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This week's theme: You keep starting over. Let's fix that.
Here's what's inside:
- Workshop recap: what we actually built in the first live session, and why it matters
- The starting-over tax: why you keep starting over, and the escape hatch
- Milestones + giveaway: 5k YouTube, 1k newsletter. 3 winners, you pick your prize.
- Read, watch, and what's coming: recent content + Recall.ai teaser
First Claude Code x Obsidian Workshop
Last week we ran the first live workshop. Here's what it looked like in practice:
You know that feeling before a meeting where you're scrambling to remember what was discussed last time? Gone. Claude pulls in every previous conversation, decision, and open question before you even sit down.
That "Watch Later" playlist with 200 videos you'll never return to? We turned a YouTube video into a processed source inside Obsidian. Claude pulls out the key takeaways, turns them into notes, and links them into your existing knowledge base. In minutes. While the video is still playing.
That exam you're studying for where you keep re-reading the same material and nothing sticks? We built a “don’t move on until you know this” loop: Claude looks at everything you’ve already captured on the topic from past work sessions, then quizzes you on it. Only once you pass do you continue to the next section. We even got it to create flashcards.
All of this in one session. And every action built on the last one.
The second workshop is tomorrow, Feb 19 at 19:30 CET.
You'll get the full setup guide and video beforehand so Claude is running in your vault before we start.
€100: Grab a spot.
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The starting-over tax
Most people live in single-loop learning.
If you hit your shin on the bed frame, you rarely hit it again. And even if you are a little thick like me, never more than twice.
Pain is the fastest feedback loop there is.
But when the pain is not that obvious - when it's spread across weeks and months and projects - we tend to underestimate its shin-shattering force.
A project lands on your desk, you push it to the finish line, you ship the deliverable, you feel that hit of relief, and you move on.
Then, weeks or months later, a similar project shows up and you're back at the beginning again, staring at a blank page like you've never done this in your life.
You have done it. You know you solved this before. That's what makes it so infuriating.
You keep doing the same shit over and over again. And by the same shit, I mean bashing your head against your desk trying to extract the long-lost insights onto the blank canvas titled "ah shit, here we go again."
Your brain is screaming it at you. But knowing you've been somewhere before and being able to retrace your steps are two very different things. All you kept was the destination. The map is gone.
So you do what everyone does.
You start from a blank page. You feel the pain. But it is too late to do anything about it now. And you just want to rush to get this damn project done. And the cycle repeats.
That is the tax of single-loop learning. It's not that you're bad at work. It's that your work doesn't compound, so every new cycle costs almost as much as the first one.
Us humans are short-term biased. We optimize for the immediate dopamine of finishing, not the delayed payoff of making the next round cheaper.
Double-loop learning is the escape hatch.
You still ship the output, but you also update the underlying approach so the same category of work is easier next time. You don't just solve the problem. You capture what you learned from solving it, so you don't have to re-learn it later.
A simple way to force this is to make every project produce three outputs:
- The deliverable: what the client wanted.
- The trail: what you did and why. Decisions, assumptions, dead ends, constraints.
- The asset: what future-you will reuse. A checklist, template, playbook, decision log, script.
The deliverable is breaking through the wall.
The trail is remembering how you broke it down.
The asset is the sledgehammer you keep for next time.
Most stop at the deliverable.
Only some keep scraps of the trail.
Almost nobody reliably turns trail into assets, which is why they keep starting over, telling themselves they're "experienced" while actively trying to forget said experience.
Transitioning from theory to practice: the work-session
After two years of PKM consulting I've discovered that the most important building block is the work-session.
It sounds like admin. Like overhead. Like something you only do when you are not "a person that is too busy to do this".
But I didn't arrive at this because I wanted to be tidy. I arrived at it by pressure testing my system and looking for the natural laws of note-taking.
I read the classics: Getting Things Done, Building a Second Brain, How to Take Smart Notes, Atomic Note Taking, The Notebook.
One of those made me cry and it wasn't the one about Zettelkasten.
All these books do the same annoying thing. Hundreds of pages of build-up and yearning. They get painfully close. And not one of them just comes out and says it.
So allow me:
Document the work.
(Noah wrote 365 letters. Spoiler: He got the girl.)
The quickest way to stop bashing your shin on the same damn bed corner, to get to double-loop learning, to get the girl, is this:
Meetings. Study sessions. Lectures. Calls. The hour where you actually push the project forward. That is where the trail is born. That is where the raw material for future assets is forged.
This is where you already start to work on the projects that don't even exist yet.
This is the ultimate gift to future you.
Be generous.
Celebrating milestones and giveaway
I don't take a lot of time to celebrate milestones.
But something about round numbers made me stop for a split second.
(almost) 5,000 YouTube subscribers. 1,000 newsletter subscribers.
I quit my day job to pursue this little business of mine because it aligned with the way I actually wanted to live my life.
The reason I first got interested in these tools was to learn things quicker. I love learning and getting good at a lot of different things. My curiosity requires it.
And somehow I found the niche where all of this overlaps - the tools, the curiosity, the teaching.
I'm learning faster than I ever expected, and I'm lucky enough to teach others how to use these tools to make for an insanely enjoyable life.
This is not just for productivity.
This is not just to squeeze more into your day.
This is to squeeze the lemon of life dry.
Leave nothing on the table.
I want more people to get to this state where you're not weighed down by the unnecessary admin of life: tasks and project management, remembering, grocery lists, relationship management.
So to celebrate, I want to give a little back. I'm picking 3 winners, and each gets to choose one:
- Claude Code + Obsidian Workshop (€100)
- Study Course (€250)
- Demo Vault (€150)
- 1-hour consulting call (€150)
- 3-session build (€750)
First winner (fastest reply) gets first pick. For the other two, I’ll use the birds outside my window to pick names from the reply list. I wish I was joking.
Reply to this email with:
- What tools are you currently using?
- What's your main use case: work, studying, personal, all of the above?
- What's the one thing that still frustrates you?
Read, Watch, and What's Coming
Read and Watch:
A collaboration with Recall.ai. I've been letting every source straight into my vault and it's getting noisy. Recall sits in front of Obsidian as a filter. It catches everything, summarizes it, connects it, and only what earns its place makes it into the vault. Plus it turns your saved content into quizzes with spaced repetition. More on this soon.
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Until next week,
Strength and Honour,
Dee
Construct By Dee - Website
P.S. Stop typing. The keyboard is dead.
wisprflow.ai
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