How to Turn Reviewing Your Notes into a Habit You Actually Enjoy

Three beliefs held me back from getting started sharing my ideas online. (And the simple shift I made to overcome them) ↓

Capturing ideas might be one of the most important practices we can develop as humans. But is writing or typing the only way to capture those ideas? Think again...

Social media gets a bad wrap these days. And for some good reasons. It's easy to get caught up with the doomscrolling, letting it distract us, getting into arguments we shouldn't, helping us procrastinate, not doing good things for our mental health. And yet. It's still my biggest category of saved items in my knowledge library & serves me up a wealth of new ideas every single day.

One weird habit has kept me consistently writing for the past four years.Before I was known as Ev Chapman, Prolific Creator. I was Ev Chapman, Wannabe creator.

What if you didn't have to start each project with a blank page?

Unpopular Opinion: You don't need to create a book summary from your notes to make them useful. This isn't Miss Johnson's fifth grade class 🤓

Every morning I sit down, choose an idea then start writing & exploring.Not to produce any particular content. But to find out what's inside me (& unlock it from the depths of my brain)

The ultimate guide to building a personal knowledge platform that turns information into insight & knowledge you'll actually use.

A renaissance practice for the modern information world: How to start a commonplace practice to organise your thoughts & build your knowledge.

For a long time I read a lot of books and never actually did anything useful with the notes I took.

I've always loved how Tana keeps everything at my fingertips. But with the new Related Content feature, it's like having a supercharged dashboard right on my day page!

I have always loved the Bullet Journal system. It's simple & yet a profound way to get things out of your head and stay focused throughout the day.

Can AI really make your note-taking more powerful?

How I'm using my Daily Page now with the release of Tana's Core features like Related Content & Google Calendar integration.

I very rarely miss my paper notebooks now that I use Tana. But every now and then when my brain needs to arrange my thoughts visually & find myself longing for a simple workflow where I can go from notes → drawing → back to my notes.

Confession: I've never been very good at a consistent weekly review habit.

I am notorious for creating day plans that are unrealistic and have WAY too much packed into them. Which is why when I saw Sunsama's daily planning routine it really got my attention

How I Use Tana To Get Admin Jobs Done Faster & More Efficiently Than A Human Asisstant

In this video I show you 5 ways you can use Tana's Random Node Field to review past notes, mix up your journalling practice, and have a little fun.

Tana is one of the most powerful knowledge management tools I have used. But sometimes all those powerful features can overshadow just how simple it can be to get started. And I guarantee that most people are overthinking it from the very start.

Throw away your Affirmations apps & subscriptions and build your very own custom one in Tana

How to organise just about any kind of information in Tana using the Tana Supertag page

Traditional wisdom tells us we should have a lead magnet to 'trick' people into signing up for our newsletter because no one just signs up for newsletters anymore right? WRONG. Every day, no less than 5 people sign up for my newsletter without having to be coerced or 'tricked' by a lead magnet.

In 2 years I've grown from 0-18k here on Twitter and people are always asking me what the secret key or tactic or hack to unlock growth is.

The biggest creators I know have started on one platform and then as they grew they branched out onto multiple platforms. Because being a creator on a platform isn’t just about the content, it’s about understanding the platform, engaging with people and a million other different factors.

Social media can make us crazy as creators or writers. On the one hand, it's the perfect conduit to get our message out there and build an audience. On the other hand, we're constantly wrestling with algorithms, and the shortest shelf life for all of our content.

Twitter Impressions are down. That seems to be the only thing I hear from creators at the moment. And yeah, it sucks. But it's not the first time they've gone through a dip, and it won't be the last.

Content alone isn't going grow your audience on content platforms. As creators, our main 'thing' is creating content, so it's easy to see social media platforms as just big distribution channels to get more people to see what we are creating. But if the internet is just one big distribution channel for your voice you are missing the point.

It's the (new) age old question - Should you publish on Medium or your own blog? Over the past few weeks, I've had multiple people ask me why I chose Medium over my own blog or substack or the many other platforms I could write longer-form content on.

Just over a year ago I got started writing on Twitter. I always viewed Twitter as a distribution platform. A place where you came to tell the world things you created. But these days Twitter has become my main publishing platform where I test ideas and get (mostly) instant feedback on them.

1000 people. 30k essays. 7 million words.When I first heard that we had 1000 people in the January cohort of ship30for30 I thought I might have to quit my day job after all 🤣

The creator economy is both wild and lonely at the same time. On one hand, I feel so lucky to be living in this moment where there are so many opportunities for creators. And on the other hand, it's an extremely lonely place that's easy to quit

It's easy to get caught up in numbers on Twitter. There is literally numbers everywhere. Number of followers, number of likes, engagement rate numbers, numbers of notifications. It's enough to make you think that Twitter is all about numbers...

You don't need a million-dollar launch to have a successful digital product.

I've been on a creative sabbatical for the last 4 weeks and it's been the best thing I've ever done as a creator.

So many creators I speak to are scared to launch their first product.I suspect there are a lot of reasons but the main one I hear is "Don't I have to have a big audience or following to launch a product?"I launched my first product with 500 followers, no email list & I made $3k in 4 weeks.

Over the last couple of years, I've said yes to a million things as a creator. New projects, platforms, launches, content, newsletters, communities and more.

I almost wasn’t able to write such a glowing review of 2022. It was October and I was nowhere near reaching the (very reasonable) goals I had set for myself.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time last year launching products. I think all up it was about 11 products from templates to courses to workshops to guides. I tried it all. And I made a fair amount of money doing it as a second income. Launches are fun (when they work) and they provide a nice windfall of cash for that month that you are launching. But they are also exhausting work and when you are not launching… no one is buying.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time last year launching products. I think there were 11 in total. Launches are fun (when they work). And they provide a nice windfall of cash. But when I wasn't launching... no one was buying.

Here's what no one is telling you about being a creator... it's relentless. Being a creator seems fun at first as you proudly hit publish on your first blog post, or write a Twitter thread that gets more than a few likes and suddenly you start to build a bit of an audience.

I love it when I see people launching their first Notion template. After all, it's where I got started. I launched my first free Notion template in December 2020 and countless more after that. And by far the best advice I ever received from seasoned template creators was to put it on Gumroad.

Don't despair over Gumroad removing the pre-launch feature. Recently Gumroad removed their pre-launch feature. If you've been using it to pre-launch your products you might be wondering how the heck to do you do a pre-launch now?

Here’s an Unpopular Opinion For You: Having a day job and being a creator are not mutually exclusive.You can do both well & enjoy them. I do. Most people assume I’m a full-time creator. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Good intentions don’t work. Mechanisms do... Jeff Bezos. I was sitting in a workshop two weeks ago where I challenged my clients to a challenge to show up on social media for 100 days. It was a Friday, the challenge was set to start Monday. Some decided to start straight away. Admirable, but foolish. Their motivation died over the weekend and they had to start at 0 by Monday.

Why are habits so hard to stick to? I think because on a daily level they seem to make such an insignificant difference. It's often hard to see the change that those habits are making when we are caught up in the daily minutia. So how do we stay motivated to keep doing habits without seeing results every day?

I'm learning that going to my edge is where I experience the most aliveness in life. The problem is that too often I revert back to my comfort zone all cozy-like and forget that the edge is where aliveness is. The past few weeks Sydney has been in full lockdown. It's also the middle of winter. So, I decided to go into hibernation in my cozy little apartment. Eat, sleep, drink (& write essays of course).

Would you rather 10x growth or consistent daily growth? The Internet is a wild place where one day you are minding your own business and the next you are exploding because someone retweeted you or shared your product or wrote something about your company. But we have to remind ourselves that those moments are the exception and not the rule.

I spent some time chatting to my good friend from Ship30 Ely about note taking, my Notion system and being a better human.

Who are you becoming? A few days ago I wrote an essay about how I don't 'do goals' instead I live in the daily and I let each day be a fresh start to becoming the person I want to be. It was a little throw-away line at the end of an essay. Until Joe Lurie asked me the ultimate question.

Is it about time you started showing up for your future self? I find it really easy to show up for other people. If somebody needs me I'll drop everything to help. Often at the expense of myself. But what if I showed up for my future self? That girl who's me tomorrow or this afternoon? What if I started to ask myself how I could make her life easier, to make her life flow more smoothly, to help her to reach her goals?

What if we're thinking of habits all wrong? A couple of days ago Jackson Steger wrote an essay that I really can't stop thinking about. About values based habits and goals. Rather than building habits based on external outcomes we built them on our internal values instead?

Being consistent in one thing leads to consistency in all things. Seeing over 60 atomic essays on my calendar is cool and all. But it's meant something more powerful than just words on a page. It's proved to me that I AM a consistent person. And every day I write, I prove it to myself again. You see consistency isn't just about willpower. It's the belief that you can do it.

I'm an Introvert. Yeah yeah. I can tell you're shocked. Most people are when I tell them. Because people assume that I'm an extrovert because they see me 'out there' online or chatting comfortably at an event, or hosting Twitter spaces or doing a thousand other things. Basically they don't see me acting 'shy' so think I must be an extrovert.

If there is one thing that has derailed me on many a 30-day experiment, it's submitting to the voice in my head. You know THAT voice. You've probably experienced it too. You're trying to build a habit. You start off so well, you might even get a week in, and when you're not seeing the results you thought you would... BAM doubt starts to creep in.

Every experiment starts with a hypothesis. It's one of the only things I learned from year 7 science. No one is performing experiments just for the fun of it. OK, we may or may not have had some fun with the bunsen burners... but I digress.