Welcome

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

This week, I've spent some more time on the Knowledge Management for Beginners course. I've also tried to improve my Website. I'll tell you more about that in the lab section.

I've been juggling with many things recently, and sometimes it does feel like it's all too much. But it never lasts long. All I need to feel better is to focus on my priorities, and put the rest aside. Some people ask me how I do it. It's simple: I externalize as much as possible to a trusted system. I organize and prioritize it all in there. Then, it's much easier to focus, as I've discussed in a recent article.

Apart from that, I've taken important decisions for my (physical) health (challenge ahead!), and started moving again. We've been going around every single day with our electric bikes, which is great. My whole body hurts, but it feels great to get fresh air into my lungs and rebuild some muscles 😄

I've also played with a few board games I love. I'll never get tired of re-discovering the rules, tactics and strategies 😂.

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

Welcome to the Lab! 👾

Knowledge Management for Beginners

So, this week I've been busy trying to improve the landing page and sales copy for my upcoming course:

Knowledge Management for Beginners

Your ultimate video course to mastering Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

Knowledge Management for Beginners

I've asked for feedback in the Indie Hackers and Small Bets communities, and applied the different recommendations I've received. To be honest, I'm far from proud about this landing page. Copywriting is clearly not my forte... That's why I'm thinking again about hiring an expert to help me out. I really feel like I'm missing many sales because of that.

I've also launched the pre-orders for the course and was happy when the first pre-order notifications came in. Having real customers waiting for me to deliver is a huge motivator.

I've tweeted a few times about the course, but have to focus more energy on marketing it correctly.

PKM Coaching

Apart from that, I organized a few more coaching sessions and had a real blast with my students. One of them gave me a 5-star rating. And it made me think about the fact that I never asked for reviews/testimonials before. Oops! I need to ask it to all my previous students. It's yet another aspect of marketing that is important to establish trust...

Website

I've also refreshed my Website. I changed the design, the menu links, updated my courses page, projects page, now page, about page, added a list of my PKM articles, and more. Hopefully, this will help more people discover my content and what I focus on.

I'm quite frustrated about the diminishing SEO performance of my Website. During the last six months, the numbers have kept going down. The worst part is that I don't know what I'm doing wrong:

The CTR is lower than before, while my Average Position in search results hasn't evolved:

And looking at Ahrefs, it's clear that organic traffic going away:

Meanwhile, more and more domains are pointing to mine...

Of course, this not only means that I get much less attention, but also have far fewer chances of getting my products in front of more people. Bummer 😦.

So, clearly, I need to do something about all this. I just don't know what 😂

New articles

I've published two articles this week. The first one discusses the reasons why we should all close open loops to recover some headspace, and improve our ability to focus:

Closing Open Loops: The Key to a Calmer, More Productive Mind

Unlocking Mental Clarity and Peak Productivity by Mastering the Art of Closing Open Loops

Sébastien Dubois •Sebastien Dubois

The second article shares some of my thoughts about how to treat ideas. The cattle vs pets approach applies to PKM as well:

Embracing Fluidity in Knowledge Management: The Cattle Approach to Ideas

Transform your ideas into a thriving ecosystem! Embrace the Cattle approach to Personal Knowledge Management. Let ideas grow, merge, and flourish.

Sébastien Dubois •Sebastien Dubois

Quotes of the week

• Never stop learning. The moment you believe you have all the answers is the moment you stop growing — Addy Osmany
• A calm mind can handle every storm
• A focused fool can accomplish more than a distracted genius

Thinking and learning

If you don't know anything about PKM, then maybe you'll enjoy this PKM Primer by Mike Schmitz at The Sweet Setup:

PKM Primer: An Introduction to Personal Knowledge Management for Creatives – The Sweet Setup

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is all the rage. Here’s what you need to know to make the most of your PKM and do your best creative work.

The Sweet Setup •Mike Schmitz

I enjoyed this video about taking better lecture notes by Aidan Helfant:

I've discovered an interesting plugin for Obsidian called "Journals. It seems like a viable and powerful alternative to my current approach with the Obsidian Starter Kit. With it, you can create different journals, easily create and navigate between periodic notes, re-use templates, but also get a more powerful calendar. Prakash Joshi Pax has published a video explaining how it works in detail:

Directly recording your voice and automatically generating transcripts within Obsidian? How cool is that?!

Make notes in your voice directly inside Obsidian

Express Your Voice Through Notes with Obsidian plugin, level up your note making experience

Obsidian Observer •Lohith dhaksha

Tiago has a cool video explaining how to transform your paper notes into digital text:

Check out this interesting discussion between Martin Adams and Aidan Helfant:

E40 Martin Adams: Becoming A Critical Thinker With The Zettelkasten - Personal Knowledge Management with Aidan Helfant

Martin Adams is ecommerce entrepreneur and content creator trying to inspire the next generation of thinkers and doers. He makes content on Personal Knowledge Management as well as content on mindset and mastery. He’s also creating Flowtelic, an a…

Buzzsprout

Speed reading doesn't make any sense.

Ready to get to the next level?

If so, then check out the Knowledge Worker Kit, the Obsidian Starter Kit, the Obsidian Starter Course, the Knowledge Management for Beginners course, the PKM Library, a PKM coaching session with me, my collection of books about software development and the IT Concepts Wall 🔥.

If you want to discuss, then don't hesitate to join the Personal Knowledge Management community or the Software Crafters community.

About Sébastien

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois (you can follow me on Twitter 🐦).

I'm an author, founder, and CTO. I write books and articles about software development & IT, personal knowledge management, personal organization, and productivity. I also craft lovely digital products 🚀

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