A Whistle Stop Tour Through My Three Favourite Apps

I'm just back from the farm so I've been to get the hens up. Once I've done that I usually start watering the stuff in the raised beds and the polytunnel. At some point whilst I'm doing that Phil usually gets up, he's not a particularly early riser for a farmer but yeah he usually gets up when I'm part way through some of my jobs and then we'll go off and we'll feed the calves. Yesterday, Bay 3, they were very naughty. 2239 is usually the ring leader and he's one of my favourites. He doesn't like the end teat on the milk bar so he kind of pushes all the others to move them along but yesterday he was really pushy. I had to go in and try to organise them. Normally you can kind of move them along, you can sort of do a gentle push on their head and move them onto the teat either left or right but yesterday it was just chaos and it ended up they didn't actually feed that much. They all seemed to give up at some point. Phil thought that perhaps they're getting ready to be weaned but today they were a lot better and actually 39 was quite quiet today. Didn't drink a lot of milk so yeah, just had a bit of a chat with him to see if he was okay. I think they just have days when they're a bit under par. So anyway, we did that, got all of that done and then washed out the milk bars and the buckets and all the bits and pieces. I finished doing my watering, gave the hens some water, checked on the lambs in the paddock, just looking over the fence making sure they're all okay. There are now three ewes, four lambs. The last ewe to lamb, she had one last night when I was there and then sometime between then and this morning she's had a second lamb. Phil thought there was another twin on the way. So yeah, that's all good and I thought what I'd do and I've been meaning to do this for a while and I think it's Chad Hall has just sort of inspired me through one of his messages, his voice notes to talk about my tech. So I have used a lot of tech over the years. I'm a bit of a geek, I'm a bit of a magpie for the latest shiny new thing, but I have been getting better and I've been sort of standardising on a few apps that I use every day. The first one that I'll talk about is Twos, so that's the number two and it's an app that is designed to help you remember things, write things down to remember them, but I came across it when I was looking for a new to-do list app and it just had something very different and it wasn't like all the apps I'd used before. It was kind of a little bit quirky, but it did multiple things really well. So I started using it purely as a to-do list app and then I started including daily logs, adding photographs, you can publish stuff, you can publish lists. So I have a lot of different lists and recently I've been organising them. I kind of need a framework, you can use Twos in multiple ways. A lot of people will just add something to their today page, maybe add a tag, maybe not and then if they want to find it they can search on it. I like a bit of structure, I always have, so I've kind of had a GTD thing, getting things done, David Allen, and I've also had Para, which is Tiago Forte, and I use a combination of the Para method and also this thing that I call All in One. So I've basically amalgamated everything.Every single list I have into one big list and recently, probably two or three months ago, I decided that I was going to reorganise everything. So I have lists that are to be done today. I have lists for this week, this month, this year, and then mixed in there I have things that are for this quarter. Then I have kind of an archive, useful information and stuff like that. And it's been working really well for me. Might not work well for everybody else. At some point I'll share the template, but it just gives me a structure to my week. So every day I add templates to my Today page, which are mostly about helping me write. And a lot of these are prompts from Dickie Bush. So I add those to my Today page and I'll populate those prompts with whatever's in my head at the time. I do a week note and a week review. I do a monthly review, but it all comes from all these notes that I'm writing every day as well. So they go into the mix. What else have I done? Yeah, the really cool thing with twos is I can look at my page for today. So I don't know what date. I think it's the 14th, 14th of May. So I can look at that and I can then see all the other 14th of May going back to 2022 when I first started using twos and I can see everything that I've done. And I absolutely love that. This is a lot of stuff that I wouldn't remember otherwise. And it just is there. So, yeah, I find that really helpful. I really like that. I absolutely love twos. The two guys who are the co-founders, Parker and Joe, they're fantastic. They have built an amazing community, an app that is always evolving. And, you know, if you're looking for something that is a to-do list app, a bit of PKM and note taking, a place to write things down to remember them, to create lists and to have a bit of community. There's a sort of social element to it as well where you can publish on twos. You can share lists with other people, add photographs, YouTube video links, all sorts of stuff. I've used it in different ways. I've used it as my project management tool when I was running a team of 10 and I had it all organised in different lists and it worked really well. It links to your calendar so you can put reminders in and it will populate your calendar. So I did that on a massive scale when I needed a project management tool. But yeah, it's just so flexible. So I think it's quirky. It's just very different. But it's really just it just works with the way my head works. So, yeah, highly recommended. Another app that I'm using now is part of my kind of second brain PKM, personal knowledge management setup. I've used all sorts of tools. I've used Tana, which was great. I've used Obsidian again, another great tool. What else have I used? I've used Notion. But recently I came across Cortex and that's Cortex with a K, which is the brainchild of a guy called Dan Coe. And I'm just finding it's working really well because it's designed for writers by a writer and it has a big AI element to it. So there are lots of templates that you can just go and use to help you do different things. So if I'm struggling, if I'm trying to write, say, something on Substack and I'm just struggling with an idea or I've got an idea and I'm not really sure how to structure it, I'll just put it into KAI, which is the AI tool, and it links to different AI engines. And I'll just say draft me.I'll put some parameters in and information about who it's for and what I want to write about and then it will just come back with this outline I can also link it to documents that I've already created so I might say write an article, use this document that I've already written as inspiration or let's take it to the next level, whatever if you've used AI you'll know all this stuff anyway but it's just been really helpful and sometimes the outline has prompted ideas and I've written something completely different to what the outline has suggested but it's just got me going, it's got the ideas flowing it's just taken me past that point of I'm not sure where I'm starting or I don't know what I'm doing today so yeah, Kortex, I absolutely love it I suppose in the scheme of things it's a fairly new tool we're still waiting for the iPhone app but that's in the pipeline there's lots of other things coming there's something that I read about a week ago they are going to be adding a share your brain or something like that function so basically you'd be able to publish different pages hopefully a bit like a digital garden I used to do that in Obsidian and I really like that so that would be really great for me but yeah, if you use anything like Obsidian and you're looking for a second brain PKM writing tool Kortex is brilliant definitely recommend it I still have Obsidian but I've not really used it I've migrated everything over to Kortex I'm just finding Kortex is working so much better I have it linked as well to Readwise so all my Readwise highlights are automatically synchronised with Kortex I can also, and I'm going to talk about voice notes in a minute I can also synchronise voice notes so that they appear in Kortex so if I've got an idea about an article that I want to write and I'm just talking into voice notes I can outline that article or put some ideas in and then when I've finished I just tag it I use a tag content and what that does is it tells Readwise that that voice note with the tag needs to then go into Kortex so I know that I can just add it that easily into Kortex and then you can chat, so there's chat with Kai you can link documents so I could put something in chat or in Captcha which Captcha is just capturing stuff without AI and I can link it to a document and then it's connected to that document so in the meta area, the header area you can see all the documents and notes that you've linked so I'm writing a book that has been many years in the making and I've had it in Obsidian and I struggled because I couldn't move things around well enough and I couldn't see where things sat together but Kortex, because of the way it works it just operates in a slightly different way and I've now got a table of contents just simply by dragging and dropping different documents into the right place if I have an idea about the book I can just add it to Captcha and kind of connect it to the main document and it's all there so when I'm writing, I can see all these references so yeah, just a brilliant tool and I think I'm probably still scratching the surface with it there's so much more that I could do so last but not least is Voice Notes I think I've been using it now over a yearI don't know how many notes I've written or recorded, but at the moment I'm on a 62 day streak which is really cool. I have had decent streaks, I'm not sure if I got up to about 147, can't remember now, and then I just had a day when I was a bit tired and I completely forgot, didn't record a note or anything like that, which was a bit of a shame, so I had to start again. But apart from a couple of lapses, I've used voice notes every day. I often record stuff to do with the farm, especially when we were lambing. I could just stand in the sheep shed and talk about something that had happened, a delivery of lambs, one of my favourites doing something, anything really. It was just so easy to just stand there and talk into my phone and know that it would get added to my voice notes. I do like the WhatsApp thing. I don't tend to record that many messages into voice notes via WhatsApp, but what I do is when a friend sends me a voice note and we talk a lot via WhatsApp, I'll forward it to the voice notes bit in WhatsApp. It will then transcribe it. I've been talking now for nearly 17 minutes, but if a friend has just recorded me a message and it's 20 minutes, I can get the transcript and I can just see what she's talked about quickly and it's really handy when I'm replying because I can just have a look through the transcript and see the key things. I could even do a summary of it as well. But yeah, I can see all the key things that I want to talk about in my reply. So I do love that. I think that's just genius and it saved me so much time. But yeah, I use Ask AI in voice notes, so I might have recorded stuff about my book. So I'll say something like summarise some of the things that I've mentioned to do with the book or ideas or I might say summarise my week. I was doing that quite a lot and sharing that. I've not done that for a while. I might say, tell me about Muffin, who was the little lamb that I bottle fed. Summarise anything to do with The Shed, which is the charity that I am involved in running. So yeah, just lots and lots of different ways to use it. But I just find voice notes really works for me. I love being able to publish stuff. I should be doing shorter things really, but this one's just a longer episode. But yeah, I do. I love being able to just share things. I think although I'm an introvert, I can talk into a microphone much better than I can talk to people. So yeah, I tend to waffle on quite a bit. But yeah, voice notes is a tool that I use every single day and I've used it for meetings. Sometimes Chris and I will have a meeting between ourselves and I just record it. We talk and then I'll do a summary of it and then we can see what we've discussed and what we need to do. I can create a to-do list. It's just so much easier. I've done meeting minutes as well. Yeah, just so many ways. Oh, and I like doing, if it's somebody's birthday, I'll record them a happy birthday message. I'll link it to a QR code and then you can put the QR code in a birthday card so they can just scan it and then they get a voice message from you. That's quite cool. My husband, who's completely blind, really loves voice notes as well. So he uses it for Instagram captions, things like...If we've got to put something in a WhatsApp group, he'll record something, do a summary of it, or ask AI to kind of make it sound better or whatever he does, and then all he has to do is speak into something and copy and paste it. So yeah, he does that a lot. It's just such a brilliant tool for people who are visually impaired or completely blind. So many uses for it, and I just think I'm only scratching the surface, but I do love as well the fact that I can link it to Readwise and Kortex, which is absolutely fantastic for me. So yeah, that's a slightly longer whistle-stop tour through my three favourite apps, but at least you've got the transcript so you don't have to listen to it all, you can just read the transcript as well. Anyway, thanks for listening and or reading, and I'll be back again soon. Bye for now.