Last week, I found out that Building a Second Brain has sold over 200,000 copies. What a milestone!

The book has 4.5 stars on Amazon with almost 5,400 ratings and is now available in 13 languages with many more to be released soon. (You can always find the updated list of international editions here.)

If you've purchased the book, thank you so much for your support. And if you haven't yet...what are you waiting for?? Just kidding...

My Read-Later App is Overflowing! What Should I Do?

I'm a big advocate for adding all content you want to consume to a read-later app (I'm using Reader) for focused, distraction-free reading, watching, and listening.

But inevitably, articles, videos, and podcasts accumulate in the inbox of my read-later app way faster than I can consume them.

And you know what...I don't care!

Here's why: My read-later inbox is very different from any other inbox in my life. There's no commitment to the items in it. It's a wish list of things I might get to one day. And if not, there's no harm.

(Content that I absolutely need to consume to make progress on a project goes into my task manager, where I'm sure I'll get to it.)

However, with an overflowing inbox, even choosing what to consume next can become taxing. I've noticed that just because information exists somewhere in my system, I feel the need to manage and organize it.

Here's what I do to simplify this drastically: When I sit down to read or watch something, I sort my inbox from the oldest saved to the newest and start going down the list. I can skip as many items as I want until I find one I like. If I notice myself skipping an item at least three times, I'll simply delete it.

Think about it...if it takes more effort to decide NOT to consume something than to read it, it's a net negative and you should get rid of it.

Lastly, I want to remind you that more content consumption is hardly ever the answer to any problem. Therefore it should be low on your list of priorities.

Build Your Custom AI Inside Mem (with Srini Rao)

I'm diving with "AI Whisperer" Srini Rao into Mem, one of the most advanced AI-centric networked notetaking apps.

We cover...

how to talk to AI so you get what you want faster
how you can create a custom AI for yourself inside Mem
concrete use cases from personal creative projects to improving your daily productivity and workflow

Watch on YouTube

If you're looking for a tutorial on Mem's basic notetaking capabilities, check out my previous video with Srini.

Book Recommendation: Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick

Ethan Mollick is a professor at Wharton and one of the top experts on practical uses of AI I’ve found. I read every single one of his Substack posts as a basic education on artificial intelligence.

You can imagine how excited I was to see that his first book on AI is coming out today. The focus of the book is on the practical implications of the “middle-distance” of Generative AI – a welcome break from the short-term breaking news or long-term apocalyptic forecasts that dominate most AI discussions.

Get your copy here