Meta: How I track things I learned
2025-12-04
In response to my 2025 Things I learned post, my friend Mark tells me “You should do a meta post on how you come up with this list.”
Frequent readers of this blog probably know the answer to this already, but I’ll spell it out in more detail here. I’ve been very influenced by my friend / mentor Alex Komoroske who has an essential google doc called Bits & Bobs.
I more or less have copied what he does but adapted it for who I am and what I’m interested in.
Thought the week each week I keep a running note in Bear called Good Tokens YYYY-MM-DD.
I throw things in here throughout my day: links I like, observations, ideas baked and unbaked.
On Thursdays or Fridays, I go through and I process through that list. About 75% of it ends up as my weekly Good Tokens post and the rest of it gets sorted somewhere else or thrown out and then I post it to my blog here.
Whenever I post something, I have OpenAI tag it for me. Then starting about November 1st, I start going back through and looking at the posts tagged things I learned.
I dump all of these into a doc in chronological order and then start cleaning up the formatting and reading through them. As I do that, I start to see themes and then group and regroup them until I’ve got the post. I am to put it out more or less on December 1st.
Perhaps a better question would be why I do this. One answer is that I enjoy it. Another is that I really do find that it builds a habit for me of looking out into the world and considering it. A third is that it has helped me crystalize what I’m uniquely interested in and where I want to spend my time — which is a funny thing to say considering how weird and wide ranging these posts are, but the act of reflecting on it on a weekly basis does help me see patterns. A final reason is that I do think that the creative act is contagious. Like running, the hardest step is the first one and so having a habit of creation keeps me in the flow.