These are my weekly Patch Notes – a log of the mental model updates I’m making and a braindump of things I’m leaning, building, or thinking about. Subscribe on Substack here. In this release: Shared social cognition and the effect of distance on it Importing my goals and values into Readwise Something magical happened on Twitter this week Blog Club: The Curse of Xanadu

A mere three weeks ago I triumphantly published a post on my home-baked productivity system describing how I’d successfully taken control of distractions in my life to get shit done. I was invincible. On top of the world. Roughly around the same time I started paying serious attention to updates about the virus. As the situation has escalated, so too has my obsession with following and thinking about it. A couple things:

My digital life in a nutshell: I discover relevant content I don’t have time to consume, I find time and become overwhelmed with my scattered backlog, I wish the content were in a different format, and then I’m unable to find something again once I’ve consumed it. Not retaining enough is a valid problem but we’ll tackle that one later. There’s a lot of generalization in my summary but the core issue is an extraordinarily high level of friction in the process of finding, organizing, and sharing digital content.