Blog | Drew Shannon

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Some things that excite me about AI for knowledge work:

Tools like Google Antigravity, ChatGPT Codex, and Claude Cowork are giving Markdown and Text Files new lease on life. Clean, structural, hierarchical text is the perfect interface for both human readability and LLM ingestion.

Taking important context from across the web and making it useful (anyone still using Goodreads?)

It’ll be interesting to see how companies balance openness with the desire to own customer data. If I’m being (perhaps naively) optimistic, perhaps a token-based economic model and bring-your-own-data functionality can re-center power back with the user. A special shoutout to the folks at Are.na for being a shining example here.

I’ve geeked out about productivity systems and methodologies (Zettelkasten, GTD, 43 Folders, 2nd Brain, etc) for most of my career, and it feels like AI helps get us closer to the ultimate vision of human productivity than we’ve ever been.

“Soul files” as a way to help one understand and interrogate their own beliefs. I’m betting we will see the commercialization of digital identity frameworks within the next 2 years.

It has reduced SO much of the mindless and low-value work that knowledge workers spend a lot of time doing - summarizing meetings, cleaning up Google Sheets, cross referencing multiple versions of the same material, copy-and-pasting content from one place to another, etc.

Interestingly, it has more neatly cleaved a lot of my work in 2: AI Work and Human Work. In the context of work, if I know that an AI can do a pretty good job of transcribing a meeting and writing a summary, I can feel more present in a conversation with another person.

If you haven’t already been thinking about how to “make the implicit, explicit” for the purposes of your individual or team’s AI tools, now’s a great time to start.

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Rec League - Share what you're into

Share your recommendations on Rec League. The whisper network for great recs.

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A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

(Henrik Karlsson)

In that vein, here are some things I've been thinking about -- and reading about -- lately:

Taxonomies

Protocols and Common Standards

Brian Eno

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) / Second Brain / Tools for Thought

LLMs + Productivity

Grounded AI / Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems

Content Bookmarking

https://www.soul-md.xyz/ 

Dark Forest Theory of the Internet 

Domestic Cozy

Digital Gardens

Commonplace Books

“If it doesn't have a URL, it probably didn't happen”

Technical writing / documentation

“Making the implicit explicit”

Working / Learning in public

Please send interesting links and thinkers my way!

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Personal website manifestos

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As I turn 40 and am unable to deny that I’m firmly in middle age, I’m… | Drew Shannon | 15 comments

As I turn 40 and am unable to deny that I’m firmly in middle age, I’m reflecting on the first half of my career: one filled with a little ha

[drewshannon]

I’ve been toying in the last day or so with the idea of ‘outfluencers’ as a way to explain / express the movements of people and conversations away from typical scale-driven central gravity to a more free-floating, incentive neutral set of conditions that prioritizes non-programmatized human interaction (spontaneity), non-qualified, open participation (serendipity) and non-transactional benefit (serenity, kinda). Looking at ‘frictionmaxxing’ or ‘funmaxxing:’ (or various other zeitgesty trends captured in the links this week and lately) through those three vectors lends creedence to the inevitability, I think, that our shared technoanxiety is misplaced and that the natural state of AI etc will be like that of electricity; eventually invisible, omnipresent, less a consideration than an expectation. Except in places where it’s not (ie the natural world, in physical work etc), but in those it won’t be missed, either. “Outfluencer,” is a term that already exists, unsurprisingly, given its logical linguistic relationship to ‘influencers’; it’s used primarily (logically) by the Outdoor industry - but to describe Influencer-y behaviour in nature. I’m talking about something different: selective self-removal from big optimized system to embark spontaneously on building (or letting something be built) small. Not because it’s inherently hard, or inherently ‘anti’, but because it seems inherently (emotionally?!) logical right now. - Ben Dietz

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Drew Shannon | Are.na

drewshannon.net

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[drewshannon]

Time to start blogging again?

[drewshannon]

Your corporate role doesn't need to be meaningful. It needs to be useful. Useful for building skills, for funding your real projects, for buying time while you figure out what matters to you. The death of the corporate role isn't a crisis. It's freedom from having to pretend your spreadsheet about spreadsheets is your life's work.

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I’m not sure if anyone reads Tumblr anymore, but things have been pretty quiet on the blog-front lately, as I’ve been busy traveling, welcoming a new member our household, and beginning my “solopreneurial” experience through a new consulting business called Modest Operations.

As part of my new professional journey, I’m launching a new weekly email newsletter with links, news, and other tidbits. If you’ve ever been a fan of my “This Week” blog posts before, this will be a little like that.

To follow along, please subscribe to the new email newsletter HERE.

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Jackson Hole, WY. January 2018

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A few from Jackson Hole, WY. January 2018.

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Colorado, February 2017

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This Week

"Just because it’s fun to hang out at the water cooler at work, it doesn’t mean I want to work there....

There’s also a subtle side effect to asynchronish business, and that is its effect on the decision making process. When work gets done over email, there’s a general expectation of a response buffer of at least an hour or two. In you, though, people can convene and decide on anything at any time. 

This is awesome for speeding up the tempo of company directives, but it also places a ton of pressure on everyone involved to maintain even MORE Slack omnipresence; if any discussion might lead to a decision being made, that provides a whole lot of incentive to be available for as many discussions as possible. 

Even worse, those with the least on their plates can maintain the most Slack presence, which leads to the most gregariously unengaged representing the majority of the discussion base while penalizing those who are fully engaged in their “real” work."- Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You (Samuel Hulick for UserOnboard)

“Harmon handled it the way he handles everything: out loud, in front of strangers. It’s the way he handled his divorce (episode 167) and the complicated relationship he has with his parents (too many episodes to name). It’s how he’s confronted the estranged brother who called him a lazy piece of shit and hasn’t spoken to him in 12 years. It’s where he works out his guilt about his sister, born with the rare neurological disorder Rett syndrome, which has left her institutionalized for most of her life. ‘I feel like I was born a criminal,’ Harmon tells me. ‘With a karmic credit card that’s maxed out.’ He says these things in hope of staving off inevitable retribution.” - The Tortured Mind Of Dan Harmon (Sean O’Neal for GQ)

“Over time, I realized that the natural instinct to push for early impact leads many incoming leaders into challenging relationships as they expose their knowledge deficit and waste time. So, I developed an algorithm that has helped me ramp up quickly — and in several cases — have an impact in a relatively short period of time, while minimizing collateral damage.” - A Career Cold Start Algorithm (Andrew Bosworth for Boz.com)

“’Just take the blame, and you’re a free man,’ he said.” - Tough Job: Norway’s Ski Wax Chief Is Only Noticed When He Fails (David Segal for The New York Times)

“For every person who wants you to have bigger portions, there is someone who says the portions are too big. For every person who says your writing is too personal, there’s someone who wants it to be more personal…” - Seth’s Blog: Never smooth enough–a modern addiction (Seth Godin for Seth’s Blog)

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Blind Barber, 2018.