Almanac

You’ve curated the sources. You’ve researched everything. You know exactly what you want to say. You just can't get it out of your head and onto the page. We are building Almanac exactly for this. Experience the beta version here: try.almanac.so Here are a few things you can do with Almanac👇

Sports feel like the one place where outcomes are actually earned. Clear rules, shared field, visible effort and first is first. But the race doesn't start at the starting line. It starts years earlier, in who got access to coaching, nutrition, facilities, and time. This week's Almanac is on why sporting meritocracy is a partial truth and why partial truths are the most convincing kind. 🔗Link below!

The cost of making things has collapsed. You can generate something polished almost instantly. And yet, a lot of it feels interchangeable. The constraint isn’t execution anymore. It’s judgment.🎯 This week’s Almanac explores why taste, the ability to decide what to keep, cut, and refine is becoming the new moat. Link below🔗

Every idle moment is now a problem to be solved, a gap to be filled before some uncomfortable feeling slips in. But the idle mind was never broken. It was processing, connecting, wandering somewhere useful. 🧬 A new Almanac newsletter on what boredom actually was, what the neuroscience says it was doing for us, and what we've sort of lost by replacing it with an infinite scroll and a dopamine drip. Link Below!🧠

Short answer: no. But people have found ways to live with it. The problem is that platforms reward frequency, not depth. The more you post, the more the algorithm shows your stuff. But the more you post, the less time you have to think about anything worth posting. And the thinking itself gets scattered. Sources in dozens of tabs, highlights buried in PDFs, drafts living somewhere else entirely. Cal Newport, a computer science professor who has written extensively about focus and distraction calls what happens next "audience capture": you check your output two years in and realise you've been writing for the algorithm, not for yourself. So what have people tried? The most common move is making a newsletter your home base instead of a feed. One writer did the full social media grind. 3 posts a day, 4 platforms and their readership barely budged. They switched to email and grew from 12 to 8,000 engaged readers. Therefore, no algorithm deciding who sees your work. Others go further. The "creator-monk" approach means deliberately not scaling writing essays that take months, keeping a small subscriber base, treating attention as something you protect rather than harvest. Newport has never used social media and sold close to 3M copies of his book Deep Work through word of mouth alone. Every workaround has its own cost, though. Newsletters still need feeding. The monk path can turn into performance. And Newport's model requires writing something good enough that strangers recommend it unprompted, a brutal bar for most people starting out. The other thing many of them are trying to do is keep a place where ideas can sit, develop, and connect before they ever become posts - the kind of workspace we're trying to build with Almanac. The practical takeaway: writers who handle this best tend to do one thing in common, they pick a single channel they own (usually email), post on their schedule instead of the algorithm's, and accept that slower growth is the price of keeping their thinking intact.z

Short answer: no. But people have found ways to live with it. The problem is that platforms reward frequency, not depth. The more you post, the more the algorithm shows your stuff. But the more you post, the less time you have to think about anything worth posting. And the thinking itself gets scattered. Sources in dozens of tabs, highlights buried in PDFs, drafts living somewhere else entirely. Cal Newport, a computer science professor who has written extensively about focus and distraction calls what happens next "audience capture": you check your output two years in and realise you've been writing for the algorithm, not for yourself. So what have people tried? The most common move is making a newsletter your home base instead of a feed. One writer did the full social media grind. 3 posts a day, 4 platforms and their readership barely budged. They switched to email and grew from 12 to 8,000 engaged readers. Therefore, no algorithm deciding who sees your work. Others go further. The "creator-monk" approach means deliberately not scaling writing essays that take months, keeping a small subscriber base, treating attention as something you protect rather than harvest. Newport has never used social media and sold close to 3M copies of his book Deep Work through word of mouth alone. Every workaround has its own cost, though. Newsletters still need feeding. The monk path can turn into performance. And Newport's model requires writing something good enough that strangers recommend it unprompted, a brutal bar for most people starting out. The other thing many of them are trying to do is keep a place where ideas can sit, develop, and connect before they ever become posts - the kind of workspace we're trying to build with Almanac. The practical takeaway: writers who handle this best tend to do one thing in common, they pick a single channel they own (usually email), post on their schedule instead of the algorithm's, and accept that slower growth is the price of keeping their thinking intact.

has anyone solved this yet

AI in warfare is often discussed as a future problem. In practice it has been arriving piece by piece. First as tools to analyze intelligence, then systems that recommend targets, and now software embedded directly in the pace of military operations. ⚔️ The recent Iran strikes and the Pentagon’s fallout with Anthropic revealed how central these systems have already become. This week’s Almanac looks at how AI moved from experiment to infrastructure on the battlefield. 🔗Link below!

We quit gyms, abandon courses, let habits die after a few days. Not because we don't care, but because our brains were never built for delayed payoff. 🧠 Gamification was the design world's answer to this. Points, streaks, progress bars stitched into apps and classrooms and workplaces. This week's Almanac is about whether it actually bridges the gap or just gives you something new to maintain. Link below!🎮

Sneak peek of the cool stuff we have been shipping in @thinkwithalma ✨ Keep an eye out for what’s next, I’ll also share how we’re building this, every step of the way 🥂

Adding sources is fun in Almanac! No more starting from scratch. Try it out in beta ✨ try.almanac.so

@alishananda08 Hey Alisha, DMed you!

@thinkwithalma Guys! Your waitlist’s hanging… let me in!

You’ve curated the sources. You’ve researched everything. You know exactly what you want to say. You just can't get it out of your head and onto the page. We are building Almanac exactly for this. Experience the beta version here: try.almanac.so Here are a few things you can do with Almanac👇

@_swanand Thanks for sharing. Have you tried reading the newsletters by me @thinkwithalma? Give it a try!

Articles I keep coming back to There are articles you read, articles you enjoy reading, articles you bookmark but never read, and then there are articles you read multiple times. Over and again. You keep coming back to them because they had an impact on you, they are still relevant, they have multiple layers, and so on. Reasons are many, but these kinds of articles are few and rare. Here is my precious list. All links in the comments below. Nine Lies About Work by Buckingham and Goodall — a review by Ian Welsh A counter-intuitive and deeply insightful book about work, work culture, and people. This review, in particular, is a crisp representation of each insight. The author rightly points out that most business books are "slop": they repeat the same advice over and over again, only to go on to demonstrate why this book doesn't fall into that category. Excellent article about an excellent book. 10 principles for growth as an engineer — Dan Heller This piece of writing has stayed with me for a long time. It's still relevant; AI hasn't eclipsed it. But more importantly, I lived those principles, which led to strong growth in an otherwise lackluster career. It later became mandatory reading at all the teams I built, managed, and ran. If you're an engineer, this is a must-read. 27 Insights From Three Years of Bismarck Brief — Samo Burja Samo Burja peels layer after layer of the macro picture, revealing the workings of the world through data, evidence, and an intelligent lens. This is an article even Nassim Taleb would approve, even if grudgingly. Some samples from the 27: - "Mission-driven" is a lie; orgs only exist to generate profit for shareholders - Wealth redistribution *can* work, as long as you keep funding it (e.g., Saudi Arabia) - One of the most underrated paths to political power is intellectual work. Yup. Surprise! Solving every Sudoku Puzzle — Peter Norvig I am a fanboy, and I cannot lie. I aspire to write with as much clarity as Peter Norvig. I don't want to say much more, but if you've ever been interested in problem-solving, you need to read, study, and absorb this piece. Time to upgrade your monitor — Nikita Prokopov Breaking pattern here to dive deep into the world of monitors, sharp and high-quality displays, and the reasonable impact they have on our heavily online lives. Nikita goes into great detail about what makes a display good, common mistakes, how to fix them, what to buy, and so on. Never buy a monitor without reading this article. How to make video calls almost as good as face-to-face — Ben Kuhn Written during the peak pandemic, when video calls were the difference between working and not working. But it has stood the test of time. You're not ready to admit that your video calls are low-quality and are affecting your ability to do your best work. You're bogged down in "You're on mute", "I can't hear you", "Is your video on yet?" and so on. Read Ben's piece and implement. Thank me later. Strategy Letter V — by Joel Spolsky Joel is one of the foremost thinkers of our generation. It's not a stretch to say that his work and writing have shaped the software world as we know it today (Microsoft Excel, VBA, Trello, StackOverflow, to name a few). But anyway, in all his writing, I keep coming back to this piece about corporate strategy around your product and its complements and substitutes. Even in hindsight, I could not have come up with a framework such as the one he presents. Perhaps it's commonplace in B-schools, but to my programmer brain, it was eye-opening. Not a complete list by any means, but this is where I will stop today. Tell me yours please! I love collecting these.

interesting take on how AI is reshaping fashion, shows where it helps and where it still can't replace humans 👀 @thinkwithalma @tiramisurabhi

AI reshaped parts of fashion completely. Operations, supply chains, trend spotting - those got overhauled and the results show. But it struggles with design, can't figure out materials, and somehow makes personal style less personal.🧵 This week's Almanac follows a garment's lifecycle right from it's concept to the closet to see where AI reshaped fashion and where it hit limits. Link Below!🌱

@Eveosian Yes we support uploading md files, do try it out!

@thinkwithalma Any way to upload .md files. I had made my entire research works based in Obsidian and wanted to try out here