Yesterday, I got a lot of great feedback from my network. I had an amazing conversation with Cary Bakker who does life coaching about the pros and cons of blogging, vs using social media. So plus one for sparking interesting conversations. Cary expressed that he is a huge supporter of what I am trying to do.

What it looks like

I took a snapshot of my Project folder on my iPhone so you can see what my Second Brain looks like working on this tiny experiment.

Two thoughts come to mind. First, if you look, you can see that my “vault” has over 10,000 notes. That’s a lot. However, Niklas Luhmann had over 90,000! In the 1960s! And they were all handwritten on paper! I can’t imagine what he would do with today’s productivity tech.

Luhmann published 400 peer reviewed academic articles - or about 2 a year in addition to publishing 40 books. Why has no one ever heard of him? Because he was a German Sociologist. Not a huge demand in the USA for German Sociology. But his productivity is what captured everyone’s attention in 2017 when Sönke Ahrens| wrote a book called How to Take Smart Notes. The concepts swept through the medical community and the creator community. Why? Because in medicine everything is connected. The other group latched on because the internet has a voracious appetite for content.

Note: What are those weird numbers in my file names? They are called Zettelkasten numbers, and they help make sure every note is unique. They consist of the year, month, day, hour, and minute the note was created. For example, if I made a note right now it the file would start with 202504290719 -. It is pretty rare to make more than one note a minute, so they usually don’t include seconds. These numbers act as a form of UID or Unique Identifier, only one that is easily decipherable. When you start getting thousands, upon thousands of notes, making up unique file names is not as easy as it sounds. Plopping a ZID (Zettelkasten identifier) on the front of your file makes this process much easier. I use templater scripts in Obsidian to automate the process.

In summary, I started a project folder called Project - Tiny Experiment 1 in my 1 Projects folder (I put numbers in front of my PARA folders so they sort correctly, otherwise I’d get AAPR), and then I made a project file _Project - Tiny Experiment 1 which serves as a kind of README file for the project. I call this the Home Note. I use a template for it, so all my projects start with a standard structure. Then I start adding, creating, and linking notes. I will create a folder on my OneDrive cloud drive that has the exact same name in the same PARA folder structure (OneDrive\1 Projects\Project - Tiny Experiment 1) to hold any PDF files, spreadsheets, images, videos or other assets I may or may not want to put into Obsidian. Though, Obsidian does a good job with PDF files. My OneDrive usually ends up holding MS Office files. I use a similar file structure on google drive (GDrive/1 Projects/Project - Tiny Experiments 1) if I have google sheets, slides, or docs. The path structure is exactly the same and I call this organizing by convention. I use the same convention everywhere so I expect to be able to find what I am looking for quickly - usually in one or two clicks. Occasionally, but not always, I will paste web links to these folders in the project home note. It is all about making life for my future self easier and reducing the cognitive load. The less I have to remember, the more working memory I have for thinking.

Thinking is hard.

I use tools and systems to make it easier and to coral my ADD brain. I don’t have to remember details, my Digital Second Brain does that for me.

7:29AM

The calls start. Finished up my morning routine, now it’s time to talk.

8:30AM

Hey an opportunity came in. A possible speaking gig for New York City Schools. During COVID we did a lot of events for universities and colleges around the country. I also helped our largest franchise owner in Long Island host a bunch of educational after school programs built around games minecraft as well as some esports titles like rocket league and smash bros. They reached out to see if we could help with a program they are working on. I had to provide a bio. This is what I pulled together (my personal website which is focused on my speaking is at: https://scottnovis.com.) Maybe someday I’ll migrate these posts to that space, but for now, since this is unproven and that is all about “looking professional” I decided to keep them separate. Mistake? What do you think?

But here’s the Bio:

Scott Novis Bio

About Scott

Scott has two engineering degrees and 11 patents. His “gameology” consists of 15 published video games for Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo. He left the Walt Disney Company, where he served as the Vice President of their Nintendo Development Studio, to start his entrepreneurial journey by founding GameTruck, the original mobile video game theater concept. Since its founding in 2006, the GameTruck franchise system has delivered more than 500,000 events and has entertained more than 14 million players. Scott started GameTruck with the purpose of creating feelings of belonging through play. Through the Entrepreneur Organization, he mentors young entrepreneurs and lectures on innovation. He is an experienced international keynote speaker, author, and passionate advocate for safe gaming. He helps parents and educators protect kids from video game obsession.

9:15AM

Need to work on creating and queueing up some more cartoons. That experiment I set for 200. I am at 82 so far. I have the process down to something that only takes a few minutes… if I have an idea, and even if I don’t…

After I line out the action, then fill the color. I scan it, clean it up, then upload into a template I created in Canva. That is where I add the dialog, and get it ready to publish.

oh great… I want to get to work and Canva has hijacked my work environment with some new promo video. Thanks guys…

okay, it’s over… back to getting stuff done.

The final cartoon looks like this…

Work flow:

  1. Sketch
  2. Line
  3. Color fill
  4. Scan
  5. Cleanup with Acorn 8 (I use a Mac)
  6. Edit joke in Canva.
  7. Download and save in appropriate PARA folder on OneDrive
  8. Schedule posts in PUBLR.
  9. Upload post to ComicFury

9:59AM

Blah. Parents are an amorphous economic entity. What I mean is that parents as a group have no specific shape or boundary. They are not a business, or a team, or members of a program. So how do I reach this audience? When I do get to talk with parents about video game safety, they immediately identify with the topic. And when I share my tools and tips, they appreciate it. When they use them, they always tell me it made a (positive) difference.

However, parents are not some unified economic entity. They are not a business or a specific community. To reach parents I need to work through groups that serve parents, and those groups don’t actually do much with the parents as a group. Take a community center, they tend to serve individual families. If you could get all of their clients together in one space you would have “parents”, but most of the time schools, churches, and NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) don’t want to do that. They deal with parents individually. I think some school districts will have meetings and hearings for “the general public” - which includes parents. But finding the partner who has an audience of parents is proving to be far more challenging than I imagined. Even Richard Walton, who runs outsell told me, “this is the longest sales cycle I have seen in a long time.” It is easier to sell a complex piece of software than a talk about parenting kids.

So, I put my outreach program on hold until I figure it out. That is another reason, I started this “tiny experiment”. Maybe you, or someone like you reading this will have an idea as to how I can reach parents. I’m definitely missing something.

What If: What if the problem is parents is too generic? What if I need to be more targeted, like I need to reach mom. Or Dad? (My gut tells me it’s mom.) How could I make the content more specific and relevant to mom’s? And what if talking about parents complicates the issue? Now I need to get both mom and dad involved. That could be a high hurdle. things to think about.

This sounds like it should be easy but isn’t.

10:30AM

Prime time productivity declining, mental energy sliding. I’ll “take a break” by adding to some book notes. Specifically I want to pull the most interesting content out of the book Tiny Experiments and turn it into Second Brain notes. This process is based upon the The Feynman Technique. The core idea is that if you can describe something you learned as if you were talking to a 12 year old you know it. If you can’t, you have some more work to do. The act of producing or expressing information is part of what turns it into knowledge.

Note: If you want to see what a Book Note document looks like you can see check out my Tiny Experiments Book Notes.

12:00PM

Had an unbelievably energizing call with Evan Walton. During the conversation as we got to know each other, he shared a personal story that gave me an idea about a path I might be able to take to help kids.

What’s my problem? Parents are not an economic entity, they are an demographic - an attribute, but it’s not specific enough. However, when parents have problems with video games, this can lead to counseling. It can be family counseling, or marriage therapy. What if I target therapists and counselors? They need continuous professional education and they are not doubt being affected by these types of trama, and perhaps they could benefit from my content, and then they can help their clients who are also struggling with it.

That is something to look into. Also investigate Bowen Family Therapy systems. (I think this is the second time that has come lately).

Note: This is what I do when I learn about something new. I make a note. Do some googling, some ChatGPTing, and I capture information and I put it into the second brain.

Possible next course of action. Reach out to the Therapists I know and do some googling as to how I might be able to help them.

5:20 PM

Had lunch with a friend. We talked about business and managing teams. I shared my new favorite management tool, the Spotify Squad Health Check. Now I’m back home and I’m tired. I want to get more done, but I’m frazzled… My energy is 🪫 and I’m in that weird place where I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to work out, I do not want to watch TV, even playing a game feels like too much effort. This will pass in a little while, but I miss feeling like I did this morning where I just sat down and got after my task list.

My best option right now is to journal. A little self reflection wouldn’t hurt. I journal with a fountain pen and quality notebook.

8:20PM

I did some reading on my kindle with warmlight on (reduces blue light). I try to stay off my devices after 8PM and definitely the half hour before bed time. No screens (kindle excepted) in the bedroom. No watching videos, no social media. The bed is for sleep. Well, sleep and and other activies that lead to sleep. I learned from the book Breath by James Nester that if I sleep with my mouth closed my sinuses generate an anti-duretic mist which is inhaled into my lungs. What this means is that as a man in my late 50s I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom any more which really helps my quality of sleep.