e.g. cluttered with unnecessary features.

But there are some that I have used consistently, and which continue to serve me well. Here are my best writing apps of 2022:

  • Ulysses
  • RoamResearch
  • Drafts 5 (on which I am typing this post, actually. I can also send my posts to the blog from there.)
  • Notion (this app is all things to all men. I use it for several things, including as a writing app.)
  • Apple Notes
  • GoodNotes 5 (I don’t use this one as much as I did in the past, but it’s still useful for taking handwritten notes while doing research.)

I’ll be carrying on with these apps in 2023. I don’t suppose I’ll be replacing any of them. Taken together, they meet all my writing needs. I’m also not looking to add another app to the list. Unless someone comes up with something truly revolutionary. I can’t imagine what that would be, but let’s wait and see.

Questions at the heart of leadership today

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For my end of year retreat, I’ll be reading Leading in a Non-Linear World, by Jean Gomes.

This book poses some of the questions that will become increasingly important in the years ahead. Here are a few of them:

  • “Can we keep working longer and more continuously?”
  • “How will artificial intelligence (AI) or automation change career paths?”
  • “How will a workforce of four very different generations, skill sets, and values synergise, and what does that mean for the future?”
  • “What if decade-old assumptions about the sustainability of our global economic system no longer hold true?”

There are no easy answers to these questions, and a lot will have to do with how we lead. First, how we lead ourselves – for example, what conscious efforts we make in cultivating a mindset that would be of much benefit to us. Also, how we lead our organisations and our communities.

Looking forward to reading this book.