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 failed at consistent journalling... until I started using Tana. There is something special that makes Tana a perfect digital journaling app. But there is never just one way to start a daily journal practice. So in this video I wanted to give you 3 different ways that you might start a daily journaling practice in Tana.

Learn how to effortlessly organise your thoughts & ideas with Tana

A lot of people tell me you can't do long form writing in Tana. I tend to disagree. Here's how Tana enhanced my writing workflow & why I can't imagine writing in any other app now.

Bullet Journal collections are a great way to track & organise just about anything. In this video I show you why Tana is purpose built for bullet journalling (& how to setup your own collections in Tana).

Wondering how to take your Trello boards and migrate them into Tana? I show you how to do just that. Plus how you can supercharge what you were doing in Trello using a few spunky tricks in Tana.

Capturing voice is easy. But working with voice notes always felt clunky to me. Until I created these 3 Tana AI Voice Workflows to get things out of my head and into a useable format that I can start working with.

Learning a new tool can be really frustrating. And if you've dived into Tana thinking it looks cool, only to find yourself clunking around not knowing what to do then today's video is for you

There is nothing more detrimental to finding flow in your digital systems than having to click around constantly to work on things. My Focus Sidebar in Tana keeps me focused on the most important things, wherever I am in my workspace.

In today's video, I'm going to show you three quick & easy command buttons you can add to your task supertag so you can spend less time managing tasks and more time actually doing tasks.I find that a lot of people are still not using commands either because they don't know how, they don't know what they can do with them OR it all just seems a little complex

After years of trying to stay tool-agnostic when it comes to talking about note-taking, I’m willing to put it all on the line & say Tana has turbo-charged my note-taking & writing like no other tool I have used before.

You asked for it & you got it! Tana's new IOS Mobile App is here 🚀And it's pretty special. After using it for the last few weeks I honestly couldn't imagine my Tana workflows without it... and that's coming from me a girl who sits 90% of her day in front of a computer.

There are a lot of complex things you can to with the AI. But for normal everyday people just trying to get their work done it can be daunting. So in this video I want to show you how you can get setup easy & fast (it's SO easy) and how to create a chatGPT like experience right in your Tana graph.

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.

I used to hate yearly planning. And I think it comes down to my relationship with goal setting. I’m not much of a goal setter. A year is a long time and I don’t like to be locked into heavy goals throughout the year.

Most of us go through our lives literally just running on a hamster wheel.We wake up, we do the same things, we drive the same way to work, or eat the same meals, and we put things back in the same place.

Consistency. I bet it's on your list of 'want more of it' in 2023. After all, it's the holy grail of productivity & self-improvement. And yet most of us feel like we're failing at it most of the time. But what if locking yourself into a rigid view of consistency is actually hindering you rather than helping you?

Strength training has taught me more about consistency than any other thing I've done in life (including growing as a creator). The other day my trainer programmed inverted rows (under a low bar and pulling/rowing up). Every time I've attempted them before I have had to do them in batches. So when she said 15 reps I yelled an expletive in my head.

When starting something new you should probably find a way to do it daily. For years I thought the way to become a creator was to write two blogs a week (or 2 podcasts or two vlogs). After all, that seemed like a reasonable amount of writing each week.

I almost signed up for an 8 week summer book writing bootcamp this morning on Instagram. I don't need another Bootcamp or mastermind or course to actually write my book. I have an outline, I have half the content for it already! But I thought maybe this is what I need to get this thing finished.

Reminder: You are under no obligation to play by anyone else's rules. Most of us don't remember a time before the noise of the internet (& Twitter) meant every time you scroll you see another influencer or person with a social media account telling you how you should be doing everything in your life.

I am the queen of unused trackers. A few days ago I threw out a tweet declaring tracking bankruptcy. It came as I looked at my Daily Page and realised that the tracker I set up to track my mood daily that I thought would be interesting, I had used a total of 2 times out of 50.

I have a decent library of books that sits in and around my desk. I designed it that way. Literally, my desk is built into my bookshelf. Every book holds a significant moment or memory or reason for being on that shelf.

Consistency is hard. But when you master it, it's addictive as hell. 2 months ago I started training again with a personal trainer after taking a break for about 6 months. Starting again was HARD. Especially because I know what strong feels like. But what seemed hard on that first day is now starting to feel easier (if you can call lifting weight easy!).

I've been a little MIA this week. You might have noticed, maybe not? On Monday I landed myself in the hospital after having chest pains & thinking I was having a heart attack. Don't worry, I was cleared of any heart problems.

This is going to be an uncomfortable essay about consistency. I am going to put a caveat at the beginning to say I am NOT the queen of consistency. Most of the time I write about things I'm currently experiencing and thinking about. So take this as much as an essay I'm writing for myself as for anyone else.