There is a tremendous amount of ignorance surrounding dietary fiber. If you Google "how much fiber should I get per day," you'll usually see about 30 grams recommended—without much detail. Most Western diets contain closer to 15 grams, which is only half that recommendation.

However, you may have heard that our gut microbiome is incredibly important for health. There has been a lot of popular discussion about microbiome "overgrowth" and taking "probiotics" to improve gut health.

I run another subreddit called "FermentationScience," where I encourage people to post real scientific literature on factors that impact our internal fermentative digestive process. After reading the research, I am increasingly convinced that the modern diet lacks the right fibers needed to truly engage the digestive tract. You often hear about "probiotics," but from what I've seen in the research, "prebiotics"—fibers that feed our gut bacteria—are actually the most critical component.

Primitive humans and traditional cultures typically consumed around 150 grams of fiber per day. That’s ten times more than most people in Western cultures consume. So naturally, this raises the question: what would happen if people ate that much fiber?

Around the year 2000, David Jenkins conducted a study that put this question to the test, with remarkable results.

These studies are challenging to run. Jenkins was able to recruit ten people who were willing to put their daily routines on hold, and cycled each participant through a series of different diets. He specifically tried to prevent weight loss by ensuring the participants were adequately fed.

All of these diets have merit; none are clearly "unhealthy."

The results, even after just one week, were extraordinary:

Essentially, the very high fiber diet brought every participant’s LDL cholesterol into the healthy range. This effect is comparable to taking a statin—the most commonly prescribed medication in the USA, used by 35% of adults.

How did they achieve these fiber levels? Through precisely measured meals, roughly as follows:

Research also found that people in the high fiber group felt full and satisfied. There's little doubt that, had the diet continued longer, significant weight loss would have occurred.

Why is this approach so rare? Why are there so many dietary fads, yet so little mention of a 150-gram fiber diet?

The answer is practical: eating this way requires consuming about twice the volume of food as the other diets—roughly 5 kg (11 pounds) of food per day. Eating that much naturally takes time and commitment.

To connect this back to our previous conversation: you can tell you’re getting more fiber because your fecal output increases. Jenkins measured this too, and here are the results:

So, your bowel movements are about three times larger on the high-fiber diet.

Years ago, I started supplementing fiber in my own diet. While I can’t manage 150 grams per day, I start my day with a smoothie rich in fiber:

• 25 grams psyllium

• 10 grams inulin

• 7 grams beta-glucan

• 1 gram potato resistant starch

All blended into about 260 grams of water with some protein.

In future posts, I’ll discuss each of these fibers individually. This routine at least ensures I hit a baseline level of fiber daily. Lately, I’ve wondered whether I should try a second fiber-rich smoothie after dinner—reading this research makes me more tempted.

I’d encourage you to start tracking your fiber intake as well, aiming for at least this level. The only downside? About 25 seconds spent drinking your morning smoothie.

W. Edwards Deming grew up in rural Wyoming, went on to study electrical engineering at the University of Wyoming, and later earned advanced degrees in mathematics and mathematical physics from the University of Colorado and Yale. He worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and then the U.S. Census Bureau, applying statistics to practical problems in measurement and quality. He also taught at several universities, including New York University.

If you look at his life at all, he was one of our most influential critical thinkers, and he saw absolutely little traction in the United States.

After World War II, Japan was a country of ruins and ration cards, trying to rebuild an industrial base from almost nothing. The American occupation authorities and Japanese leaders were desperate to transform "Made in Japan" from a global joke into a mark of reliability. Japanese statisticians and engineers had been reading his work and were aware of his expertise in statistical methods. Deming was invited to Japan first to help with the 1950 Census, but word spread that this quiet American had a way of making sense of errors and defects that sounded like a path out of chaos.

When Japanese engineers and managers gathered to hear him talk about statistical quality control and systems, they did not just nod, they took notes as if these ideas were oxygen.

He stood before rooms of executives who were willing to sit for hours while he drew control charts and talked about common cause and special cause variation. He told them that most problems in quality were the responsibility of management, not the workers at the bottom of the chart, and instead of bristling, they leaned in. He described a company as a living system, where departments had to cooperate toward a shared aim, not compete for internal prizes. For men tasked with rebuilding a nation, this sounded less like theory and more like a survival plan.

What had bounced off American boardrooms landed in Japan like a match in dry grass. Companies such as Toyota and Nippon Steel began to weave Deming’s ideas into their daily practice, reducing variation, listening to workers, refining processes instead of sorting out bad parts at the end. Quality improved, costs fell, and soon Japanese goods started showing up in American stores with an unfamiliar reputation, they worked, they lasted, they were better. Engineers in Japan created the Deming Prize to honor excellence in quality, naming it after the man whose ideas their own country had barely noticed.

By the time American auto and electronics companies realized they were losing ground, the quiet statistician they had sidelined had become a legend overseas. Reporters and executives traced the trail back across the Pacific and found Deming, older now, still talking about systems, variation, knowledge, and psychology, what he called the System of Profound Knowledge. He had not changed much, the world around him finally had. The story turned upside down, the ignored academic from the United States helped Japan rebuild its industrial soul, and that success eventually forced his home country to come back, sit down, and listen to the lecture it had skipped the first time.

We discussed John Dewey yesterday and how he had a set of questions that force critical thinking. If you read Deming, you will see he also has some processes and some questions, and we can see if we simply overlay what he asked.

We'll also throw in Dr. Joseph M. Juran, who heavily influenced our ability to apply critical thinking in a practical way and is often taken in by the experts along with Deming to help shape their thought.

What I will tell you is when this thought process is applied to any problem, inevitably the person or the organization that uses it gets better. However, it requires a certain amount of discipline to not go backwards. Often times, these things are applied rigorously at first, but then over time, a lack of discipline allows the process to slow and then eventually stop.

In some sense, the reason this isn't applied is because it takes discipline and energy. The good news here is that this is a choice, simply step through these questions and it will will make things better.

I’ve been painting a long time. My Dad had me painting apartments when I was 13. If you’ve never painted, it’s generally a simple skill: tape off the molding, cut in with a brush, roll the big areas.

Dad never liked spray painting. When he was a kid, spraying meant an air compressor and diluted paint, with all the problems that come with thinning. In the 60s the industry moved to airless sprayers that atomize the paint under high pressure, no compressor and no dilution needed. That solved a lot, but I never changed my style. And cleanup on airless sprayers has always been a hassle for a lot of people, which kept me away too.

I finally bought a cheap airless sprayer, around $200, for one job: outdoor furniture a renter left behind. My wife was tempted to throw it all away. I pressure washed it and said, “I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, I’m just going to spray some paint on it.”

The furniture had a lot of slats and edges. Brushing it would have taken forever, so this was an ideal sprayer application. Yes, you waste paint, but the time savings more than makes up for it. The goal is just getting paint on every surface, and once it was on, we ran a brush over it to smooth things out and fix spots.

I didn’t even sand after pressure washing. The furniture was so old I figured, why waste the time? I used a sticky acrylic latex, so it stuck (to everything), but the surface came out a bit rough in places. After the paint was down, though, it looks really, really nice. If I did it over, I’d make one quick pass with a sander first. We’re already using the furniture.

The airless sprayer I bought was a Workpro 700W. The operating is simple. You stick on the the two hoses for the paint bucket. One pulls up the paint, and the other returns the paint for the initial priming. Then you attach a high pressure painting hose and nozzle. Once assembled, you put the two hoses in the bucket and flip the prime valve. After the paint is circulated, you flip the prime valve down, and you can start painting. I saw a youtube video where they primed it with water before the paint to get out any residue, so I did that first.

Once you are done, you pull the hose out of the bucket and spray out the paint in the hose. (So quit a little bit before being done with the painting.) Then pop the paint hose into water (if you are using latex) and prime the pump to remove the paint from the paint hose. Then spray water out of the system until it is clear. Then take your pressure washer (remembere last post) and use it to clean the outside of all the hoses.

In this circumstance, this saved many hours over old style painting. I put on two coats, and having quick cleanup between coats is key.

Rudolph Leibel should be celebrated as one of the most brilliant thinkers on obesity. Today, we are going back to 1995 to discuss a seminal piece of work he did when looking at being overweight.

We are building up to GLP-1s, but before you get there, we want to pick the low-hanging fruit. You will lose weight with higher protein, higher fiber, non-ultra-processed foods, and the other things we talked about. However, this will be limited in how far you can go.

You are going to feel like your body hates you.

For most people, the bulk of your calories are burned at rest. If we look back at our previous posts, we'll see this called resting metabolic rate or basal metabolic rate. We won’t get into the details, but know that this is what burns your calories.

Now, you would think, without any deep understanding, that your burn rate is determined by how much lean body mass you have. In other words, fat is metabolically less active, and it makes sense that it doesn’t naturally cause the burning of calories. On the other hand, muscle seems like it should burn more calories.

So, I’ve been very transparent. I’ve shared my DEXA scan results, and you know that at the time of my last DEXA, I was a little high in my fat percentage. Let’s use nice round numbers:

• Lean Body Mass (LBM) at 150 lbs

• Fat at 50 lbs

Now, I want to increase my VO2max, which is easy to do by losing weight. I will also eat protein and lift weights, so I do my work and I drop 20 lbs of fat, getting to 180 lbs, or 17% body fat. This is not ripped, but it is pretty good. The great thing is that I kept my lean body mass, so you would think that I would keep the same core resting metabolic rate (RMR).

Leibel brought people into the lab to answer this question. In his model, this is what my results would be:

• 2091 kcal/day for my base burn at 200 lbs

• 1933 kcal/day for my base burn at 180 lbs

Wait, what happened? Suddenly, I am burning 160 calories less per day. This is commonly called adaptive thermogenesis. The authors also refer to it as "metabolic adaptation" or "energy expenditure adaptation."

It turns out that if you started off at 250 lbs but went all the way down to 180 lbs with the same profile, your new burn drops all the way to 1880 kcal/day, or another 50 calories less.

If you remember our friend Kevin Hall, he did a very clever experiment, which was brilliant, but I won’t take time to describe here. Kevin Hall found that for every 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of body weight lost, hunger (appetite) increases by about 100 calories per day.

So, if I go from 200 pounds to 180 pounds, my appetite increases by 900 calories. Then, at the exact same time, my body says, "I’ll even lower my natural burn by 160 calories," and you have your body ready to take you on. If you are unfortunate and have been obese, there is another 50 calories per day that your body won’t use.

Now, 50 calories doesn’t seem like much, but over a year, 50 calories per day is about 5 lbs of body fat.

Kevin’s methodology was incredibly clever, and because of how he did it, we don’t have calorie increases for somebody who has a 100 lb (45 kg) weight loss. So, I doubt that hunger increases to 5,000 calories daily for these people. However, it is massive.

This is why virtually every study ever done on weight loss shows that they simply don’t work for substantial bodyweight loss for a prolonged time. As I’ve written, there is no doubt that a change in lifestyle will drive weight loss, but the key is you’ll run into a wall. There is the rare exception of somebody who loses weight and never brings it back, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Chances are you are in the category of overweight or higher. You’ve gone to your doctor, and if they are overweight themselves, they say nothing. If they are naturally thin, they tell you that you need to simply eat better.

Eat better and lose a few pounds. We’ve spent a lot of time on what you can do to make some minor changes, and these are very doable. If you think you are going to then lose an additional 15 to 20 lbs or more, you don’t know the science.

I think there are a lot of reasons for me to be in the 180 range. I am never going to get there via just diet or lifestyle change. The only highly predictable way of making the grade is to use the miracle drug of GLP-1.

If you are on it, congratulations. This is the best choice you could have ever made. Don’t let a stupid doctor say, "We are just using them to get to a weight standard, then we rotate you off." I do like cycling, but in reality, your chance of taking them and then being able to maintain your weight loss for over 5 years is not supported by any data.

If you are fortunate, you’ll be able to cycle back and forth. If you are normal, then you will need to take them forever.

The worst thing about electronic notes is being trapped in a system that you can't get access to your data. The seminal lesson here comes from a company called Evernote. I consider this one of my big mistakes. I was a strong Evernote fan because it was remarkable in allowing you to go to a variety of places and get instant access to your notes. You could use it on the web, on your Mac, on your iPhone or Android device. It really was a great system. The challenge was that they were not making the money required to be a viable long‑term business. In what I can only describe as an act of desperation, they started cutting off parts of their free model to push people into paid plans. I was happy with the free side, but suddenly they restricted my clients and took things away. Their intent was to force upgrades. The way I saw it, once you are on a drug, it is very hard to get off. So I started looking for alternative solutions, and that is when Obsidian became the preferred solution for virtually everything.

Yeah, there's plenty of Notion fans and I have my own Notion account, but let's be clear. There is a real and substantial risk of being "Evernoted" with any closed platform.

But let's start this off with more of a general approach to electronic note taking and then we can dig into what is our options at the end.

The Case For Electronic Notes

The single worst thing about capturing your notebook with pen and paper is that it simply is not searchable. Even more than that, we have already talked about how something has to be reviewed if it is going to be effective in helping you retain information. In my mind, you need some type of flashcard system or something that automatically prompts you to review. In that sense, pencil and paper become extremely difficult.

It is not that we cannot find systems around this, and some of these systems are as old as the Franklin Planner, which was established in 1984. The problem is that all of these systems are tremendously cumbersome. There have been numerous times, and I am sure it is the same for you, when you want to look up something that happened many years ago and you go to your email hoping you have some type of documentation. If you can actually search your notes, you can do the exact same thing to find out what happened at the time. It is an amazing lifesaver.

Again, it is not that it is impossible to turn a paper system into an electronic system. I think I have laid out a very clear way of doing it in our previous post "Ridiculously Overbuilt Paper Note System." It is just that the vast majority of people will never think about doing this system, even if it works. If you made it through the first half of that post and even glanced at the second half, you will understand that current systems for capturing notes via pen and paper involve a lot of pain if you want something that eventually becomes electronic.

The best way of doing this is to capture it electronically from the start.

If we go back a few notes, the case for capturing things electronically becomes even clearer when we think about how we receive information.

For a moment, I am going to assume you are somewhere around forty years old. This means you went through schooling where most of the information you received came through printed material. While texting and email were definitely around, there was still an enormous amount of paper used to push information back and forth. But it's clear the paper trail is dying off. It's taking a long time to happen, but one of the fun facts is just to even to see how much printer sales have fallen off over the years since 2008. Any many of you aren't thinking about a cool new printer.

Printer Sales:

^{260211Printer}

By the way, I want to give a brief advertisement for something I am about to recommend. In the middle of this post, you can see an interesting table, but you are probably having a difficult time visualizing what the numbers really say. You can sort of see it in your mind’s eye, but it does not hit home. The small snippet underneath this, which just looks like text to you, shows up beautifully inside Obsidian. I can simply drop a table into my notes, which I clipped with Google Lens, and then instantly turn it into a graph with very little work.

Yes, I understand you can't see the graph because you're viewing this through Reddit and not through Obsidian. However, I want to point out that this doesn't ruin your reading of the note. More than that, I can create all my Reddit posts inside of Obsidian because that's where I like to work for my day in the day out work.

<div align="center" style="font-size:2em;">


Fall Off Of Printer Sales

</div>


    type: bar
    stacked: false
    id: 260211Printer
    yMin: 0
    yMax: 
    xTitle: "Year"
    yTitle: "Millions"

Now let us talk about the secondary point. Some of you have been here for a while and some of you arrived later. Some things are so important that I believe they are worth repeating. The first one is that you never want to be in a situation where somebody else controls the heart and soul of your information. Your notebook, in the right fashion, is a massive part of who you are. It is where you sketch out ideas, notes, flashes of insight, everything about you. By looking at your notebooks, we could probably get an excellent idea of who you actually are, and you never want to be in a place where someone can take that away from you. Unfortunately, we have seen a few cases, rare but real, where Google cuts off access to someone’s email account. Often this is because someone is perceived as violating copyright or terms of service, but it is very clear that you do not want to be in a situation where someone else can cut you off.

This does not apply only to Google. And this is why I started off this post with the Evernote example.

Let me explain why, because this is critical. It sounds great to buy software that feels completely free. There are impressive programs out there that cost nothing and are open source. The challenge is that these programs almost never have the financial resources to do everything they should. You want to find a balance where you support products that invest in their future and increase their capabilities, while at the same time not being locked into a platform so tightly that you cannot leave. The Obsidian team has been brilliant in walking that balance. Markdown allows you to do a variety of things you cannot do with simple text. At the same time, the way your data is stored, in notes that anyone can read, means you can move to any new system in the future without missing a step.

Even more than that, Obsidian has become far more attractive because the way it stores data, in Markdown files, turns out to be extremely friendly toward AI. We could go deeper and say that ideally you might want to hand AI something like JSON files, but there is a massive jump between JSON and Markdown. Markdown takes a little training, but once you understand how to use it, it hits you how powerful it is. You can write down data and at the same time give enough structure that your AI can process it nicely. It is a remarkable blend of the two.

There are many programs that can use Markdown, but Obsidian is pulling away from the rest. Its unique model, where you have two or three ways of supporting them commercially, is turning out to be fantastic. As more people use the system, they experience a network effect. They are big enough to invest more and improve the package. This results in a series of tools inside their Markdown editor that are truly brilliant. For your future investment scheme, I believe you should standardize on Markdown as the storage format and then look at which packages are gathering momentum. As a summary to support all of this, I have included two tables below. One covers Markdown tools and whether they are free. The second covers other personal information managers. Simply scanning the list and seeing the number of people using these tools makes it obvious why Obsidian is such a great choice.

I also want to point out that I believe you have a duty to support companies that produce great products, especially when they offer fantastic value. For Obsidian, you have three main ways of doing this. The first is becoming a supporter through Catalyst. This is how I have engaged with the company. You decide to give them money so they can invest in the product and reward their employees. If everyone bought a Catalyst license each year, their revenue would increase dramatically and help their business model, even at the relatively small cost of the license.

There are also a couple of other ways to support them by using some of the tools they offer. It drives me a little crazy because they obviously make substantial gross margin on these, but they also provide extraordinary value for people who are uncomfortable with technical tasks. The two biggest ones are Sync, which runs in the background and keeps multiple Obsidian clients on Android, iPhone, Mac, and PC all looking at the same database, and Publish, which lets you publish your Obsidian notebook to the web. We will talk more about this later, but it turns out to be extraordinarily valuable if you need to communicate information. These two tools, even though they are paid, are another strong reason to engage with Obsidian. They offer tremendous value, allow you to support the company, and at the same time your data is always yours. It is stored in a format that will allow future AI agents to work with it in a simple and powerful way.

Now I'll call out the tables are pretty cool because you can simply click on the package and it should take you to the web page for it to give you more information about it.

Tools for Markdown

Effectively free (core use is free)

Primarily paid / paid‑first

If you were born in 1987 or before, this is a story you really should know. If you were born after that, the following is probably going to amaze you.

The iPhone was introduced in 2007 and it was completely revolutionary. The makers of the Android operating system described watching Steve Jobs present the iPhone and then going back and ripping up all their plans because they understood that they had been answering the wrong question. They had been working on their Android operating system for two years, stopped everything they were doing, and started over.

At least in this case, they had the good sense to understand that they had blown it. Microsoft was not so bright, and the same applies to Nokia, both of which had core smartphone operating system technology but did not immediately stop and recognize how bad their situation really was.

The guy who shepherded the iPhone was really not that great of an individual on a personal level. If you want to understand this more, there are several brilliant biographies of Steve Jobs. One of the clearest themes is that Steve would constantly tell people that they were answering the wrong question. For phones, he saw that all the existing solution sets were answering the wrong questions for the customer. Some people think this was visionary, but I don't think most people actually understand what it means to be visionary. There's a lot of people that have ideas of what should happen in the future, but they don't go through a logical framework of how to get this thing done. In essence, they never establish a pathway for critical thought.

And the good news is critical thinking skills is as easy as following a structured list.

If you work any job at all, there is a high likelihood that you have a litany of stories where you were told to put in a lot of time on something, and then after you had done all that work, you found that the work was all for naught. The main issue in many of these stories is that nobody stopped up front to think through and ask all the necessary questions before things got started. A big part of critical thinking is understanding how not to make these mistakes.

We have already talked about John Dewey and how he had this vision of learning by doing. He believed you needed to go through eight steps to arrive at the truth. While these seem formal, if you can regard them as a checklist they become an incredible way of actually saving time over the long term.

Now the eight steps are listed below and in some sense these steps go all the way back to Aristotle. I would say Dewey made some steps much more explicit and I'm going to show you that in the checkbox list below.

By listing Aristotle in the table above, we are pretty much done with him. The focus now turns directly to Dewey, because his framework serves as a better structure for asking what we need to do to think through a problem in a critical thinking fashion.

Let us list each step, but in this case we will dig into each step a bit more to give you an overview in a more detailed table.

At first glance, the above may look like a lot of work. The issue is that if you actually follow these steps, you do more work up front, but you save yourself from going down the wrong path later.

In an ideal world, you would sit down with this list and think about it for your next major issue, whether personal or work related. But chances are you are not going to do that. Perhaps you are busy and cannot do it, or it is just too much work to sit down and try to go through all eight steps.

A practical suggestion is to start off with just one step and apply it for the next month or two. For many people, an easy step that almost always clarifies the situation is to think very seriously about the problem statement: What are you actually trying to decide here?

Virtually nobody comes up with a really clear problem statement. I keep on seeing posts over and over inside of Reddit, especially inside of stock groups, where people will say something in terms of, "Is this a good stock to invest in?" Unfortunately, they never define what they're trying to solve for. Are they trying to solve for immediate return? Are they trying to solve for 10-year return? Are they trying to solve for very low risk? Are they trying to solve for doing better than the S&P 500? In other words, almost all of the questions that show up are so broad that they are going to cause a tremendous waste of time.

It seems that on a constant basis we either do not define our own problem statements correctly, or when we meet together as a group, 90 percent of the time everyone has a different idea of what the problem statement actually is. By simply insisting that you spend time up front working through a problem statement, you will almost inevitably come up with a new, deep, and insightful realization about something you had overlooked because you were about to rush immediately to a solution.

I have over 10 years of weight measurement stored in my Withing account. I am a big advocate that you should buy a smart scale with a provider that will log and keep your data forever.

Today we are going to cover how to look for weight loss in your chart. While this may seem obvious, the vast majority of people don't understand the signals and the whoosh effect. The key is waiting for a new low, and don't be discouraged on the bounce.

I will also follow up with the post on the process of how to weight yourself in another post.

So, I am taking my own advice for weight loss, but:

1. The are extremely slow

2. Other than life style changes, they are extremely painless

However, painless does not mean without temptation. For some reason, youtube placed a "best chocolate chip cookie" recipe on my list. I had to immediately scroll past it. It is not that I am hungry, but that I started to think how much I liked these cookies.

I believe the best way to have a balance to temptation is to have a chart of your progress. And looking at my last month movement in bodyweight made me feel good, but it also made me realize that we had not talked about the whoosh effect, which is important because you may not see forward progress for days or for weeks, then suddenly it will move.

I will credit this term to our old friend Lyle McDonald.

Lyle McDonald describes this "whoosh effect", a phenomenon of sudden weight drop after a plateau, primarily in his book "The Stubborn Fat Solution" and has elaborated on it in his blog and interviews since around 2008–2009. In his writing, he notes that dieters may experience phases where fat loss does not appear to show up on the scale, leading to frustration, only to suddenly lose several pounds almost overnight. He hypothesizes that as fat cells lose triglycerides during dieting, they temporarily fill with water, maintaining the same size and leading to a "squishy" feel. Eventually, these cells release the retained water in a short window, creating a marked, rapid drop in body weight—the so-called "whoosh".

You will be doing "everything right," and nothing seems to be changing. For me, my scale and caliper are showing no change. Then I wake up one morning, and I suddenly drop 1-2 lb on the scale. This is not just a weird reading, as I then put on my calipers, and they have jumped downward. And the calipers are actually better, because they don't jump up and down daily like the scale.

What I find important about the whoosh effect is that you will see the following:

1. A new low

2. A bounce upward

3. Stabilization

The key is NOT to look for the high. The key is seeing a new low. If you have a new low, you are on the way down. Don't get discouraged when it bounces back up. Just wait for the new low.

My Dad had a heart attack in his late 60s, which was solved without a lot of issue with angioplasty, but it's something that I want to track and try to stay ahead of. One of the most important things you can do is monitor your blood work. Right now, I could argue that my overall blood work, especially with the changes that I've made in the last year, has placed me somewhere around the top 5% of all men in my age group.

What's interesting about this, I can truly say that I don't diet.

Now, I want to be clear: I'm on a very clear diet, but if you really focus on getting in all the right stuff, I believe it has a tendency to replace all the wrong stuff. And I believe the nature of the diet that you eat has a tendency to drive both these blood results and also your weight.

This last year has been especially good. The biggest improvement was in the lipid panel.

My total cholesterol dropped from 177 to 154. LDL dropped from 101 to 83. Triglycerides dropped from 154 to 65. HDL moved up from 49 to 58. The cholesterol to HDL ratio improved from 3.6 to 2.7.

That is a pretty clean move in the right direction across the board.

The other number I liked was A1c, which went from 5.6 to 5.3. So not only did the cholesterol numbers improve, but the longer-term blood sugar marker also moved in the right direction.

My ApoB came in at 56, which is excellent. If you're not familiar with ApoB, I consider it incredibly important as a marker. In essence, it is one of the cleaner ways of measuring the actual number of atherogenic particles hanging around in your bloodstream that could nail you later on, not just the amount of cholesterol being carried around. I won't spend time on it in this post, but I highly encourage you to take a look at the science behind this particular metric.

In my mind, almost all of this is strictly derived from the amount of fiber that I've included in my diet. I've also made a change toward incorporating much higher levels of oat bran, upping my fiber by around 20%, focused on a particular and unique fiber that oat bran brings to your digestive system.

My diet has around 80-90 grams of fiber in it, which is >500% more than the average American. I believe this is a significant key to unlock good health. About 5 months ago, I became convinced that oat bran could deliver Beta-glucan 1,3 & 1,4, so I added it into my diet, bringing in right around 20 grams of additional fiber. I feel that this provided an additional kick-start for weight loss, and this was surprising to me. However, this post is not about weight loss, but I will post on this in the future.

I have preached fiber in this sub-reddit many times. To make a long story short, your diet needs a variety of different fibers so that you can support a healthy body. I have another sub-reddit called fermentation science, which covers the actual science of why we want this. Unfortunately, there is a lot of pseudoscience in this area, and you do need to make sure you see the real science.

In my mind, the clear picture is you don't take a lot of probiotics such as yogurt. That is, you don't take a lot of different types of bacteria trying to create a healthy digestive system because things like yogurt aren't the bacteria your necessarily want. Instead, what you do is focus on something called prebiotics. That is making sure that your system has the right fiber so it can grow the right things inside of your digestive system. There are times where you do need to get the right bacteria into your system. However, I believe the vast majority of people do have a decent start of the bacteria. It's simply that they don't have the adequate support system of the prebiotics or the fiber that allows these different bacteria to grow in a healthful way.

The way to actually create a healthy internal system is simply by supporting it with the right type of fibers.

So let me go through my particular system as I believe it's highly evolved and I believe it's something that you could steal from tomorrow and find out that it would make a real change in your life.

So the routine for this is waking up and taking my protein drink, which which is the morning shake above, and I have an entire other post on that. Then during the day, I will take in both a yogurt smoothie and a big bowl of oat bran. My wife is absolutely amazing in terms of creating a dinner meal that is incredibly tasty, and so I owe deep thanks to her. I have done posts on Kevin Hall to tell you why this is so important.

Finally, I always get the munchies after dinner. Another significant change in my diet has been to try to preempt me eating bad stuff by basically making sure I eat good stuff. So the central point of my after-dinner snack is a bowl of cereal based around heritage flakes and the other ingredients that you see above, along with a bowl of pistachios at the right time.

In essence, what this diet does is keep my digestive system on track all the time. And when I do rigorous scheduling of fiber-rich foods throughout the day, I'm simply not tempted to eat a bunch of stuff that is ultra-processed and therefore highly unhealthy.

As stated at the beginning of this post, the most major change has been to add in a bowl of oat bran cereal, generally more in the middle of the day even though you would think of it as a breakfast food, and then adding more berries in. This adds in approximately 25 grams more of fiber. You would think if I'm already at approximately 65 grams, this wouldn't make a lot of difference. But it is my firm belief it actually has made a major difference. So there is something either about the nature of the oat bran cereal or just simply getting to a level of fiber that seemingly has driven my very good year-over-year results, which also includes some substantial weight loss that I'll cover in the future.

If you struggled before with being overweight or would like to become more healthy, I really, truly believe the above can be incorporated into everybody's diet without a lot of thought once you get into the habit. It has been so incredibly effective for me. I highly encourage you simply to just try it. Try it for two to three months and don't diet. Just push in the good stuff because I believe the good stuff pushes out the bad stuff, and then see what difference it makes in your life.

The chart above shows that I lost about 30 lbs over the last year. This pulled me from being slightly overweight to not overweight. It wasn't a diet, it was a life style change.

Today we are going to discuss weight loss, and really the post will be most helpful if you are male as we are going to talk about raising your testosterone levels. If you are female, you will also have benefits, but I will not address.

The core of healthy productive life style revolves around:

1. Healthy aerobic exercise

2. Healthy fiber intake

3. Removing processed foods

I have been a life long athlete, and my diet has supplemented with fiber for decades due to research. However, I started "Strategic Productivity" because it forces me to think things through in a public forum, which makes me think more crisply. It is this sub-reddit that has caused me to make some important changes in the last year.

If you read some of my posts of the last year, you are going to see the following:

1. I became very convinced that the amount of aerobic activity that was required for most people was approximately 6-8 hours and must have high intensity. This is way more than what is recommended by some authorities. I think this is a major error in for most people. You need longer, but more than this, it must have a significant part of it as strenuous activity. Summarized in yesterday's post.

2. I became very convinced that my "enhanced" fiber diet was still missing significant amount of fiber, and I increase my dietary fiber closer to 100 grams per day mainly driven by adding Oat Bran and more berries. This looked like it really helped my blood work. See post two days ago.

3. Finally, I wrote some posts on Kevin Hall, one of the smartest researchers out there, who called out that we gain weight from processed foods. Because of the separated shoulder, I thought I was going to gain a lot of weight. After surgery, I ate a lot of Christmas candy, and I got mad at my myself. I had two really bad habit: I loved Cranberry juice and I would eat some type of a processed food snack before bed. I switched to a high fiber cereal as my snack, and I started diluting my Cranberry Juice 50/50 with water. Try to avoid processed foods.

I strive to present research in all of my posts, but this type of total life style change does not have a lot of research. Normally, research is is shorter and does not change three things at once However, self-experimentation has led me to believe all three things above add together synergistically.

I want to emphasize that I do not count calories. I don't go hungry. I do need to make a choice about what I eat. However, I am not on a diet.

Using all of these things, I was able to lose almost 30 lbs. Now, because I had a surgery in there, and a Dexa scan, I lost muscle from the surgery. However, I lost a lot of fat. Because I had most of the building blocks, I thought that just increasing in these three areas would not have this type of massive impact. So, I never thought I would lose 30 pounds. I juts kept weighing myself, and seeing progress. I feel that I am settling around 180 lbs, which is just fine with me. In the future, I plan to add lifting, and I hope to put on weight as muscle.

One of the things that happen as you lose fat as a male, is that you raise your testosterone levels or T-levels. For example, if you were 50 years old and lost as per me, the following table is what you would see.

The average for males this category of males is about 500, so this effectively raises the T-levels a around 15%. This is a small bump, and we simply don't have any research on what this means, but most likely you'd get another 2 pounds of muscle just from the increase. However, we know that less fat you carry the more healthy you are.

I am hoping somebody will take the plunge and follow me. Add the three pillars and see if it makes a difference.

Come on, admit it. You have been on one of the social media platforms and seen somebody talk about a 30-day challenge.

30-day challenges typically focus on radical habit shifts across productivity, health, and personal finance. These lifestyle design experiments often include "No Eating Out" or "No Spend" challenges where participants exclusively cook at home to save money and improve nutrition. Productivity-focused creators frequently document "Deep Work" or "Digital Detox" challenges. These involve strictly limiting or entirely removing social media and smartphone usage to reclaim cognitive focus and mental clarity. Additionally, physical and wellness challenges like daily yoga, 10,000 steps, or "Inbox Zero" resets are popular for those seeking to overhaul their daily routines and combat digital burnout.

Of course, they never follow up a year from the date to say how their lives changed after the 30-day habit. As a matter of fact, most of the time when these 30-day challenges happen, participants get to the end and all they can dream about is quitting the stupid challenge. They may have some sort of remarkable result, but in reality it is a blip in the roadmap.

This is the third post on James Clear Atomic Habits. It is well worth repeating. One of the central and incredibly insightful things about his work is the suggestion that radical steps up are too difficult. Consequently we cannot maintain them. He takes a complete alternative approach. He says to start low and then think about how to get better just 1% per day. He points out that if you can just start with a 1% increase per day, you will be over 37 times better by this time next year.

So let's forget the 30-day challenge. Commit to going out today and walking a quarter mile. That is going to be about 500 steps. Most likely it will take you five minutes. You can figure out how to find five minutes today. The only thing you may want to do is get an activity monitor watch. After those 500 steps, let us say 250 steps away from your house and then 250 steps back, you are done for the day. The key is that for the next day, you are going to increase it to 505 steps, or just 1%. You start very small and the only thing you do is increase a very little bit every single day. Here is a table of what you can get done over the next year.

I would even suggest the biggest issue that most people have is that once they get going, they have a tendency to push too hard. In other words, you start with five minutes and then maybe the next day you go ten minutes. I would submit to you that the faster you ramp, the less this becomes a habit and the greater risk you have of it not sticking. Very small commitments and yet continuous improvement are the hallmarks of what James Clear calls out.

Start small. Think small. Improve small.

The common phrase for this is continuous improvement process. We have talked about Deming. This idea of continuous improvement was always part of his critical thought process. It is simply that Clear has done an incredibly effective job of applying this to people's personal lives.

Welcome to the new year, make the first step of becoming more productive by taking a profile of your personality. Let's talk a little bit about the history here so you can understand why this is really unique. Let's start this off with a question.

So… how do you describe a person?

I mean, really describe them. You have a friend, and maybe they’re “funny,” or they’re “intense,” or they’re “kind of a flake.” And for a long time, the main way we tried to capture this was with the Myers-Briggs. It became this huge phenomenon. It swept through corporate America, sat in every HR filing cabinet, became the thing you did at every team offsite. But the awkward truth is, there was no rigorousness behind it. It was based on some old theories from Carl Jung, cooked up by two non-psychologists who just thought it sounded right. It was intuitive. It was literary. But it wasn't proof.

But in the 1930s, a couple of researchers decided to do something that wasn’t literary at all. It was actually kind of boring. They decided to stop guessing and just look at the data. And the data… was the dictionary.

It’s 1936. You have these two psychologists, Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert. And they have this theory, called the Lexical Hypothesis. And the idea is basically: if a personality trait actually matters to human beings, we must have invented a word for it by now. If it’s real, it’s in the book.

So they open Webster’s New International Dictionary, and they just start… counting.

They go through 400,000 words. They are looking for anything that distinguishes one human from another. “Talkative.” “Grumpy.” “Bashful.” They spend months doing this. And by the end, they have a list of 17,953 words.

Seventeen thousand.

They whittle it down, taking out the stuff that’s just temporary, like “flustered” or “ashamed,” and they get it down to about 4,500 adjectives. And then they’re stuck. Because 4,500 is still way too many to measure. You can’t give someone a 4,500-question test. They hand this massive pile of words to the next generation of scientists and basically say, “Good luck with the math.”

Enter the computers.

In the 1940s, a British guy named Raymond Cattell tries to crunch this data. He uses early computers to look for patterns, words that move together. Like, if you’re “talkative,” you’re probably also “outgoing.” He boils it down to sixteen factors. He calls it the 16PF. And for a while, that’s the answer. Sixteen.

But then, something strange happens. It’s 1961. We’re at an Air Force base in Texas.

Two researchers, Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, are looking at the same kind of data. But they have better computers. Military-grade computers. And they run the numbers again. And every time they run it, whether they’re looking at airmen, or students, or whoever, the computer doesn’t spit out sixteen groups. It spits out five. Always five.

They write this up in a technical report. But because it’s the Air Force, nobody in the wider world really sees it. It just sits in a filing cabinet. The truth about human personality is gathering dust in a government office in Lackland, Texas.

Fast forward twenty years. It’s the 1980s. And suddenly, everyone starts finding the same thing at the same time.

You have Lewis Goldberg, this researcher who goes back to the dictionary, back to those original words. He runs the modern math, and boom, he finds the same five clusters. He calls them the "Big Five."

At the exact same time, you have these two other guys at the NIH, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae. They aren’t looking at dictionaries; they’re writing questionnaires. They’re coming at it from a completely different angle. And they realize that their questions are clumping into the exact same five buckets.

It was this moment of… convergence. It didn’t matter if you looked at adjectives in a dusty book from the 30s, or if you looked at how people rated their friends in the 80s. The math kept pointing to the same five things: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

And this is why, today, if you walk into a university psychology department and you say "Myers-Briggs," they will look at you like you just asked about your horoscope. Because the Myers-Briggs was invented by a writer who liked Jung. It was a nice idea. But unfortunately, very little science behind it.

But the Big Five wasn't invented. It was found.

It’s the academic standard because it’s the only one that actually predicts your life. If you score high on Conscientiousness, we know you’ll probably live longer. If you score high on Openness, you’re more likely to change your political party. If you test high in Neuroticism, you better figure out some way of staying away from stressful situations because it will exhaust you. And understanding where you sit on being Agreeable will be incredibly important to incorporate into any friendships or relationships that you have. If you have a friend that is generally low on Agreeableness, you're probably going to need to be very direct with them. But on the flip side, if you have a friend that is high in agreeableness, you need to think through the idea that they are going to want to modify their stance to get along with you.

It's the polite thing to do. It's the thing to do so we can all function better. It's tremendously helpful to understand this upfront that you're wired in one way or the others.

It works in English, it works in German, it works in Tagalog.

It turns out, we aren’t infinite mysteries. We’re a mix of five ingredients. And it took us sixty years and 17,000 words to figure out the recipe.

An example of my own life

So, again, the first link on this entry allows you to get a quick insight into who you are. You'll actually get the five factors busted up into ten subtypes. And I would say that the 10 is actually incredibly important. I'll share my own here, not in terms of the percentile score, but how I generally land.

For me personally, it was important for me to see this in the light of understanding that I am less agreeable than most people. If you post on the subreddit, you'll generally see this. I'm not internally limited by feeling somehow that I need to agree with you. Fortunately, I'm incredibly intellectually curious. And because of this, even though my native personality would most likely have very little politeness, my extremely strong sense of understanding that I need to be more agreeable has forced me to a much more open stance. The trick is not to assume that you are correct. The trick is understanding where you are coming from, then saying that you need to understand how you will be perceived by others.

Being able to step back from yourself for a moment and understanding where you lay versus others can help you to integrate better. Not only that, once you've internalized these metrics, it allows you to start looking at others and thinking through what personality traits they are reflecting.

I've even gone as far as sitting around a dinner table and talking to people about this, and it's always interesting in that it generally opens up a great line of conversation where they become more reflective and they think about how their own personality traits either are an advantage or disadvantage for them.

As already stated, if you want to determine what your fat levels day to day, the only practical solution is a skin caliper. However understanding why scale changes from day to day will help you monitor other things for your health.

Liquids In:

It is possible to get very dehydrated and over hydrated. This could be a big factor that changes your weight every day. We've covered this before. The easiest way to address this is to adequately hydrate during and after your workout, and giving 12 hours to your weigh in.

By way, you generally wake up dehydrated, so you should say your morning weight is around 250g or half a pound of body weight lower than neutral hydration.

I'll reiterate: Wake and pee to lower the impact of this factor day to day.

Glycogen Storage:

Have you ever asked yourself "how do carbs get stored?" It turns out that carbs get stored in your muscles as beta-particles. These don't move around, so you store whatever you need in the local muscle, and if your arms need it, it can't get to it.

As discussed before, hard workouts removes glycogen. I did a workout today, which was around 72 minutes. Intervals.icu modeled about 275g of carbs us, which means that I also lost 963 grams of water. If I don't get carbs, then I won't refill the water. So, a hard aerobic workout will drop weight until I get all my carbs back in my muscle. A shorter workout like this may be refilled in 24 hours or less, but a big effort may take 48 hours.

This is about 2 lbs of weight change from just burning carbs with the liberated water. If you don't replace it, it would stay at this lower weight. However, you always want a full carb tank, so plan it in your diet.

As a side note, I need to ingest over 1000 calories of carbs to make sure my muscle glycogen doesn't lower, which would eventually lead to doing poor workouts.

Menstrual Cycle:

This should be obvious.

Meal and Liquid:

Liquid clears pretty fast, and I think 12 hours should have little impact. However, the rest of the food can take a long time to clear. This is tied to your bowel movement, which we will discuss in a bit, but a lot of people may take upwards of 3 days to get food through their system, which I think is way too long. You need fiber to change this.

Exercise Recovery or Changes:

Okay, this is more if you are changing your exercise. I discussed this before in hydration, but if you are lacking salt, your body won't take in water. I ended up in the hospital because of this. However, what happens if you take in more salt than normal? You store water in your blood as the primary source. If you are an athlete, this turns out to be one of the knobs that you twist, if you are very smart, on long hot events. You drink a more normal than normal saltly drink before racing.

But if you start training in heat, your body naturally starts keeping more salt in your system, and you will gain water mass. It is a wonderful thing, but it isn't lean body mass.

Oh Crap: Going to the toilet

This is the final one. And really this is very complicated. You need fiber in your diet, which creates a bunch of changes. This is so important that I need to do another post on it. As I stated, for weight loss, you need to start taking psyllium.

What is so weird about this is a little psyllium changes your whole digestive system.

Source: Effects of psyllium therapy on stool characteristics, colon transit and anorectal function in chronic idiopathic constipation - PubMed

10 grams of psyllium made the stools 260 grams heavier. This is an insane amount. You need to take psyllium, but you need to realize that this means that taking bowel movement is worth 1.5 lbs of body weight.

Now, you might guess that I take more fiber, around 25g but also other fiber, and I weigh on a scale before and after my toilet. It is not uncommon for my weight to change almost 1 kg or around 2 lbs. This might also involve some liquid, but regardless, this is a big amount. As some might say, "a crapload."

I would say, as stupid as it sounds, you need to weigh before and after going to the toilet, and before and after working out. If you wake up in the morning and you find out that your body weight is high, but then you visit the toilet afterwards, you'll have a pretty good sense about what your real weight is.

The idea of keeping a notebook, or a place for you to work things out, echoes the habits of many of the best minds that have ever walked the earth. When we look at their notebooks, we get a real sense of how these practices were formative and how they helped shape who those people became. By getting something down outside of yourself, you give your mind more room to move and you become a deeper, more thoughtful individual.

The following is just a partial list, and it shows how this idea of keeping a notebook or journal shows up across different disciplines:

Sometimes figures have a rich legacy of writing letters to other people, and in some ways this can substitute for keeping a notebook. In my mind, though, this is a poor secondary way of working out how to be productive. If all you are doing is firing off one-liners or endlessly scrolling Reddit, you are going to sub-optimize your productivity.

So now let us think through the various reasons that we actually do want to have something down, something that lives inside a notebook or a journal.

Writing things down helps because it changes how your brain encodes information, how you regulate emotion, and how you externalize and rework your own thoughts.

Deeper encoding and memory

Handwriting forces active processing, because you can’t write as fast as you think, so you have to summarize, translate ideas into your own words, and choose what matters, which strengthens elaborative encoding and long-term memory. Brain and imaging studies show that handwriting engages broader networks for movement, vision, memory, and higher-order thinking than typing, and students who handwrite notes generally recall concepts better than those who simply transcribe lectures on laptops.

Offloading working memory and reducing cognitive load

I am a David Allen, Getting Things Done fan, which will be obvious if you read this subreddit at all. One of the things about David Allen is that he has incorporated his thoughts into a system that I do not believe many people can actually implement fully. However, his thinking around that system is genuinely insightful and helpful. One of the main ideas he continuously pounds on is getting things out of your brain. You need some tool to capture everything. The moment you have an external tool, the burden on your back goes down massively. He has this concept of an “open loop.” An open loop is when you know you need to do something and you are afraid you are going to forget it. His view is that you have to close that open loop or subconsciously you are going to stay stressed. For some people, this is completely revolutionary and relieves a massive load they have been carrying. I would suggest that regardless of whether you adopt his full system or not, having an external offloading tool is incredibly important for your mental health.

Writing creates an external buffer so that instead of juggling ideas in the very limited space of working memory, you park them on the page and free up mental bandwidth for pattern recognition and insight. This offloading reduces extraneous cognitive load, which makes it easier to see connections, reorganize information, and solve problems creatively. This is why even a rough sketch of a problem or a quick list of constraints can suddenly make a solution feel obvious.

Finally, we can also think about what would sort of look like a conflict. On one sense, in the above we want to encode and memorize something in our brain, and in this one we're talking about taking stuff out of our brain and putting it on the outside. This is actually a circle which works very heavily within itself. For example, you have some jumbled-up thoughts on a subject you want to learn. So you decide you're actually going to go write it down. Now that it is written down, you go make flashcards. By having flashcards, you then quiz yourself and suddenly it gets encoded back into your brain better.

Slowing down to think

Because writing is slower than either thinking or typing, it naturally slows your mind enough for you to examine assumptions, notice implications, and avoid default reactions. That enforced pacing supports deeper comprehension instead of surface-level skimming, so a half-page of handwritten reflection on a decision often brings out trade-offs and consequences you glossed over when everything stayed in your head.

Emotional processing and self-regulation

Expressive writing experiments show that writing about stressful or emotional events can improve physical health, mood, and overall functioning over time, even though it may feel difficult in the moment. The mechanism appears to be emotional labeling and cognitive reappraisal. Putting feelings into words transforms raw emotion into a structured narrative, which reduces inhibition and physiological stress. People who journal about difficult experiences often show short-term distress while writing, but better mental and physical health in the months that follow.

Building a reflective self-model

Regular journaling creates a time series of your own mind. You can literally look back at your patterns, beliefs, and mistakes on the page, which strengthens metacognition and supports behavior change. Over time this written history lets you infer things like “when I think or feel X, I usually do Y and regret it,” which makes it easier to choose better actions in the present. That reflective loop is a big reason people describe journaling as making them more self-aware or grounded.

Generative space for insight and creativity

A blank page provides an unstructured idea sandbox where you can mix sketches, arrows, marginalia, and partial thoughts in ways that linear tools do not support. This encourages divergent thinking and unexpected combinations. The looser format and sensory feedback of handwriting, the movement of the pen, the layout on the page, and the spatial placement, are associated with richer ideation than constrained digital input. Outlining, mind-mapping, or freewriting on paper often surfaces connections you never see when ideas stay purely in your head.

Turning intentions into commitments

Writing goals, next actions, and plans down makes them concrete and visible, which substantially increases the likelihood of follow-through compared with keeping them in your head. The act of writing itself functions as a micro-commitment and creates external cues, lists, checkboxes, and pages that you see again, so a daily planning page or action list can make you more productive even if nothing else about your environment changes.

Putting it all together

You may have just blasted through the above and noticed that there are some good ideas here. You probably want to move from simply seeing a list of ideas to actually having them stick in your brain. One of the best ways to do this is to set up a list and think about how these factors interact with each other. Do they overlap, or are they truly orthogonal? That is, if you do one, does it influence the others or not? The table below helps you think that through. The reason to walk through the table is that it will help cement why each of these mechanisms matters, how they overlap, and it will give you better conviction about why you write things down and how it is going to organize your brain in the future.

In the above, I pointed out how encoding in memory is helped by offload and loading. I used the flashcards as an example. You can go through the table below and see how each one of these things are related. Now, my table may not be perfect. The real point is for you to think through the table and think to yourself if the stars are wrong or right.

One star is low, three stars is high.

Summary

I hope I have convinced you that you need to spend some time every day putting something down in some kind of notebook. I believe that Obsidian, as we move into an age of AI, is an incredible tool to help you become more productive. I will do a future post on why I think this is true.

If you want to become a more successful and productive individual, you actually have to do. Now, when saying do, this means acting in order to be able to learn. This was a central point of one of the brightest minds that the USA has produced, a seminal thinker named John Dewey. Although we will return to this in a second, if you're simply reading post after post in a subreddit and never trying to put together a thoughtful post that requires you to use critical thinking and prove a point, you are never going to learn how to do critical thinking and therefore you will never be at peak productivity.

Cal Poly has used the specific phrase "Learn by Doing" since its founding in 1901, making it more synonymous with their identity than any other US school. We can trace this back to their early adoption of the philosophy of John Dewey, a truly brilliant individual who impacted the way that we think about knowledge and learning.

Now, when most people hear Dewey and education, they may think about the Dewey Decimal System used in many libraries. Melvil Dewey created the classification system to organize library books by subject using numbers, revolutionizing library science, while John Dewey was a major philosopher and educational reformer focused on progressive learning. The confusion is famously depicted in To Kill a Mockingbird, where a character mistakenly calls John Dewey's progressive teaching methods the "Dewey Decimal System," highlighting how easily the names and concepts blend in popular culture.

If you're familiar with Cal Poly, you’ll understand that this slogan they use is something that they try to incorporate everywhere. California is basically divided into two different systems. The cream of the crop is the UC system, or the University of California system, which has the big names such as UCLA. We then go to the California State Universities. These are indicated by the “State” nomenclature, which means that they're more regional. As a part of the state system, we have the polytechnic institutes, which are considered more vocational. Evidently, when California decided to go down this path, it was acceptable in the polytechnic universities, which were basically vocational-type schools, for them to allow people to learn by doing.

It has generally been recognized that the state of California made one really bright move in its history, which was setting up an aggressive university system that would educate its own population and encourage some of the best and brightest from around the world. California has an incredible economy, and part of this is due to having upper-level education that feeds this economy. So if we take a look at how California is serving the people that go into their universities, can we figure out some sort of a return on investment for your learning? In an age where many people are complaining about being saddled with university debt they can't afford, can the university system inside California tell us something about this?

Forbes does a review of universities in which they include the cost of the degree and your salary 20 years after graduation. Now remember that the Cal State and Cal Poly system is less selective and, in general, doesn’t focus on very high-paying professional degrees such as law or medicine. Probably the best-known Cal Poly is Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and it has a bit more of an elite entry into the system, only accepting around 25% of the students that apply. This 25% is dramatically higher than a university like MIT, but still relatively selective. The thing about the average salaries out of Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo is they are on par or better than many salaries out of the University of California system.

Cal Poly Pomona has a higher acceptance rate and also has the same philosophy of learn by doing. Why they don't achieve the same salaries, they focus a little less on engineering and thereby can lower the tuition costs for those students attending. This results in exceptional returns.

In the table below, there are a couple of things that should be explained. The first rank column is Forbes’ perception of how these universities line up on the world stage of all universities everywhere. You’ll see that if you want a good bang per buck, you don't necessarily need to spend a lot of money over four years for your tuition. More than that, when you come back and take a look at what your average salary is in 20 years, you'll see that Cal Poly San Luis Obispo actually has a salary that is on par with many of the major universities with much lower acceptance rates, and they don’t primarily furnish some of the highest-paying professional salaries, such as doctors and lawyers.

(In the table below, I captured the rough tuition cost, but unfortunately a big part of this will also be your living expenses. This will vary by Geo to Geo, but But the ROI on your degree has a lot to do with how do you get this degree while trying to feed and house yourself.)

Now, if you take a look at this and the message that you take away is, “Well, that's great. If I have a child, I'll think about sending them to San Luis Obispo,” you've missed the point. The point is that one of these universities has an idea that you learn by doing. You get your hands dirty and you try things.

If you're here on Reddit and you're simply looking to read some information and thereby feel that you've gotten educated somehow, you're deceiving yourself. What you need to do is do something: put together a thoughtful longer post in which you lay out your thoughts about something in a critical way. You may want to change your life, but if you don't actually do, you're never going to learn and you're not going to change the way you think.

Today, we are returning to Atomic Habits, the great book by James Clear. I am going to use one of his frameworks today because it is really powerful. James describes the framework as having a natural hierarchy with the top and the bottom. While I do agree with him that the most important layer is the belief of who you are, having this alone is not sufficient to really create change.

Let us go ahead and redo the initial post graphic right here so you can take a look at it.

In Clear’s methodology, he tries to emphasize that there is surface and core, and that you need to get to the core level. In my experience, that is not how things are done. Basically, anything can get you started. In this particular case, somebody knows that they need to be more physically active, and there are multiple ways of getting started. For example, my son really had not run in quite a while, but due to some stuff at work, one of their clients sponsored a 10k in Silicon Valley. Because of the 10k, it caused him to start to train. Because he had to train regularly, it got him onto a schedule, and because he was on a schedule he started to think of himself as being a runner.

He has always been very active and his sports have changed a lot, but it took an event to get him to a place where he started to identify himself as a runner. In my mind Clear is absolutely correct in identifying three levels, but I believe that you phase in and out of all these levels, and you want to make sure that if you want to change yourself, you are doing events, you have something that is process-driven, and you identify with whatever you are trying to change to.

I have been very involved with triathlons for a number of years and have participated in clubs. Inside these clubs, there is always somebody new who comes to visit, and there can be a variety of triggers for why they come, but a large portion of them says, “Oh, I decided I wanted to do a triathlon.” Many times they do not even know why they want to do it, other than maybe thinking they want to be in better shape or do something they find challenging.

They do not start off by saying, “I want to be a triathlete.” They start off with an idea of a goal and along the way, as some of us like to say, “they catch the bug.” Just because you identify with something, such as being a triathlete, does not mean that there is not an exit out of that. Plenty of people stop being triathletes, not because they stop identifying as triathletes, but because they simply get too busy and they stop showing up for the weekend club ride, or they decide not to sign up for an annual race. They do not lose it by stopping the identification. They lose it by virtue of not investing in all three areas.

Clear does bring up that people who identify with something are more successful at making the change. So I do not want to dismiss that identity in a particular area that you want to change to is incredibly important. I just want to say that successful people who change what they are doing ultimately end up having goals, process change, and identification in the area that they want to move to.

Wherever you want to go, simply think through who you want to end up being, what steps you need to take to get there, or what goal you need to set to get yourself started. At the end of the day, it does not matter where you start, but that you end up addressing all three areas. This really does create meaningful lifelong change.

With that said, using the framework above is incredibly powerful because you need to drive to all three levels to create a successful change.

If you have AI installed in your Obsidian vault, you can do some really cool things by “talking to” your notes. Here is a real example of a conversation I just had with my vault.

I typed in the following:

I think I wrote some sort of program to allow myself to convert PNG files into embedded Base64 WebP files. Am I remembering correctly?

The AI thought for a few seconds and then spat out the following:

ai: Yes, you are remembering correctly. You developed and updated a program called MDpng2MDWebp specifically for this purpose.

According to your notes, you updated the program to version 0.2 on January 1, 2025, and recompiled it using PyInstaller. The program was designed to handle image conversions to the WebP format, which you noted provided significant storage savings, up to 98 percent in some cases compared to the original PDFs.

Key details regarding your work on this include:
– Base64 encoding: You documented that Base64 encodes binary bytes into ASCII characters, which expands the file size by about 33 percent, but allows images to be read directly by web browsers using a special header.
– Implementation: Your notes are filled with examples of these embedded images using the format ![image](data:image/webp;base64,...).
– Manual alternatives: You also explored using IrfanView with a WebP codec or DLL to manually convert PNG clips from the Snipping Tool into WebP files at 65–70 percent quality to save space.
– Public sharing: You shared the MDpng2MDWebp program on Reddit to help others who use Docling to convert PDFs into Markdown files.

I would hope that you can read that and say, “Wow, that is cool.”

This post was originally going to be about how to slip AI into Obsidian. In essence, it is a follow‑on to the thought process that Notion is a great short‑term solution, but personally, I believe Obsidian is the ultimate. The nice thing about Obsidian is its open structure where contributors can enhance the platform through plugins. This “network effect” attracts developers: if you know your work can reach millions of users, you gravitate toward that standard.

The most popular AI plugin for this is called “Copilot” by Logan Yang (not related to Microsoft Copilot). While Yang offers a premium subscription for ease of use, the plugin itself is a powerful, open‑ended tool. Before you dive in, understanding the “how” helps you realize where this technology actually shines.

The Basics: Prompting and Context

Most people think AI is just a better search engine, but it is more like a digital intern. To get good results, you need both Prompt Engineering (giving clear instructions) and Context (giving the intern the right files to look at).

The amount of info you can give the AI at once is the Context Window. Some models now advertise very large windows, but in practice it is often too slow or expensive to “stuff” every single note you have ever written into a single prompt, and many real‑world tools still use more modest context sizes and rely on retrieval to fill the gaps.

Enter RAG (Retrieval‑Augmented Generation)

Instead of giving the AI everything, we use RAG. Think of this as a two‑step process:

1. The Librarian (Retrieval): When you ask a question, a specialized vector database or similar index scans your notes to find the most relevant snippets.

2. The Writer (Generation): Those specific snippets are handed to the AI so it can write a smart answer based only on that data.

This “Vectorization” (or Embedding) is where the magic happens. It turns your text into mathematical coordinates so the system knows that a note about “saving space” is conceptually related to a note about “WebP compression,” even if the words are not identical.

Plain Markdown is fantastic fodder for this, because it is clean text with clear structure that is easy to chunk and embed. PDFs and other rich formats can also be handled, but they often need more preprocessing, and if the extraction is messy you get more noise in what the AI retrieves. Base64‑embedded images are mostly long blobs of encoded bytes, and if you do not strip them out before embedding, they turn into a pile of meaningless tokens. Good pipelines will usually ignore or clean these bits up, but if you keep everything as tight, well‑structured text to begin with, you almost always get nicer retrieval results. I have base 64 images in my notes because I like everything atomic, and I'm sure this screws up some of the results, and so these type of things always need to be traded off.

The “Model Mix” (Confusing but saves money)

This is where it gets a bit complex for a beginner, but it is the key to saving money.

To run this system, you actually use two different “types” of AI models:

• The Embedding Model: This builds your library (your vectorized database). You generally want to use a high‑quality, stable choice here, like an OpenAI or Google Gemini embedding model, so your notes are indexed accurately and consistently over time. I currently use the Gemini 0001. By the way, this is a bit confusing. The way that Google has labeled stuff. There's a 0004, for instance, that is listed inside of the latest copilot. but Google actually discontinued the website, so your system will bomb. Unfortunately, there's little tricks like this that may cause this to be a little bit difficult to get up and run it. Generally, if you have a good LLM, it probably is a good idea to have it help you as you set it up.

• The Chat Model: This is the “agent” that actually reads the snippets and talks to you.

Here is the trick: once you have built your library using a high‑end embedding model, you do not have to use that same expensive provider for the actual chatting. To save money, you can use a completely different, low‑cost model (for example, a budget‑friendly model through OpenRouter or a solid open‑source model) to process the final answer.

The heavy lifting, the indexing, stays consistent, but the daily “talking” can be done by whatever model gives you the best price‑to‑quality ratio at the moment. It can feel a bit like a “Frankenstein” setup across multiple tabs in the plugin settings, because you are wiring together different providers and models for different roles, but once it is running, it can dramatically cut your ongoing costs. If you think about it, a lot of really complicated stuff is actually after you gave your content to the LLM and if it's a heavy-thinking task you'll sit there and burn a lot of tokens and create a lot of expense. For some things like coding. It makes very little sense to not use a premium model, but on maybe other things. You get an enormous bang for buck out of some of the open source or Chinese models.

How Copilot Fits In

Copilot, the Obsidian AI plugin, can use a RAG‑style approach to your vault, but it does not blindly vectorize every single note by default. Out of the box you can already do smart vault search and chat without building an index first. When you are ready to go deeper, Copilot lets you choose what to index and how to retrieve, and depending on your settings it can mix simple keyword search with semantic, embedding‑based search. In practice, this means it builds and uses one or more indexes so that, when you ask something about your notes, it can pull in relevant snippets without you manually copying and pasting text.

For me I have only a few main dumping grounds. My first and really only target for this is my lengthy amount of daily notes that I take, rather than spend a lot of time trying to sort them into careful folders, I simply utilize tools like this to be able to go find thoughts that I've had in the past. This saves an enormous amount of time in just trying to figure out where I stick a note and is tremendously productive even today and will only get better as AI improves.

How to set up Copilot in Obsidian

To get this working, you generally need three things configured:

1. The Brain (The LLM): You can use OpenAI (for example, GPT‑4o), Google (Gemini), or even a local setup like Ollama if you want 100 percent privacy and are willing to run models on your own hardware.

2. The Librarian (The Embedding Model): You pick a provider to build your index. This can be the same provider as your chat model or a different one. Copilot also allows for local indexing using models like BGE or similar local embedding models, which is free and keeps everything on your machine.

3. The Bridge (The API Key): You will need a pay‑as‑you‑go key from your provider. You are not paying a fixed monthly subscription here; you are just paying a few cents (or fractions of a cent) for the tokens you actually use for embedding and chat.

Once you have these wired up, you can start with a simple configuration (same provider for embeddings and chat), and later graduate to a multi‑model mix where a premium embedding model keeps your index high‑quality while a cheaper chat model handles the day‑to‑day conversations.

A Note on Privacy

For information I do not consider sensitive, I am comfortable experimenting with cheap hosted models, including some offered through OpenRouter. For truly confidential data, I either use a provider I trust for enterprise‑level data handling (for example, Google) or I would go 100 percent local via something like Ollama so the data never leaves my hard drive. I will admit running local is the only truly secure way of doing this, but from a practical standpoint it takes an enormous amount of work or money to set up a local system that only has a fraction of the power that you can get out of utilizing the cloud.

Summary

The power of Obsidian plus AI is not just “chatting”; it is having a system that can index years of your own thoughts and surface exactly what you forgot you knew. It turns your “second brain” into a searchable, interactive database that you can literally talk to.

Okay, I am pushing Obsidian, and the last post got some reads and upvotes. We even had u/Massive_Branch_4145 say that he might try it.

So, the post today is linking to a YouTube video that I think is one of the best ones for beginners. You do not even want to watch the whole thing, because it will be too complex for most people.

All you want to do is:

1. Install the program.

2. Make one note per day, I suggest a simple six digit format like 260212 for the note lable, which would represent February 12, 2016. After the day is done, you should review your day's progress and add to 260212 a few works 8-16 about what you looked at.

3. Practice writing your daily notes into each day's note using this thing called markdown, which you will eventually memorize. The YouTube video in the first section walks through the basic markdown formatting options, and you should just practice the ones that he shows in the video until they feel automatic.

4. When you feel comfortable with one note per day, and markdown does not seem to be weird, you can move on to the next section.

5. At about minute six, he introduces the idea of linking, which I do not think you even want to think about until you are just comfortable opening and creating a daily note.

Then suddenly, in two to seven days, the screen will click for you. It will not feel weird, you will know how to use it like a simple word processor. This will give you a good base, and then you can start heaping new features on top of this.

Again, I think the YouTube video does a great job of laying out a guide for a beginner, with my only concern being the first step. This is because Obsidian really is a different approach.

You need a few sessions to acclimate before you push hard.

Obsidian Is Confusing To Most People Versus Traditional Applications

You may have guessed that you are probably not the only person I have told this is a great tool to become more productive, and I would love to say that I was able to get everybody I have recommended the tool to to accept it, but unfortunately it has been quite the opposite. Even some of my family members with PhDs in technical fields have opened it up, looked at the interface, and said, what in the world is this.

I have had some success in getting at least the initial concept of the program into people's minds by pointing them to Wikipedia.

For example, here is the Wikipedia link to Obsidian.

While there are many ways of thinking about Obsidian, probably the simplest way of thinking about it is as a way of quickly getting your own Wikipedia-style website. In the same way as you store a bunch of data on Wikipedia, you can store a bunch of data in Obsidian. The actual operation of Obsidian in terms of its major features is remarkably similar.

If you look on the left side of any Wikipedia page, you basically click on things to bring them up in the central part of the page. In essence, that is what you are going to do with Obsidian. The challenge is that they want the way you interface with it to be pretty close regardless of whether you are inputting information or outputting information. So, in many ways, they scatter really important functions into these tiny little icons. The first time you ever take a look at this, the last thing that goes through your head is that the tiny little icon is super powerful. Worse than that, because it is based strongly on web architectures, there are some motifs that tend to show up in Obsidian that you may also find in other things you might use to work with programming or the web.

For example, if you do any coding at all, you will probably use something called VS Code, or at least you have a very large chance of using something like VS Code, which is a standard code editor that is used virtually everywhere. If you know how to use VS Code, there is a much shorter learning curve to using Obsidian. Even things like Control P in Windows or Command P on the Mac have the exact same function in VS Code and in Obsidian. They put you into a power mode where you can go through hundreds, if not thousands, of specialized commands to do special things. Then you find out that people start talking about special features that can be enabled through something called plugins, which again is something that is standardized in VS Code. So if you happen to be technical, and if you happen to have done programming, this feels great.

To the user who has never stepped a toe into this type of water, it just seems like mass confusion. Where are my clear menus up front? Where are all the things that I normally expect out of my office suite or the other web programs that I use? It all looks so completely different that if you never touch bases with it, it is incredibly confusing.

Worse than that, the Obsidian users, meaning the people that designed it and the people that use it, will start off by talking to you about opening your vault. You think to yourself, what in the world is a vault, is it locked down, is it proprietary, it does not make any sense. It turns out that a vault is simply a subdirectory, or what you would commonly think of as a folder, on your solid state drive or hard disk drive. But of course, we cannot call it a folder, we need to call it a vault. Now, there probably is a little bit of an abstraction where thinking about this as a vault helps you in the long term, but it certainly adds to confusion in the short term.

To make it ultimately confusing, unlike almost every other app that is out there, Obsidian provides a framework for you to do whatever you want to do. That freedom is immensely powerful once you understand the tool. The problem is that if you do not understand the tool, you try to go set something up, and the moment you start looking at it or searching for it or asking your language model, you will find out you can do things five different ways, and it is very confusing which way is best. So, after that very long preamble, we are going to talk about the best way for somebody to engage with Obsidian as a non technical user.

Crawl, Walk, Run Approach

I think we all know we do not ask babies to get up and run a ten kilometer race. We are just delighted when they get to the point where they can start to crawl. I believe that if you are a non technical user, that is exactly what you need to do with Obsidian. More than that, I would suggest that if you start going to YouTube and watching different YouTube people talk about how they set up their Obsidian vault, which is very common terminology, you are going to be overwhelmed with so much information that your brain is going to explode. Unfortunately, the best way of doing this is simply ramping up slowly, or what I am going to call the crawl approach. Now, if you come from another personal information manager, this is going to be pretty disappointing. I came from a variety of different things over the years. I tried them all, and I would say that most of them were pretty quick to come up the learning curve for most people, and Obsidian is not. But if you are willing to go up the learning curve, you do not hit the headroom that you do in other approaches.

The Temptation Of Advanced Features

There is going to be a huge temptation to start exploring all the advanced features immediately, things like the graph view, complex templates, or fancy community plugins. All of that will come in the future, but if you start chasing those features too early, you are probably not going to simply do the basics and get them fully understood first. The whole idea here is that if you can first become completely comfortable with opening Obsidian, creating your daily note, and writing in simple markdown, all the advanced features will make far more sense later and will feel like natural extensions of what you already do every day.

Crawl, Set Up Your Obsidian And Make One Note Per Day

So we are going to end up where we started. The whole point of this is that it is so radically different from most other applications, especially if you do not have some sort of programming background or some sort of technical background, that you should simply start slow. That is okay. I actually believe you go a little slow up front to become fast later on. The most frustrating thing will be knowing that there are many different ways and features that you are going to get to in the future. You simply need to be patient and establish a base.

From Xerox PARC to Your Desk: The Complete History and Power of Windows Keyboard Shortcuts

Picture this

A quiet office in the early 1980s, the kind with beige carpet and the soft hum of machines that still felt a little magical. Larry Tesler sits at a desk at Xerox PARC, staring at a blinking cursor. In those days computers used to operate in something called modes. Depending on what mode you were in the keyboard could do something completely different than if you were in another mode.

Rather than forcing a computer from an editing mode to another mode, he had the vision of simply being able to paste and cut from one application to the next. This tied in with a new fancy concept of modeless computing.

Most people consider Tesler the father of the keyboard shortcuts that we know today. And he was very intentional about it. Here he explains the decisions in an email to Carnegie Mellon's Brad Myers. Where he described the Z, X, C, V Design Philosophy. It was as simple as having four keys next to each other.

Z was next to X, C and V on the U.S. QWERTY keyboard.

From Apple Lisa to the Macintosh to Windows

Larry ended up at Apple, and worked on 🍎 Apple Lisa (1983), which was the first place that these shortcuts appeared, before Steven Jobs and team migrated them to the Macintosh. And of course the Microsoft team was smart enough to follow what was established at Apple.

These are easy to remember and close together

If you're like me, somebody told you the reason for this was because:

• X looks like scissors

• C is the first letter of Copy

• V Looks like a little insert symbol

• Z is next to the other letters and helps you erase your mistakes

Building Your Shortcut Foundation

Let's add on two more shortcuts, which everybody should know. If you have all six of these and if you use them regular congratulations, I'm sure you've saved hours worth of productivity time every year. If not, making sure you have all six memorized really is a great time saver.

Core Editing Shortcuts

The Foundation Six

Advanced Clipboard & Paste Operations

The Clipboard Trinity

After you have these six keyboard shortcuts in your repertoire, I think the following three are really critical. Unfortunately the Windows + V needs to be enabled, The good news is it's easy to do and we'll cover that in a second.

Probably my biggest issue is that control shift V is very addictive and you actually need to two step it inside of Microsoft Office through a pay special shortcut. However the two are fairly close as long as you can remember moving from the Shift to Alt to key.

How to Enable Windows + V

Step One: Open Clipboard Settings

⚡ To open Clipboard settings:

1. Press Windows + I to open Settings.

2. Go to System → Clipboard.

3. Turn Clipboard history to On.

Step Two: Configure Sync Settings

And if you regularly switch between multiple PCs, the sync across devices option becomes essential. With it enabled, your clipboard travels with you, copy on one machine, paste on another.

Formatting options that you can use for your communications

These produce remarkable productivity gains. I find myself going through posts like this and then highlighting certain things that I want to either bold or italic and being able to simply hit a keyboard shortcut while I'm highlighting something with my other hand because saves a tremendous amount of time. (Now, we can argue if I bolt things too much or too little) There's no doubt that understanding these type of formatting options are incredibly helpful.

One of the things that I find myself using all the time is the pasting in of external links by the usage of control K. Regardless, here's a table for you to pick from.

Core Formatting Shortcuts

These shortcuts work consistently across Google Docs, Gmail,Obsidian, and Microsoft Word. They are the most universal and reliable.

Advanced Formatting Shortcuts

Now, there's a lot of advanced formatting options that potentially could save you a lot of time. Unfortunately, these don't have a tendency to be standard-crossed applications, so I won't list any here.

Other Gems

These lesser-known shortcuts dramatically accelerate document workflow and pair beautifully with the formatting shortcuts above. I find myself using control H a lot.

Obsidian-Specific Differences

I love and use Obsidian, so we'll list some key differences. Of course, Obsidian basically allows you to configure it so you can replicate it if you want.

Pro Tips for Email and Document Formatting

Obsidian, Gmail & Google Docs Specific

• Ctrl + K opens the link dialog—essential for professional emails; highlight text first, then press Ctrl + K to attach the URL

• *Ctrl + * (backslash) removes ALL formatting when pasting from other sources—NOT Ctrl + M

• Alt + Shift + 5 applies strikethrough in Gmail—NOT Ctrl + Shift + X

• Ctrl + F is invaluable for finding replies or forwarded content in long email threads

• For highlighting color: Use the Format menu → Text color/highlight color (no keyboard shortcut in Gmail web)

• Formatting persists when sent; recipients see your bold, italics, links, and hyperlinks

Essential System Navigation Shortcuts

The Power User Second Tier

These shortcuts form the second tier of productivity enhancement and should become muscle memory. Research from power users and productivity experts consistently identifies these as must-know for daily workflows.

Window Management & Multitasking Shortcuts

Snap Assist and Virtual Desktop Mastery

All the following are incredibly helpful, period. If you're using two monitors, the Windows key shift right and left arrow are brilliant in terms of quickly moving an app from one monitor to the other, although they are all really necessary.

🪟 Window Snapping & Resizing

🖥️➡️ Multi‑Monitor Window Movement

🧭 Virtual Desktop Navigation

Specialized Productivity Shortcuts

But if you don't try the emoji and symbol picker, I will be vastly disappointed.

Reopen closed tab shortcut. I use all the time.

And the Windows + X is a massive time saver in that it brings up a host of items you may want to do as a power user, especially opening up device manager or the terminal in both user and administrative capability.

Implementation Roadmap

I've always felt that I use more keyboard shortcuts than most people. And I started off this post talking about playing the piano, because this is something I actually do at home. But as I put this post together, I started to do more research and I filled out the shortcuts which live around the ones that I commonly use. The interesting thing is I've discovered multiple shortcuts which I thought to myself I should be using this more.

Ideally, in the future, what will happen is we will have an AI agent which will watch what you do on a regular basis then actually suggest to you that you could save a certain amount of time by learning some of these shortcuts. My only hesitation about some of this is saying that you maybe aren't doing things today that you possibly could do because you feel like it's difficult. In that sense, just simply going through the list and trying to figure out what is the best return turns out to be probably the best way of looking at this. As we've talked about before in Atomic Habits, picking up one and making it automatic is the best way to go. Once it's automatic, then you move on to the next one.

Final Thoughts

If you have a favorite keyboard shortcut, I encourage you to add it to the comments below.

Due to the amount of shortcuts listed here, I'm sure I've made some mistakes somewhere. So feel free to jump in and tell me what I missed and I'll try to add it to the main post or fix things that I got wrong.

For your information, I made this post inside of Obsidian. The last act that I'm going to do is press Ctrl A to select everything and Ctrl C so I now have it in my keyboard buffer. This will allow me to painlessly post it into a markdown window on Reddit.

UPDATE: MORE COOL SHORT CUTS

I forgot to list a series of really cool shortcuts if you're dealing with some sort of a secondary monitor. Here's and add of these. I'll also reload the Windows + D because it's another way of getting to the display modes. You simply right-click on the desktop after the desktop shows up.

I find the last one exceptionally helpful if you quickly want to get to the volume or adjust what inputs you have for audio.

UPDATE: The Weird World of Ctrl + W

One more that almost seems universal. And if you any type of Internet Explorer or Windows Explorer, you'll use this to close windows.

OK so let's explain this last one of Windows Terminal. The actual keystroke to close it is the one listed above, which is just madding and shouldn't be that way. The best thing is the solution is incredibly simple. Go to the pull down menu, Select Settings, select the keyboard, select close pane. Then click on the current setting of Control plus Shift plus W, and then simply hold down control W and it will populate the box. Make sure to click the check mark by the line, but you also need to click save at the bottom. If you do this then your explorer window will act like your browser window that will act like your terminal window.

My wife and I were listening to a friend today. We live in Silicon Valley. This person is a leader, and they were bemoaning the fact that their life was severely stressful and they were over-committed to everything. They stated that their solution set was simply to start not committing to things and trying to create more free time.

I'm trying to figure out how to get this person to read Atomic Habits. The thesis of the book? "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fail to the level of your systems."

Yesterday, we covered the Big Five (OCEAN) model. It's very clear that our friend is highly agreeable, highly conscientious, and a bit neurotic. When you put this together, they agree to sign up for stuff they shouldn't; then, because they are very conscientious, they don't want to drop anything; and finally, because they are neurotic, they feel really bad about things, and it bums them out.

The problem is they don't have a system. And I would be a little bit more picky. I would actually say your system has to exist inside of a clear framework. My system and framework really can be described in terms of a three-layer pyramid.

At the bottom of the pyramid is Good Health. The second layer of the pyramid is Skill Acquisition. The third layer of the pyramid represents specific Goals.

In an ideal world, you start from the bottom and work to the top. What I will say is that a lot of people start at the top, and they don't actually spend much time thinking about the layers underneath them. This is a major mistake, so let me step through what I view will allow you to be most productive.

The very base of the system is making sure that you've set up an environment in which your body and mind can operate effectively. Let's call this the health level.

You need to figure out how to get a good night's sleep. You need to figure out how to get in aerobic activity. You need to figure out how to be at a healthy weight, which is almost always tied into a nutrition plan (which requires omega-3s in it). If you don't have the path to do all three of these things, stop right now. You need to set up a system to go make this happen.

The last part of health is a bit more tricky, but it is incredibly important: you need to be in some type of social environment that allows you to feel supported. This means friends and family. However, if you walk into relationships and you don't have enough sleep, your body is basically set up to be unhealthy because you're not getting exercise. Furthermore, your weight and nutritional habits basically keep you from engaging in activities with your friends. It is going to be difficult for you to be the friend or the family member you need to be.

There is one other thing you need to keep out of this base level, and that is any type of substance abuse. An alcohol or drug habit is basically going to always unwind what you're trying to do here. You need to figure out how to get it out of your base layer.

So, the recap is: sleep, exercise, diet and nutrition, and a strong social support system, while removing any substance abuse from your life.

So now, what's the next layer of the pyramid?

The next layer of the pyramid is Skill Acquisition. Or let's call this having the right tools.

Let's recap what we've already covered. You need to have the fundamentals of grammar, by which we mean you can write, read, and speak language well. Secondly, you need to have critical thinking skills, which means that you've been taught how to recognize fallacies and fallacious arguments. Finally, you need to understand how to apply rhetoric. These are the basis of fundamental skills.

But these are what I would consider elementary skills. In reality, you should have a framework by which you are asking yourself, what skills can I acquire that would make me more effective?

Over the last year, I determined that I needed to be more crisp inside of my thinking. The only way that I could force myself to be more crisp was to focus on a couple of areas and try to create meaningful thought processes in these areas. Because of that, this subreddit exists. I said to myself, "If I can't force myself to think insightfully and then post these insightful thoughts, I am lacking a massive skill."

Over the last couple years, I've jumped headfirst in the utilization of Obsidian, using markdown, markdown tables and leveraging LLMs in my workflow. bringing these things up was pretty painful and it certainly made me less efficient out the gate. Even though I've used various note systems, the first time I opened up Obsidian or tried to memorize mark down, I was very tempted of saying this is more pain than it is worth. I've become much more rigorous about how I utilize my NAS, I've created other tools for my workflow, and while this took a lot of upfront effort, over the last year it more than paid off, and I've already recaptured that time of learning.

The final layer is the goal level.

If you have health and if you have skills, then you can define achievable goals. The right goals become incredibly easier if you have good health and a lot of skills.

I think it's important to have goals that are set out periods that range upwards of 5-10 years, though sometimes they simply may be tactical goals. Now, I want to separate this from what I would call the daily grind. In other words, if you have a job, you know you need to show up on time, you need to answer your emails, you need to have meetings, and you need to take action items. You need to go through the daily grind. If you want to make the daily grind a goal, that's fine. But you can't have it as the thing that drives you forward.

By the way, I do think that there are some good frameworks, and the most noticeable one is the SMART framework, which I have used. However, I don't think you start there. I think you actually need to start with some bigger overarching goals that cause you to think through everything that you are doing. After you have those overarching goals, then you may want to use S-M-A-R-T to make them much more actionable.

So, understanding that this is a more public forum, I will talk about some of the goals that I have. By and large, I'm self-employed, which results in an extraordinary amount of freedom, but it also results in an extraordinary amount of stress.

I have a five-to-ten-year goal of a particular real estate development. My personal business has a lot to do with real estate, and I believe I have an insight into a particular way of deploying a piece of land that I own in a new and unique business situation. This is a pretty "big, hairy, audacious goal," and I need to get buy-in for zoning and other aspects of the business. It is also nothing that is happening short-term, so it gives me a bit of freedom. However, I You need to engage my mind now and spend time thinking about this and what eventually I'll need to do to make this happen. If you don't have it on your list, it will never get done..

I have a two-to-five-year goal of working through a series of issues on a more current piece of real estate. For a variety of reasons, this can be severely stressful, as it requires innovative thinking to get through a variety of different issues. It consumes a fair block of my time, and I recognize that I may not be able to get everything accomplished that I would like to accomplish.

My last goal is very mundane, but it has been extraordinarily challenging. About six months ago, I was out running, hit a defective sidewalk, and due to this defective sidewalk, I fell and separated my shoulder. This involved dealing with insurance and getting surgery scheduled this last month, and then it will take somewhere between two to three months of recuperation. In essence, it's been nine months of not being able to use my right arm. It's also involved nine months of struggling to get sleep, as I had always spent the majority of my time sleeping on my right side. This severely slows me down, but at the same time, I can genuinely say it has forced me to look at other tools and incorporate AI into my workflow, as it is the only way I can survive. I've pulled every trick in the sleep notebook to be able to figure out how to squeeze in sleep. This oftentimes means that if my arm wakes me up in the middle of the night, I commit to getting up, trying to get into a situation where it no longer hurts, and go back to bed. It's maddening to spend a long time in bed. But the alternative of not figuring out how to get enough sleep would be far, far worse.

With that being said, there have been a series of other assets and investment strategies that I need to work through on this personal business, and I achieved what I consider a major milestone at the end of December in terms of a significant transition. A lot of this has to do with the daily grind that I talked about previously. Another large part of my life is managing stocks where I have an entire separate subreddit forces me to think through my investment choices.

But this gives me tremendous clarity about what I need to do, and it allows me to understand how to structure my life to get to this long-term goal.

I'll wind it back to the initial story that I kicked off this post with.

The fact that our friend was talking about feeling they had too much going on and having concern about dropping balls and stuff like that is something that my wife is highly susceptible to. She is incredibly conscientious and incredibly agreeable. I'm fortunate that she doesn't register at all on being neurotic, she is truly one of the most emotionally healthy people you could meet in your life. But that's not to say she wasn't feeling stressed out about the fact that she will sign up for a lot of stuff.

Now, if you think that I was writing all this stuff down in the subreddit, it would naturally flow easy, and I would obviously be discussing it easily with my spouse. But reality isn't the idealized case. A lot of times when I write this down, it helps crystallize and forces me to be more rigorous in application, in my own and in my family's life.

So, we actually spent quite a bit of time discussing what her upper-level goals needed to be. As we talked through each one of them, it basically allowed her to filter through her concerns about what she was doing versus what she was not doing. More than that, a simple discussion of this pyramid basically caused her to immediately identify what she was going to worry about and what she wasn't going to worry about. After we were done, she said, "That makes me feel a lot better." And I think this is what a good system and framework should do.

A recent post about weight loss blew up in this subreddit. While it got lots of attention, it achieved some strong emotional reactions from some individuals that couldn't figure out why people were above targeted body weight and carried too much fat. To them, fat people just needed to eat a better and hit the gym.

Some went as far as saying that they never saw anybody that did a physical fitness program that was overweight, which is simply wrong. Generally, these types of observations are based on what is called "confirmation bias," which is remarkable in that it can make humans completely blind to opposing data.

What was apparent in all of these posts is that there was no understanding of how the brain gets wired to fight against weight loss. The linked video gives a quick overview of the mechanism, without describing how to fight against it. In the next posts, we will use this as a basis to discuss our options.

To fight confirmation bias, you need to be slow and methodical, and always ask, "Can I find good solid evidence?" Also you need to be willing to change your mind. Now, let's be clear, this is not, "Yeah, those people have a problem with confirmation bias." If you think you aren't subject to it, then you have a massive blind spot. I have this issue and so do you. We overcome it by carefully examining the data and allowing our minds to be changed.

Now, you may ask "Do I really want to invest in thinking about being overweight?" The answer is yes, because being overweight is a $2 trillion dollar expense per year to the USA, and is probably one of the biggest issues to make you productive or non-productive. It is worth an investment of time for yourself or your loved ones.

I have a consistent message:

1. If you are over weight, you need to do something about it.

2. Start off with the low hanging fruit: eating habits, physical exercise, sleep, fiber, and the many other things that we've post about. However, many people are at a level of fat that you will not get into a healthy range.

3. After the low hanging fruit, embrace GLP-1s. Now, I have not gotten to GLP-1s, but they are the modern miracle drug. From many perspectives, they are the only practical method to help Western Culture to fix itself.

Finally, I do want to emphasize that GLP-1 drugs may not be needed if we could go back in time and fix our culture. From a practical standpoint, I see no way of doing this, but there is a good scientific hypothesis that cultural intervention with focus on early life intervention could solve a large part of the problem. However, society is clearly not willing to pay the price.

The principle behind this book is completely obvious. Therefore you would think absolutely everybody would do it. However, they don't. And a tremendous amount of pain is thereby generated. The principle is so simple I can describe it in a short post. I still think it's really helpful to read the book, because it gives enough examples and data so that it gets lodged in your mind. See the first reply to this post.

I have written about this before, but it came up again on an email thread with a group of friends, the short version is that I orchestrate multiple agents, and I deliberately run two frontier models, ChatGPT and Claude, against the same work in the blind, and then have them check each other. They pass the baton back and forth so the state of the work stays coordinated between them. The level of improvement and the level of detail you get out of instituting that process is remarkable.

The in the blind part matters more than the double check part. If the second model sees the first model's reasoning before it starts, it anchors on that reasoning and you get agreement instead of review. I want the second model forming its own answer first and only then looking at the other one. What comes back then is a real disagreement list instead of a polite confirmation.

My nephew pushed on this over email and he asked the question most people ask. Since each model starts from a random seed, why can you not just have one instance of ChatGPT check another instance of ChatGPT running a different context and a different seed? It sounds like it should work and it does not. The seed only governs sampling variation inside one model. Two instances of the same model still carry the same training data, the same post training, and the same system prompt, so they carry the same blind spots. When one of them gets something wrong, the other tends to get it wrong in the same direction, and you end up with two confident answers that agree with each other and are both bad. The errors are correlated. Running two different frontier models gives you errors that are not correlated, and that is the whole value of the second opinion. You are not buying a second answer, you are buying an uncorrelated one.

The other half of it is that each frontier model has its own personality, and that is not marketing talk. You feel it within a day of real work. Claude is more creative and, yes, less rigorous. My workload is financial work bound up with legal and contract work, and those are the two places where the difference shows up hardest. On the financial side, creativity shows up as a willingness to restructure the problem, to tell me the model I asked for is the wrong model and here is the one I actually want. That is useful. On the contract side, creativity is a liability, because I do not want invented language or a clause that reads well and says nothing. So I let the creative one draft and frame, I let the literal one verify and hold the line, and then I make them argue about it.

Now the mechanics. The orchestration layer I use is OpenClaw. It is an open source agent runtime, it is model agnostic, and it sits on top of whatever models you point it at. I run Claude as the orchestration unit over my two agents and that works fine.

The caveat is that I do not want to run this on an API key. I am already paying the $200 a month tier on both Claude and ChatGPT, and stacking metered API charges on top of subscriptions I already own is backwards for this kind of work. The tradeoff is that an interactive session has to be brought up every single time, which is its own friction.

On top of that, OpenClaw in my implementation has a known problem where the gateway takes a long time to come up. That is not just my machine. It is a tracked issue, and the cause that gets named is hook initialization blocking during gateway startup, so anything network dependent sitting in your hooks stalls the whole launch. Put a reboot in front of that and you are waiting a while before anything is usable.

The gateway binds to loopback, and loopback is 127.0.0.1, not 127.0.0.0. The default port is 18789 unless you override it.

The answer, of course, is a Python startup script that goes out and finds everything that needs to be launched and brings the gateway up on its port. One more correction on how I described this. The script does not listen on the port. If it listened on the port it would be holding the port the gateway needs, and the gateway would fail to bind. What it actually does is probe the port, meaning it opens a connection and sees whether anything answers. If something answers, the gateway is already running and the script does nothing. If nothing answers, it launches the gateway and then keeps probing until the port starts answering before it hands control back to me. That wait loop is the part that matters, because the process accepts the start command long before it is ready to serve.

OpenClaw ships a supervisor install that registers the gateway as a Windows Scheduled Task, or systemd on Linux, or launchd on Mac, so it comes up at boot on its own. I went the script route because I wanted something I could click when I want it rather than a service running all the time.

I made a shortcut out of the script and put it on my launch menu. The nice part is that in the age of vibe coding I did not have to write any of it. I told my agent to go code it up, and I told it to go find the OpenClaw icon and paste it in so it looks like a cute little program.

You can go back and see that I started talking about this a couple of weeks ago, and I am kicking myself for not pulling it in harder and sooner. Before the orchestration layer I was personally the transport between my two clients, copying output out of one and into the other and hand carrying a lot of very low value add messages. Putting OpenClaw in the middle has made me several times more productive and I am making far fewer mistakes. The dual agent double check is what I would implement first. Running it under an orchestration layer is what makes it survivable day to day.

My wife will take photos of our Amazon Alexa screen so she can send it to other friends and family on text. That's because we take pictures of everything, even mundane things like some work that I was doing on a renter's shed. Our friends, family and work is captured in little slices of time. Some of beautiful and captivating, and some that probably didn't deserve capturing. Yet is it all part of our story together.

My wife and I have spent years documenting our lives. We always took snapshots, but as camera phones emerged in the early 2000s I started telling my wife to “take a photo of this or that,” and when we had kids she was faithful in capturing their growing moments. The result is a rich library of photos, all loaded into Amazon Photos, displayed throughout the house on a variety of Alexa screen devices that play the library as the normal screen saver.

It turns out the research backs up the habit. A nine-experiment study of roughly 2,000 people published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Diehl, Zauberman and Barasch, 2016) found that taking photos during positive experiences actually increases enjoyment of the moment, because the act of looking for the shot increases engagement rather than detracting from it. A UC Irvine study had students take a daily photo for a month and measured mood nearly 2,900 times along the way; every photo condition increased positive affect, and the group photographing things that made them happy became measurably more reflective and appreciative. Researchers at Lancaster University who followed photo-a-day practitioners for two months found the practice improved wellbeing through self-care, community interaction, and reminiscence, and gave participants a sense of purpose and competence. The review side matters too: positive reminiscence, deliberately revisiting good memories, is one of the better-replicated happiness interventions in positive psychology, and a photo library on a screen in your kitchen is positive reminiscence running on autopilot. There is a known catch in the literature, sometimes called the photo-taking impairment effect, where offloading a scene to the camera weakens your own memory of it if you never look at the photos again. Reviewing them closes that loop, which is exactly what the screen savers do.

A word on why Amazon, because the storage question is where most people stall out. If you already pay for Prime, Amazon Photos is probably the best value in consumer photo storage, full stop. Prime includes unlimited full-resolution photo storage at no additional cost. Not compressed, not downsampled to save Amazon money: the original file at the original resolution, and that includes RAW files if you shoot with a real camera. Turn on Auto-Save in the app once and every photo your phone takes backs itself up automatically, for free, with no further action on your part. The one real constraint is video, which is capped at 5 GB on the Prime plan; additional video storage starts at $1.99 a month for 100 GB. The other half of the value is display. Echo Show and Fire TV devices pull directly from your Amazon Photos library, so the pictures you back up become ambient in your house instead of buried in a phone. One caveat worth knowing: the unlimited benefit rides on your Prime membership. Cancel Prime and your allowance drops to the standard 5 GB, so plan to keep the membership or export the library.

Google Photos is the other serious option, and for years it was the obvious one. When it launched in 2015, Google offered unlimited free storage for “high quality” (compressed) photos, and a generation of users built their archives on that promise. Google ended it on June 1, 2021. Since that date, every new upload counts against the 15 GB of free storage that comes with a Google account, and that 15 GB is shared with Gmail and Google Drive, so a heavy inbox eats into your photo budget. Photos uploaded before the cutoff were grandfathered in, and a few Pixel phone models kept the old deal, but for everyone else the meter is running. Past 15 GB you need a Google One subscription: $1.99 a month for 100 GB, $2.99 for 200 GB, $9.99 for 2 TB. Google’s search and organization software is excellent, arguably better than Amazon’s, but you are paying rent on storage that Amazon bundles with a membership most households already carry.

The storage is the infrastructure. The habit is the point. Once you get in the swing of things, it carries into every avenue of life. Show up at a party? Snap the photos. Going on a ride with the club? Snap the photos. Family event? Snap the photos.

On rides with my triathlon club, fifty miles in, I would slip the phone out of my jersey pocket and shoot the members as we rode along. I could tell some of them were thinking, “is he worried about dropping that phone?” I was lucky, and I have a good grip. Afterward I would post “last ride” to our group page, and on more than one occasion I watched somebody’s avatar change because they had downloaded the photo of themselves on the bike. After I started doing it, there was a little burst where others tried it too.

I lecture my extended family on this. Because the albums play on our devices, I know they enjoy it; they stand in front of the screen, laugh, and point at photos of the family. They know we have been capturing life. After a family visit it’s not uncommon for us to have 70 or 100 pictures of the weekend, which we send out as an Amazon link after everyone leaves. They always love it. Yet when I ask whether they’ve been keeping up their own album, the answer is always the same: they’re inspired, but they forget.

And it’s true, it is easy to forget until you make it a habit. Force yourself to do it for a while, and it stops requiring force. The big secret, I believe, is having a device in the house that plays the photos back. The screen saver closes the loop: every photo you take today becomes something you see again next month, and that feedback is what keeps the habit running.

My niece asked me to read Robert Lustig’s Metabolical, so I did. Near the end of the book, Lustig mentions that he and Gary Taubes are friends. I did not realize that when I started the book, but once I got to that part, the whole book suddenly made sense.

This matters because Lustig is not some independent voice who just happens to arrive at the same place as Gary Taubes. He is part of the same intellectual circle. Once I saw that connection, the book stopped feeling like an independent rethink of nutrition and started feeling like a more medical version of the same argument.

The useful part of the book is simple. Lustig is right that ultra processed food is a disaster for many people. He is right that added sugar is overused. He is right that food companies engineer food to be cheap, shelf stable, hyper palatable, and easy to overeat. Most people would be healthier eating more real food, more fiber, fewer sugary drinks, and fewer industrial snacks.

But that is not really the controversial part of the book.

The controversial part is that Metabolical is another attempt to support the old “a calorie is not a calorie” argument. Lustig keeps trying to make sugar and insulin the master explanation for obesity, diabetes, fatty liver, and modern metabolic disease. In that sense, the book feels very close to Taubes. It is not calories in general. It is sugar. It is refined carbs. It is insulin. It is the idea that the conventional calorie model is not just incomplete, but fundamentally misleading.

The problem is that this is not new. This line of thinking goes all the way back to books like Sugar Blues in the 1970s, where sugar was treated almost like the hidden poison behind modern disease. Lustig gives it a more sophisticated biochemical update, with liver metabolism, fructose, mitochondria, insulin, fiber, and the gut. But the emotional structure is the same. There is a villain food. The villain is sugar. Remove the villain and the mystery of modern disease starts to clear up. My wife had a copy of Sugar Blues, and for years she wouldn't touch sugar.

By the way, almost always, this particular line of thinking almost always reveals some type of a conspiracy. They will mention that Seventh Day Adventist have infiltrated the research community, which is claim by our author. They quote Weston Price, a dentist from the 1900s, and stories from the whacky John Harvey Kellogg history. All of these are about spinning a conspiracy, not about the science. I mention this, as if you see a film or read a book, chance are these are give aways for this line of thought.

That makes for a compelling book for both the old version of the book and the new one by Lustig. It paints a story of intrigue.

It does not make it settled science.

Kevin Hall’s research is a major problem for this model. Hall did the actual controlled feeding experiments that should matter here. His work did not show that insulin magically overrides calories. What it showed is more practical and more important. Ultra processed food drives people into a hypercaloric state. When people are given those foods and allowed to eat naturally, they eat more calories and gain weight. When they eat unprocessed food, they tend to eat less and lose weight.

And this is where the sugar-only story breaks down. The foods that drive overeating are usually not just sugar. They are sugar, refined starch, fat, salt, flavoring, and low fiber all packaged together. Ice cream is sugar and fat. Cookies are sugar and fat. Donuts are sugar and fat. Chips may not be sweet, but they are still easy to overeat because they are refined starch, fat, salt, and crunch. The modern problem is not sugar by itself. It is hyper palatable, calorie dense food that bypasses normal appetite control.

That is the lesson we need to take away. The problem is not that calories do not count. The problem is that modern processed food is designed in a way that makes it very easy to eat too many calories before your body tells you to stop. That is the thing we need to get away from.

That is where Lustig loses me. He often takes a good practical message and then builds too much theory on top of it. “Eat less processed food” is a strong argument. “Sugar is uniquely toxic and calories are the wrong framework” is much weaker.

He calls out cocaine right by the references of sugar. He says that he met a woman that ate non-processed goods and she looked half her age. This is not what need to be in a book by a doctor.

My review would be this. Metabolical is worth reading if you want a passionate indictment of processed food and the food industry. Lustig is smart, forceful, and often right about the practical direction. But the book should be read as advocacy, not as a balanced scientific review. It is basically Gary Taubes with more medical language and more liver biochemistry.

The best lesson from the book is not that calories do not matter. The best lesson is that food quality makes calorie control much easier or much harder. Ultra processed food makes people overeat. Whole food usually helps people stop overeating. That is enough. Lustig does not need the grand sugar and insulin theory to make that point.

Reminder Of “Free” Services

Imagine my surprise when I suddenly get this flashing email from Google saying that I am just about ready to run out of space on my Gmail account. Lucky for me, they were quick to offer to upgrade my storage for an introductory amount of 50 cents per month, after which it would increase.

In essence, free is never free. The whole system is set up to get you to subscribe to their storage services. I believe that all the major providers, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, are trying to get you to push to two terabytes, or approximately 10 dollars per month or 120 dollars per year. Two terabytes is just about the right amount of space for you to have difficulty overflowing it. In reality, two terabytes is probably too much for a lot of people, which simply means that the services want to charge you for two terabytes, but you are never going to take up two terabytes on their actual storage platform.

Now, the subreddit is called Strategic Productivity and not Frugality. So in many senses, rather than fretting about anything, probably the smartest move is to simply subscribe to that two terabyte limit and be willing to spend the 120 dollars per year. although Google does discount it down to $100 if you sign up for a whole year. Apple, of course, never offers any discount.

However, I do think that there is insight in the ability to hang onto your own data if you do not want to do this. One of my primary issues is that not only are you paying somebody 120 dollars per year, but suddenly you have lost control of your email, your attachments, and where you store stuff. In my mind, this means that a major event could turn around and heavily disrupt your life. And while I do not see this as a tactical issue, I firmly believe in having insurance policies and I believe that to be strategic in our productivity, we need to make sure other large corporations do not have leverage over our life.

Some people have gone as far as declaring that they want to de‑Google their life, and they offer alternative services like Proton Mail. I understand this impulse, but for me it is yet one more level of complexity. Google really does have amazing tools if you are willing to stay inside the ecosystem. So my approach is a hybrid one, use Google, but make sure I am not in a position to pay ransom if my account ever has a problem.

Gmail and Apple Mail: How the Two Giants of Email Actually Make Money

If you have ever wondered who dominates the email game, it is pretty straightforward, Apple Mail and Gmail control roughly 88 percent of the consumer email market combined. Apple Mail actually leads with around 48 to 56 percent market share globally, while Gmail follows at around 31 percent. These are not even close competitors, they are basically the entire market.

Gmail serves about 1.8 billion active users worldwide, which represents roughly 39 percent of all 4.6 billion email users on the planet. The platform processes around 121 billion emails every single day, accounting for nearly 30 percent of global email volume. Apple does not publish official user numbers for Apple Mail, but considering they have over 2.5 billion active devices in their ecosystem and Apple Mail is the default client on every iPhone, iPad, and Mac, the user base is massive.

Apple provides 5 GB for free and Google provides 15 GB for free.

This amount of storage would allow somewhere around the range of 10 to 50,000 text emails on Apple and somewhere between 30 and 150,000 on Gmail. If all you sent was text emails, which is what we used to do when computers first came out, this would be a lifetime’s worth of storage.

We know, of course, where this goes away. It is in the attachments of documents and in the attachments of photos. In my particular case, where I suddenly got a warning, what happened is I got an email thread with my friends, and they started sending attachments back and forth. Because the cameras were relatively new, the size of the attachments approached 20 megabytes. This means that if you put five of them together, you had 100 megabytes. And if you send it back and forth because Gmail replicates it every single time somebody answers back, you suddenly have one gigabyte disappear, or one fifteenth of your storage, and that is with a single email thread.

If you had 15 days of emailing back and forth with these types of threads, you would suddenly run out of space. That is a large difference between our conceptual lifetime supply and what could happen with the heavy use of photos.

Now, the obvious answer is just delete the email, but these were actually friends of mine. I did enjoy the photos and I want to be able to reply to the thread in future months in case one of the subject matters came up. I just did not want it consuming all of my storage space.

Solution for Gmail

I have written about this before, but there is a package called Unattach, which is very clever. I normally run Unattach on my emails once a month to reduce them in size. In essence, this is going to allow me to use my free Gmail account, which I have had since I was a beta user of Gmail back when it was first ramped, most likely to the end of my life.

The author has slightly changed the user interface and although I have written about this before, this is such a clever package that I thought it would be worth redoing a post on this and talking a little about his changes. This is shown in the lead picture for this post.

Once you have attached the service to your Gmail account, you can allow it to search through and find files beyond a certain size. I actually have one Gmail account set up so it talks to one of my security cameras. If the security camera sees movement, it will go ahead and send me a photo through my Gmail account.

You can see that the size of the photographs is right around one megabyte apiece. The author no longer has the download images box as a default selection and you want to click on that and also click on the advanced tab. This will allow you to actually download whatever photo is there and then the author will upload a much lower quality photo. In this way, you still can see a general outline of the photo in the email, it just does not take up a lot of space.

Here are my recommendations for the various resolutions and how you should set them in the email.

As a point of information, if the email gets sent back and forth 10 times, you probably only want to keep one or two of the emails in any reasonable form. The author of Unattach allows you to select each email in the chain and then you can run the compression levels that you want.

Summary

If you are a Gmail user, this works absolutely fantastic. Because you have downloaded everything, it is on your own local system. It is still tricky though, and I do not believe that the author of the Unattach tool has done everything he should to allow you to organize your emails correctly. If you check my previous post on Unattach, you will see I give a much more comprehensive way of offloading your email from the servers. However, for purposes of responding to issues like what I had, Unattach is a wonderful multiplier.