#01: Welcome to The Refined Mind

The inaugural issue

Hi friends!

Thanks for signing up to be a part of this experiment of mine! In case you don’t remember, my name is Mike and I’ve been tinkering with digital gardening lately. The term is somewhat…nebulous…but really it’s just a website where content is highly linked and written as something between a tweet and an essay. It’s made of my own personal notes, but uploaded publicly in the spirit of thinking, learning, and working in public.

This newsletter may or may not become consistent, but the goal is to send out a list of additions and changes every other week.

A goal of mine is to meet more people and have more conversations, so every page on the site refinedmind.co has commenting and you’re encouraged to respond and/or comment on the emails as well.

That said, here’s what I’ve got for you in this issue! It’s been a lot of setting things up and tinkering, but as that slows down and the writing picks up we’re sure to get into some good stuff. This issue includes everything since I started logging changes but expect future emails to be more concise.

Take a look below, explore what calls to you, and definitely share anything that stands out and makes you think!

Thanks again for joining me.

Catch you on the internet,

Mike Tannenbaum | The Refined Mind

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2020-06-26 — New + updated notes

• It’s tough to live life amid all these circumstances

• Friday is for closing loops, weekly reviews, and funky tunes

• Cleaned up and reorganized What has my attention now

• It feels like there’s a new internet being built with the principle of the early days—sharing and connecting knowledge—but with the wisdom of today, accumulated over decades of improving technology’s capabilities

• Added links to workflows on Alfred is for automation and central control

2020-06-18 — Fixed URLs + newsletter subscription

• Made permalinks more accessible with hypens instead of spaces

• Added link to substack subscription in footer

• Added refinedmind.co

• Added a new logo!

• Updated What has my attention now

• New notes uploaded

  • The land of the free is such a lie

  • America

  • Finding topics to write about is most effective when a body of notes already exists and all we have to do is look at where there is density and cluster of notes

  • automate what you can

  • Ideas improve by writing about them not by thinking about them

  • web of thinking

  • Share ideas before they’re ready

  • public notes build authority and trust

2020-06-16 — Black Lives Matter

• Updated MTDC homepage with BLM

• New notes uploaded

  • Black Lives Matter

  • We must confront ourselves. It’s as simple as that

2020-06-15 — Updated some language

• Updated homepage language

• Made changeling more accessible

2020-06-12 — Added commenting + new notes

• Sensemaking and wayfinding are critical skills for thriving in 2020 and beyond

• Wayfinding is the process of orienting within new environments, navigating through space, and progressing towards desired destinations

• Sensemaking is the process of creating situational awareness amid uncertain and ambiguous situations and anticipating trajectories in order to effectively make decisions

• Added a comment system in hopes of some dialogue and public discourse!

2020-06-09 — Content + Layout updates

• Added more notes

  • Bidirectional links between apps would greatly improve interoperability of concepts and ideas

  • My new system design

  • Alfred is for automation and central control

  • Bear is for networked thinking

  • How to take smart notes

• Updated footer with changelog link

2020-06-07 — Updated URL

• Now running on http://mind.miketannenbaum.com (will change soon)

2020-05-29 — Site deployed to Netlify!

• Deployed to tannenbaum.netlify.app

• Running on my new GitHub repo /my-public-mind

• Content added

• Stylesheets updated

• Tweeted the link out once

2020-05-28 — Built on the shoulders of others

• Base: Maxime Vaillancourt’s Setting up your own digital garden with Jekyll 🌱

• Wiki links converted to html links with Extending Jekyll markdown

  • Based on GitHub - jhvanderschee/brackettest