How to retain what you learn & A place to save your thoughts and ideas

You are reading Creativerly, the weekly digest about creativity and productivity-boosting tools and resources, combined with useful insights, articles, and findings from the fields of design and tech. The newsletter built for the creative community.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 158 👋

First and foremost, the current events happening in Ukraine are devastating, cruel, and inhuman. There is absolutely nothing that can justify a war. I am sitting here in my office and I feel useless, as there is not much that I can do to support Ukraine. But the last thing I can do, is raising my voice and use my audience to spread ways of supporting those who are currently going through hell. If you know of any organisations or companies who are actively offering ways to support Ukraine please let me know of them, as I want to highlight them in my newsletter. This is not about picking aside, this is about standing with the inocent people who are losing their homes, their relatives and friends, and their lifes.

As we are already wrapping up the second month of the year, I thought it was about time to open up Creativerly’s Advertising spots for Q2 of 2022. That means you can now book sponsor spots and classified ad spots from April to June. I am incredible thankful for all the support over the last couple of months as I had the chance to partner up with amazing companies and individuals. That has always been my number once focus when I decided to launch advertising options in Creativerly. I always wanted to partner up with like-minded creative folks and companies. The partnerships should always be fruitful for both parties.

Besides opening up the advertising spots for Q2 of 2022, I would also like to introduce volume discounts. That means if you are booking three sponsor spots you will get €10 off your invoice, if you book five sponsor spots you will get €15 off, and if you will book ten sponsor spots you will get €20 off. The same applies for the Classified Ads, which means you can book three Classifieds for €65, five for €110, and ten for €230. I have updated Creativerly’s advertising page with additional information.

If you are interested in booking an advertising spot in Creativerly, I am looking forward to hear from you soon. You can find all the relevant information at creativerly.com/advertise and you can check the open spots in the Airtable database. If you have any additional questions or want to discuss any other forms or opportunities regarding partnerships, do not hesitate and get in contact.

Discover the best micro-startups for sale

Microns.io (Sponsored) →

Delivered straight to your inbox every week, Microns.io is a newsletter to help you discover the best micro-startups for sale. Join hundreds of other entrepreneurs and investors looking for their next micro-startup acquisition opportunity and, along the way, learn about how great deals are done.

Apps, Software, Tools

Clementine →

Clementine is a beautifully designed and built app by Kevin Chung, which gives you a dedicated space to save and store your thoughts and ideas throughout your day.

As we are living in such a fast-paced world, we get overloaded with informations, news, thoughts, ideas every single day. Most of the time, the important bits we want to save and store get lost or scattered across different apps, which results in having a hard time to find the information again you are looking for. Clementine wants to help you to keep all your thoughts and ideas in one beautiful space.

The app was designed to create your personal thought space. In Clementine you can add notes, tasks, bookmarks or anything else you want to keep track of. If you are stumbling across important links throughout your day, put them in Clementine, and come back to them whenever you want. If you have a nice idea you want to iterate on, jot it down in Clementine, and once you have time to act on it, just get back to it.

Clementine features a beautiful clear, structured, and lucid interface. The tool also features the popular CMD + K interface, that gives you the possibility to quickly add a note, task, or bookmark, or navigate through the app. You can use Clementine totally for free, and it is only available on the web.

Marvin →

Marvin is a personal productivity app that combines different approaches and principles from behavioral psychology to help you beat procrastination. If you ever had the feeling you lost control over your to-do list and all the open tasks, you might should check out Marvin to regain control and finish your work.

The reason why Marvin entitles itself as a „personal productivity“ app is the fact, that Marvin features powerful customizations, which gives you the possibility to find a system that works for you. At the core, Marvin was built to reduce procrastination, feel less stressed, and ultimately increase your productivity. Within the app, each feature can be individually enabled and customized so you can experiment with your workflow. This means, there is no more need to try out different apps if you want to switch up your workflow.

To kick off your projects and start customizing your workflows, Marvin offers pre-made templates right out of the box. To find out what workflows suit the way you work best, just try out and play around with the features. Marvin offers a wide range of powerful features just like Todo List Sections, Time Blocking, Time Targets, Long-term Planning, Super Focus Mode, Built-in Timers, Time Estimates, and more.

Marvin is available for macOS, Windwos, Linux, iOS, and Android. The tool costs you $8 per month (billed yearly). Besides that, you can also buy a Lifetime Deal for $300.

Producter →

Producter is an exciting tool, that aims to help teams to manage software products in one place with a product-led growth mindset. Producter is the one tool you need if you want to collect feedback, manage tasks, plan roadmaps, and share update all within one single place. When you are running a software business, you like will receive feedback from different kind of sources, just like email, Slack, or any other tool. With Producter you can pull in all the feedback you have collected into one beautiful dashboard. This gives you the power to go through them all at once.

Feedback can come in from all different sources. If you do not have your feedback in one place, it is all over the place. With Producter you have a tool that helps you to stay on top of the feedback you get and actually act on it. Producter is also offering simple links and embed widgets to collect feedback. Once the feedback is collected you need to act on it. Producter has built-in task management which helps you to decide what to build next around the customer insight you received. If you ever wanted to see the connections between a task, the customer feedback, and the corresponding roadmap item, Producter is the tool that lets you achieve that.

With Producter you also get the possibility to develop strategic roadmaps that reflect business and product objectives. If you want to, Producter lets you set your roadmap public for all teams and users or keep it in private. To make Producter even more powerful, it integrates with the tools you love, by offering integrations to unite your existing sources for feedback, task management, and roadmap tools with Producter.

Producter is currently in Beta. You can use the tool forever for free for up to 5 editors. If you need more than that, you can add your teammates for $20 per editor monthly.

Singularity →

Singularity is a project and task management tool with true cross-platform compatibility, as the tool is available for macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, Linux, and Web. Singularity is the ultimate planner tool. It combines the best techniques and features for managing tasks, projects, calendars, checklists, and reminders. The app features a structured interface, that gives you the possibility to completely unload your head and put all your tasks into Singularity. To always stay on top of your tasks, Singularity lets you create projects to organise all your tasks.

When using task management software it does not only matter to have features and functionality to structure and organise task, you are looking for ways to actually get work done, and check off the tasks on your lists. To put your tasks in a broader image, Singularity lets you set deadlines and customise notifications to your needs. Additionally, you can add priorities to your tasks, so you immediately see which tasks need your attention and focus first. In the desktop and web versions of Singularity you will get a calendar mode, which allows you to see all your tasks in a beautiful and clear day-to-day calendar.

Within Projects, Singularity gives the user the possibility to divide their projects into large semantic blocks. This allows users to move in stages to achieve their goals. For further organisation and better structure, you add tags to your tasks, which makes it easy to quickly find them again when you are executing a search through Singularity's filtering options. If you want to create subtasks to create dependancies regarding certain actions, Singularity lets you create as many levels of tasks, subtasks, projects, and subprojects for any purpose. This gives you the power to create tailored workflows.

Besides all of that, Singularity was built to actually achieve your goals and get your work done. With Singularity you can keep track of overdue tasks, use a pomodoro timer straight within your task manager, focus on a specific project while Singularity will hide everything else, or go through all projects and tasks one by one to update their status and see their progress. The basic version of Singularity can be used for free and is limited to one device. If you want to use Singularity across all of your devices and sync your tasks you can upgrade to Singularity PRO which will cost you $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year, or you can buy the Singularity Forever lifetime deal which will cost you $79.99 once.

Useful Resource

Newcon →

Did you ever feel bitter because you missed a certain conference with high-profile speakers and keynotes from different business areas? Well, then I am excited to introduce you to a superb resource called Newcon. You can think of Newcon like the Netflix for professional keynote presentations and conference content.

With Newcon, you get on-demand access to over 100 of the world‘s best thought leaders and conferences in the areas of entrepreneurship, VC, growth, Web3, Climate, Diversity, Community, Creator Ecomony, and more. With Newcon everyone gets access to insightful keynote presentations, fireside chats, and interviews by thought leaders just like Li Jin, Kevin Rose, or Brian Armstrong.

You can sign up to Newcon now and use it for free while Newcon is in beta.

Mental Wealth

➢ Time is elastic – “In 2016, I gave a TED talk on “How to take control of your free time.” In it, I recounted a story of a woman whose water heater broke during the week she was tracking her time. The aftermath of this disaster consumed seven hours of what was already an incredibly busy week. Seven hours is an interesting number, because it is the equivalent of “finding an extra hour in the day!” — a promise I have read on a great many magazine covers. And yet, if we had sat down at the beginning of the week, and tried to find seven hours for something like training for a triathlon or setting up a new mentoring program, I imagine we all would have struggled."

➢ In a Hybrid World, Your Tech Defines Employee Experience – “Over the past half decade, executives and leaders have thrown around the phrase “every company is a tech company.” In 2022, this statement hits even closer to home as the digital employee experience becomes just as important as the physical one; with the pandemic putting more pressure on aspects of work like well-being, culture and training, at a time when the competition for talent is fierce.”

➢ How to Retain What You Learn – “Learning is a meta-skill—arguably the most important meta-skill. School taught us many things, but unfortunately, how to learn was not one of them. Learning is how we adapt to our changing environments, circumstances, and situations. Learning allows us to create new “maps”—and edit old ones—in order to navigate the dynamic, highly-complex world with confidence. Growth is fundamentally driven by the long-term accumulation and compounding of usable learning. We accumulate and compound this learning through consumption and retention. Consumption is the inputs—what comes in. Retention is what remains after any leakage."

➢ Your circle of competence: should you stick within it or step outside of it? – “Should you stick to what you know, or is it wiser to broaden your abilities? Some people may tell you to only take on projects that fall within your circle of competence, while others will advise you to get out of your comfort zone. Who’s right? The circle of competence model states that everyone has an area, or circle, of expertise. However, the circle of objective competence may be surrounded by a larger circle of subjective, and often over-inflated, belief in your ability. Your circle of competence represents what you really know, versus what you think you know."

Classifieds

• Join 50k+ smart people on Refind and get 7 new links every day that make you smarter, tailored to your interests, curated from 10k+ sources.
• Think tasks, not apps. Setapp* is your one-stop subscription to solving every task on Mac and iPhone.
• Fathom is cookie-free, GDPR compliant, privacy-first website analytics software. Get $10 off your first invoice and a 7-day free trial when you use this link*.

If you are interested in putting your tool, product, or resource in front of over 1500 creative minds, consider advertising in Creativerly and book a sponsor or classified ad spot. Find all the important information at creativerly.com/advertise.

Appendix

➢ ICYMI

Creativerly’s newest interview with Elizabeth Butler (creator and founder of Calmer Notes*) is out now. If you want to get insights into how a productivity and personal knowledge management enthusiast is structuring and organising notes, managing projects, building in public, and if you want to read about thoughts about the PKM space in general, then I encourage you to check out Creativerly’s interview with Elizabeth Butler. Head over to creativerly.com and give it a read.

➢ Quick Bits

• Hacker collective Anonymous claims credit for Russian media outages
• Meta blocks Russian state media from running ads worldwide
• Millions in Bitcoin pouring into Ukraine from donors
• Facebook overlooks half the climate denial content on its platform, study finds
• App Store users spend twice as much money on subscriptions as Google Play users
• Russia Intensifies Censorship Campaign, Pressuring Tech Giants
• YouTube bans ads on RT and other Russian channels
• The data game: what Amazon knows about you and how to stop it
• US and Europe will block some Russian banks from SWIFT

Twitter thoughts

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

Support: Do you have a friend who is looking for inspiration, news about design, and useful tools and apps? Forward this newsletter to a friend or simply share this issue and show some support. You can also show some love by simply clicking the button down below and keep this newsletter a sustainable side-project by buying me a coffee. ☕️ 🥰

Some of the links in my newsletter and my blog posts are affiliate links. Those links are marked by an asterisk. If you buy something through the link, the product will not cost you anything more, but I will receive a small commission which not only supports Creativerly and my work but also helps me to keep this publication a sustainable side-project.