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Can You Leave Your Software?
On August 25, I asked Codex to search my notes for earlier work on digital ownership. It read the Markdown files directly from the vault. Obsidian wasn't part of the access path. That showed something narrower than ownership: the notes were accessible outside the application that organizes them. I used to judge software at the…
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A Streak Is Not a Record
On June 1, I picked a habit tracker and wrote myself a warning in the same note. The tracker was Streaks. I already owned it, so the test cost me nothing. It also fit Health and Apple Watch better than the alternatives I was considering. The warning was this: I’d bought Streaks once before and…
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Find the Break, Not the Motivation
A stalled task is not always a motivation problem. Sometimes the break sits between the plan and the capacity of the day.
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Most Urgency Is Borrowed
On June 18th, I had two tests planned for the morning. By noon, neither had started. By end of day, neither had run. The day wasn’t unusual. I work 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. in Bangkok, shifted late to overlap with Europe and still get a few hours with the US. The morning is supposed…
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When to Stop Building the System
Earlier this month I spent forty minutes tweaking the CSS that hides my AI_OS folder in Obsidian. The folder was already hidden. I was adjusting the color of the overlay when the panel collapsed. Nobody sees it but me, and I already didn’t see it. That’s the moment. Not dramatic. Forty minutes, zero output. I’ve…
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Maps as Thinking Tools
I linked my GTD note to my Obsidian vault note without knowing what I expected to find. Probably nothing. The two had always lived in separate mental compartments and that separation felt so obvious I’d never questioned it. The link broke it, which I didn’t expect. What I found was this: GTD’s actual core insight…
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The PKM Trap: Capturing More Than You Connect
I saved the same article twice. A week apart. Different folders. No memory of the first save. The article was Tiago Forte’s guide to building a second brain. That’s when I knew the system wasn’t working. Not because I was careless, but because the system had no way to show me what it already knew.…
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I Didn’t Have a Self-Control Problem. I Had a Friction Problem.
For a while I thought I just lacked discipline. I had 80-something apps on my phone and used maybe a dozen regularly. I had 18 habits tracked in my system and was hitting roughly 10 of them. And I was buying things I didn’t need, cheap or on offer, because clicking “buy” was easy. The…
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Reading Without Retention
One year I ran the 52-book challenge. Logged on Goodreads, tracked in a spreadsheet. I finished 58. 18 of those were fillers, books read to keep the count moving, not because they had anything to offer. I cannot tell you the title of most of them. That is not a failure of memory. It is…
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PARA Worked. Until I Started Thinking.
My Resources folder was a graveyard. Reading notes from books I’d finished, half-formed thoughts that didn’t fit anywhere else, blog drafts with no deadline. Everything that wasn’t a project, wasn’t an area, wasn’t an archive in the obvious sense. It all went to Resources. Which meant it went nowhere. PARA is a good system. It…
About
Personal writing on AI, productivity, systems, and photography. Based in Bangkok.