Oncle

Review

The Sleep Solution by Chris Winter is a book about how to fix your sleep. The Author ran a sleep clinic for many years, and after having similar odd experiences happen frequently, such as people claiming they haven’t slept in years, he published a book to clear up common misconceptions about sleep and offer solutions that will work for most people. It was a fun read; the humour is entertaining and well mixed in. Concepts build on each other nicely, and the chapters are not so long to get boring, but are enough to cover everything in sufficient depth.

One thing that impressed me about the book was its navigation around hard sleep issues, soft sleep issues, and non-sleep issues. There are extremely few people with hard sleep issues, actual disorders that prevent you from sleeping even when you are asleep. Those people will need a sleep study. He says this right at the start, but says to read the book first, because almost all sleep issues are soft issues, which doesn’t mean nothing is wrong, but it just means you can probably fix it on your own with a bit of effort. There are also some non sleep issues, where he outlines people who think they have poor quality sleep, but there is nothing wrong with it. It’s just an attitude problem. There is lots of information for each of these groups, and I would recommend giving the first half a read if you want to understand sleep better. It's just good advice on setting up and improving your own sleep. Don’t have time? Fear not, I’m back at it talking about this book to yet another victim (you).

Abridged

Before Getting Into It

There is a lot of advice in this book. If not following it works for you and you feel good, don’t fix what isn’t broken. There is no reason to make changes if you think it would harm your sleep.

Different people need different amounts of sleep. They say the average is 8 hours, but depending on age, activity level, body type, etc, it can vary. If you stay awake and function during the day, you get enough sleep. You may read about sleep cycles that people say are 90 minutes. You don’t need to time these. Your body can do that for you if you’re consistent.

Poor sleep is bad, but it’s not that bad. Old doctors used to work two straight days, sleep 6 hours, then do it again for weeks on end. They survived, and they did OK. They could have done better, but they did OK. If you have poor sleep, try to improve it, but it’s not the end of the world. Everyone sleeps. It is a primary drive, like eating and breathing. If you don’t do it, your body will force you to or it's joever. The issue is never that people don’t sleep; the issue is that they are dissatisfied with their sleep. That is an important distinction to make, because if someone claims they don’t sleep, they don’t understand what the problem is, and won’t be able to find a solution.

Sleepiness is when you want to fall asleep. Exhaustion is physical exhaustion. These are different, but often grouped into being tired. Similar, but not quite the same. If you are not sleepy and are trying to sleep, it’s like being full and forcing yourself to eat. Sure, sometimes you have to do it, but your body is saying you don’t need it. Listen to your body.

There are many reasons you may be sleepy or exhausted. If you’re tired but your sleep is fine, it may be something else. Could be diet, exercise, thyroid, burnout, or anything. Focus not only on sleep as the source of all your issues. If you are experiencing a temporary disruption in your everyday life, or if you have had a brief bout of poor sleep, that’s normal. Don’t make mountains out of molehills.

Setting Up Better Sleep (If You Need To)

First is the place where you sleep. Your bedroom should be for sleep: as dark as possible and as quiet as possible. White noise and night lights are unnecessary and often harm sleep. Your bedroom should be a colour that is calming and gentle on the eyes, and should be set up to be as comfy as possible for sleeping. You spend 1/3 of your life sleeping and it helps with everything, treat it like such. Your bedroom is for sleeping and clapping cheeks/getting cheeks clapped. Some of you may be in university, so you can’t have a purpose-built bedroom, but that’s how it’s best done. If you use your bedroom for more, like work, try to come up with a clear separation of spaces and don’t spend time in bed unless you are sleeping or smashing.

Wake up at the same time EVERY morning. If you got blasted at the Toucan, had a fire, watched a movie, stayed up late, etc you may need a nap, but do your best to wake up at the same time. This helps your body time everything, and not doing that messes up your body’s rhythm. Go to sleep at the same time too based on how much sleep you need. If you don’t know, go to bed 6 hours before you wake up. No napping. Stay up the whole day, then keep that schedule for a week or 2. If you are sleepy every day still, move your bedtime 20 minutes earlier and repeat. The goal is to be tired to guarantee efficient sleep, but if you are exhausted, it is not enough sleep, and you should adjust your schedule for more. There’s a whole popular thing about sleep debt, don’t worry about it. A few days of regular sleep and you’ll be back to normal.

No phones. zoomers and millennials, I swear to god, this is one of the biggest issues. Fast-paced content keeps your brain awake and wired, and bedtime is when you want your brain to be slow and sleepy. Blue light also signals to our brain it’s time to be awake, which you don’t want when it’s time to be sleepy either. E-readers have some light but to a much lesser degree. Turn off all screens ~1 – 1.5 hours before bed (well, ideally 2, but I know you won’t do that). Commit to it, and trust me, it is worth it. There will be nothing worth seeing on social media. There never is. If some piece of content is that worth it, it will stick around to the next day. Need to do something productive like work? Tomorrow’s problem. If it is 100% necessary, fine, don’t sweat it, but just do your best to make sure that situation is uncommon. You can almost always postpone midnight work to the next day. Before bed you can read, journal, plan, meditate, etc. There’s a lot to do that’s healthy, but note that indirect soft lighting is the softest on the eyes and best for the brain as you get closer to bedtime if you pick reading.

Stress is a real killer. You don’t want poor sleep, so you stress about doing things right, only for that stress to keep you up, giving you another poor sleep. This is a negative spiral that can single-handedly create all of your poor sleep. Do you sleep way better in motels or unfamiliar places? Chances are you’ve had this spiral and, in a trauma-like way, your brain now has associated your bedroom with poor sleep and anxiety. If this is the case, switch things up in your room: repaint it, move things around, get some new pillows (I recommend a pregnancy pillow, they are a game changer), and just try to break some of that negative association. If you know you are still stressing, just realize that your sleep is OK. You are still getting through the days. Even if you are more sleepy than you want to be. Improvement is a slow process that comes with setbacks. Bad sleep one night? Try again the next night. Just keep putting in that extra effort, keep to good habits, and it will pay off in the long run.

This leads to one of the last big points: identity. Some people are complainers or poor sleepers who make sure someone knows it. A study found that how people express their sleep has a bigger impact on how they feel during the day than the actual quality of their sleep. Fake it till you make it. Someone asks how you slept but you had your 7th poor sleep in a row? You actually slept fairly well last night! Woke up feeling like death? You actually had a cool dream! Can’t remember it well though :/ just that it was cool. Keep working on your sleep, but also try to create a more positive image of your sleep. You might kick some of those anxieties, and you might seem like a happier person as a bonus.

With that, I think you have the tools you need. Consistent schedule, no screens, and just keep at it. If none of these can help you, get a sleep study. A real in-person sleep study, not a fake at-home one or an app.

Extra Snippets

Resting, just lying down but staying awake, is great in the absence of sleep. Sometimes it is even equivalent. If you really need sleep but can't quite fall asleep, a bit of rest is better than stressing that you can't sleep.

No research has confirmed any sleeping pills help you perform better the next day and most do have negative health effects over long-term use. They have some role with jet lag, but there is no major benefit to them. If you use them as a placebo, maybe try replacing them with a caffeine-free tea with honey, which is connected to some slight benefit (potentially, he said it but I didn’t look it up). You should not be relying on anything to help you sleep.

Modern society is the root cause of so many sleep issues, and they sell pills to us to fix them even though they are ineffective. It’s literally the “feed us poison” meme.

Narcolepsy. If you constantly feel the urge to sleep and just curl up and sleep just about anywhere, even after a good night’s sleep, get it checked out. The vast majority of people with narcolepsy just think it’s normal and never seek help.

Shift workers have negative health consequences from having no internal consistent time. The negative health consequences are worse than some diseases or even parasites. Society does not need shift workers, but by using shift work, capital can have fewer workers and a more precarious workforce at their disposal. That’s kind of messed up. Also, capitalists people spend so much optimizing their sleep it’s unreal. They do all that just to avoid what they demand others do every day.

Think of what I said at the start: People sleep and sleep is a primary drive. These rich fucks who say they get a 4-hour sleep and work hard all day every day are lying. When people have slept that poorly, as the doctors mentioned earlier, their body forces them to sleep, they pass out on the job, and some even fall asleep while doing tasks.

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We went from childhood dreams And end up just like ‘em I’m finna catch some Zs

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Oncle Spencer

Note: This is the second book in my productivity guru series. To read the first, Building A Second Brain, the article is linked here.

Book Review

David Kadavy comes through with another book for all the people who want to be productivity gurus. This one is less wordy, cutting down on all of the stories that appeared in Building a Second Brain, but also does often leave things a little open-ended. I was expecting a book on how to make a digital zettelkasten but instead found myself reading a book on how to generally improve your experience with productivity once you already have a zettelkasten. As someone in that position, who has one but was feeling like something needed to change to make it fun and approachable, this was useful. To people who are looking into ideas for taking better notes, you might want a different starting place. That being said, it's worth coming back to and will help once you have a start.

The book was an incredibly easy read, only taking me a couple of days. It was entertaining, light, and chapters were kept short, which helped me feel like I was consistently progressing through the ideas without any of them requiring too large a time commitment. You could power read it as I did, or spend 10 minutes a day casually reading, and either way, the book progresses naturally. This is probably its biggest stylistic strength and is something that many authors could use some help replicating, especially in the modern day.

Core Concepts

The book does talk a bit about making a zettelkasten here and there. The idea of keeping notes small and concise. The different types of notes: fleeting, literature, and permanent. The workflow of processing ideas. But the strength of the book lies in its flaw: it doesn't dwell on it much. He gives some ideas of the core values, but acknowledges that you can find in any Youtube video that is guaranteed to tell you about how the word zettelkasten comes from German for slip box and how Niklas Luhmann used it and was productive and cool. Instead, most of the book is talking around your zettelkasten.

So what does around your zettelkasten mean? Kadavy knows you can set up a zettelkasten with more up-to-date information on what applications are available on Youtube, so he decides to talk about the longer term aspect: your interaction with productivity and how that relates to your zettelkasten.

In my opinion, this is the most important aspect of the book. Burning out is the death of productivity. It must be avoided at all costs, including short-term productivity. No strategy will work if it doesn't accommodate periods of particularly low energy or if it instantly consumes periods of particularly high energy. If you want to be productive long-term, you need to have a strategy that is mentally sustainable for you and not too rigid to allow variation based on internal or external changes in day-to-day life.

This relates to the zettelkasten because, if you design it to be, it is a long-term sustainable note-taking style. Given a book, you can decide to not take notes (read it purely for fun), take a few notes, take notes but only as pertains to a specific topic, or take full notes. Each note taken in this system is tiny. As you read, you can highlight the parts you find noteworthy, then you add your interpretation or turn it into your own words, give it a name, and you're done. The note can now freely connect to anything you want it to, and you have a pre-digested idea that you can put into any project if it ever comes up. It requires no further organization or maintenance, you can just move on. Furthering this, in one chapter, he even breaks down body position and how he likes to read in certain positions, make notes in others, and think in others. From lounging to lying down, to sitting up, to exercising, each one means a different step in the creative process to help create mental associations with those positions to break it up. You don't have to do it all at once, you can do different steps based on what kind of mood you're in. If you have a setup that works for you, you'll get to it eventually, and the result will be atomized long-term notes ready when you need them.

My Setup

Here comes the part of the article where I talk about myself a bit. I use a zettelkasten for my notes, and it took me a while to get it working. Here's where I'm at right now.

First, I decide whether or not I'm taking notes on something. If it's audio, I generally don't. Maybe a note or 2 here and there but it just takes me out of it too much. If it's a book, I chuck it into my e-reader so I can highlight it and make notes. Then I decide how much I want to learn from it. This book? I said a couple of ideas. Golden Gulag? I want a lot of information. In cases where I expect to take a lot of notes, I generally listen to it as an audiobook without taking notes first. This is for my enjoyment as well as to get a sense as to what the book is about, and what the overarching themes are across the chapters, helping me identify what is fluff or talked about more later. I generally don't rewind when I listen like this, I just go with the flow since I'll read it later (unless I think something is fascinating or I connect it to a specific project, in which case I jot it down in my notes, which I'll process into becoming a Zettel note later).

As I read it in my e-reader, I might find something interesting or cool. If that's the case, I highlight it, then in the highlight write why I think it's cool or what the idea connects to. Whenever I have time and feel like it, I import all of those notes, then leave them in a long list to process into a 'Zettel notes.'

Each Zettel note has the following template, and gets thrown into a big folder called Zettelkasten, which you can see in my previous article:

Note Title

>[!quote]
>
>>[!note]
>>

---

## Backlink: 

## Topic tags: 

## Contextual phrases: 

## Timestamp: {{date:YYYYMMDD}}{{time:HHmm}}

Now I will show you a filled-out note that uses this exact template, then tell you how I fill it out in order: – In Obsidian, I have a hotkey that allows me to make a note with the blank template to fill out nearly instantly. This drastically speeds up the process.

Travel For Activism Costly For Poor


>[!quote]
>prisoners’ mothers taking an unpaid day off work and contributing from their slim wages toward the $1,000 charter cost.
>>[!note]
>>Extremely hard to afford activism or even just support loved ones for the working poor

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## Backlink: [[Golden Gulag]]

## Topic tags: [[Activism]][[Poverty]][[Transportation]]

## Contextual phrases: 

## Timestamp: 202303112206

I make highlights and write something about each highlight as I read it in my e-book reader. The highlighted part goes into the quote section. This is not absolutely necessary, but for academic writing, I like to have a direct quote. This also means that later, I can change it or make another note on the same quote. It also means I can quickly find it in the book if I want a citation.

Note: could be an insight or a rephrase. This helps retain information, and also helps me recognise what I was thinking was useful about it when I read the note. I generally only write down my immediate thoughts from when I read the quote, but sometimes I can revisit it if I think there is more meaning to be found.

This is the entire note. 2 sentences, both incomplete. There can be more, if I find something particularly inspiring, it might get a couple of sentences. If it gets longer than that, it can almost always be made into smaller notes, but sometimes I even get up to a very specific small paragraph.

The back-link is simply a link to the page I have dedicated to the book. That page will generally just have a short high-level summary of the book in case I need a quick 2-second summary to jog my brain.

Then the tags. This is optional. Since it talks about activism and poverty, I chucked a tag on to connect it to those. I remember quickly thinking 'travel costs are the barrier here', so I chucked a transportation tag on it. Who knows, maybe at one point I might write about how activism is difficult or issues of not having cheap long-distance transportation lines. If I ever do, I'll be able to find this note connected to those topics. If you aren't sure, you can also find this note using the search features on whatever app you use. I put about 10 seconds into this step. If I think too much, I just move on.

Timestamps are auto-generated just to put a date to it. Contextual phrases are almost always empty, but if I can immediately think of another way to phrase the title to help with searchability in another context that I'm writing about, I put it here.

After this, I think of a title. The title is generally just a trimmed-down version of the quote or the note. I put just enough information that if I were to read it, I could decide in a second whether that note may contain useful information on whatever project I may be working on or not.

Once I am done reading the book, I delete the page that has all of the quotes and notes, since they are now all turned into Zettel notes, so I don't need them anymore. I am left with a page that has the book's name, who wrote it, and a summary, as well as a ton of little ideas connected to it. I have all the information I want to take out of the book, and it's in my second brain, so I can just move on without having to worry about missing anything.

That's my process.

Additional note: You do not need tags or contextual phrases at all. I just have them because it gives me a second to try to connect them to other ideas, which I find fun, which makes it more mentally sustainable for me. You can have a different format. You don't need to have a quote attached. Maybe you want a different section, you can add it. I just find this template is so lean that making new notes is not daunting, which is how I make my note-taking more mentally sustainable. Make it work for you.

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I'll be lampin on Lamphere Standin on the curb With some very close friends

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Oncle Spencer

Overview

Building a second brain is a book that is a product of productivity gurus, by a productivity guru, and for productivity gurus. It succeeds in its goal of communicating note-taking systems to help people organize their lives better, but while it has drip in its core, it drowns in what can only be described as surplus productivity making it into the book. The information management skeleton is intuitive and concise. It strips information management down into its core and helps you build up your personal structure from that core to make it work for you. Information is broken down into 4 categories, and the production pipeline is broken down into 4 steps. This keeps things short, simple, and clean, so where did the other 100 pages come from?

This book has two types of padding that likely triple the length of the book. The first is the less egregious of the two: over-explaining. Multiple times, the book explains a concept well, then immediately has another chapter that is much longer explaining the same concepts again. While I would claim it was unnecessary and the book should have cut some of the explaining, I will say it as less egregious because it is overall productive to understanding. People using this as their first gateway into note-taking may find it useful, whereas those reading to increase understanding won't miss anything by skipping it.

The second type is where the book becomes a slog: anecdotes. Throughout the entire book, there are constant anecdotes ranging in duration from a paragraph to an entire chapter. They detail how people have been generally helped by having any form of note-taking system, from Einstein to random people the author knows with only a first name given. Where this could have been productive and an opportunity to go into detail about how that person sets up their notes, giving ideas to readers as to different ways to personalize their note-taking experience, it usually ends up at a dead end that simply states X person took notes and it was good. At first, it was interesting and motivating, but by halfway through the book, I found myself saying “that entire chapter didn't need to exist.” It seems that the author wanted to flex the memory that their notebook can contain, and show off how many people they can remember because of their second brain, but forgot that being able to use your second brain to produce more content doesn't mean it makes a good book.

At this point, you may be asking yourself “But Oncle Spencer, you said the core was good but have done nothing but complain, what is the good in the book?” Well, let me tell you.

Abridged

Our brains are great for a lot, but constantly remembering everything isn't their strong suit and can get stressful or annoying. Leaving this to notes, which are great at retaining information, frees up your brain to simply not have to worry about any of that. To organize everything from what you've read to work to personal projects, Tiago Forte recommends 4 core categories for notes that will make up your second brain:

• Projects: Active projects you are working on. This can include work, school, personal, or anything that you need to keep track of as you do it.

• Areas: Things you're generally working on, but are much more abstract and larger in scope. Where a project may be “make my meal plan for the week”, an area might look something like “becoming a better chef.” A project should have a definitive start and end point, where an area is more akin to an area of improvement long-term.

• Resources: Pieces of information that may be useful down the line. Sometimes the right information is at the wrong time. Maybe you read a book with some great information, but you're currently busy with other things. Take that information, put it here, and maybe down the line you'll come back to it and find it useful.

• Archive: A place for completed or stale projects. When a project is done, you may want to revisit the resources you used to make it, but it is very rare to revisit that project itself. When a project is complete, move it here. If a project is delayed or becoming stale, with little new development (or little involving you), you can also put it in another folder here, to come back to without letting it fill up your active projects.

  • As a side note, try to have some form of meaningful celebration for project completion. The time spent completing the project is near zero whereas the time spent working on it is significant. Celebration helps motivate you to work towards something, and makes completion more than a moment to move to the next task.

If you are just looking to get started and are wondering how to bring all your old notes over, any current project notes or very important documents can be brought over, just throw anything else you want into your archive in a file called 'old notes.' You can also just leave them. Don't let converting old notes be a giant project, it will only discourage you or burn you out before you start. Chances are you won't need to go back much if at all, and starting something fresh with a good structure can be freeing, letting you get away from the slog of old, messy, or rigid notes.

Forte recommends using this new second brain for the production of something new. You can take in random information and store it, but that doesn't make it useful, and can become tedious over time. When you produce something with the information you have, it makes your second brain useful instead of just serving as mass storage. The production pipeline is generally two parts: gathering information and refining it. Forte breaks this down a bit more.

• Collect: Gather useful information as well as information that seems meaningful to you (This is the intake information into your second brain)
• Organise: Organise the information you have gathered (This is the structure of your second brain)
• Distill: Making the information concise and usable outside of its original context. (This is refining notes that you take instead of just copying whole articles into your notes)
• Express: making something with the information you have.

As you make projects, the recommended strategy is to make a rough draft and then build it into a full project. This can generally be done by some slightly personalized method of the above. One thing he does stress is you do not delete information. If something seems like it shouldn't be there despite being related to the same topic, keep it at the bottom of the rough draft just in case. Sometimes connections are made that will make it useful, and sometimes you forget something you just had that would be useful now.

Where to take notes

Forte has a website that helps people find what tools to use for their note-taking experience. There are lots of note-taking applications, and they all work. Don't stress about finding the perfect application. Find one that seems around right, then mould it to work for you.

My recommendation: Obsidian. Obsidian chads are yet to take an L.

Their recommendations based on archetypes:

• The Architect. Someone who wants to plan, wants to create something, and wants to be able to create structures and stay organized: Notion, Craft.do
• The Gardener. Someone who wants to work 'bottom-up', gathers ideas and lets connections between ideas emerge organically. These are based more on linking ideas together. Obsidian, Roam
• The Librarian. Someone who wants a straightforward structure for collections and easy retrieval. Evernote, Notion
• Students. People who have short-term priorities and just need to get things done pretty quickly with information mostly coming from new sources. Forte recommends Apple notes, Google Keep Notes, but I recommend just doing the same thing in any other app and then collecting them all in a 'University Archive' file that gets thrown into the archive after. The PARA structure will likely help with university work in the long run.

My Setup

Just in case you want to see my personal setup for some ideas.

My PARA structure

The numbers are just to sort it in a specific way. I made it three characters because I thought it looked cooler. – Files: Stores things like screenshots, PDFs, templates, etc for use elsewhere. This is a utility folder – Projects: This is for things I am currently working on – Resources: This is for my research, it is full of all my sources, with different folders for things like articles, documentaries, courses, or theory. This helps me separate what I can use as a primary source in an academic paper vs what I have heard and can look into farther – Archive: Old, completed, or stale projects – Zettelkasten: I use this to store lots of small specific notes that I take away from my resources or think up on my own. It's kind of just a throw box for all of my ideas and things I've learned to come back to later. I believe Forte would put this in resources, but I personally separate it just because it makes sense to me. – Home. This is just a place that more or less mirrors the folders but is just more visually appealing. It is a place where I can jot down quick thoughts to process later, look at all my projects, and quickly see each of their closest due dates

Other Setups

There are a ton of people who have setups all over YouTube or other blogs that are useful to check out to help you get started. Just remember to start with a bare-bones skeleton and add what you need from there. Other people's ideas may have something that works for them, but may just not be the right fit for you. The goal is to make a long-term note-taking structure that is suited to your needs. Don't sweat getting it right at first, you won't, just get started and adapt your note-taking as you go.

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Walking through the pale moonlight phone tapped, I think and my minutes is hella low

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Oncle Spencer