HeyJaredConsider the Ant
Quiet reflections from a life of noticing—where small things open into deeper meaning.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 14
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 15, 2026
Latest issues
Apple Notes vs. Ember: Which Is Better for a Commonplace Book? (opens the original)
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Not long ago, someone told me, “I use the Notes app on my phone. Why use Ember?”It’s a fair question. And honestly, I love it, because it gets right to the heart of why I built Ember in the first place.The Notes app is a fine place to save ideas. But saving an idea and thinking with it are two different things. That gap is what this piece is about.So I made a video to answer that question the best way I know how: by showing you. I set up a commonplace book and journal in Apple Notes and try to a
The Note-Taking Trap That Looks Like Thinking (opens the original)
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I wrote about a $10 sprinkler recently. My neighbor’s. Spins in circles, tips over if you look at it wrong, and his grass was greener than mine.And the thing is, I thought I was done with that idea. I wasn’t. So I started another thinking session in Ember to dig into it.This $10 plastic sprinkler is the simplest piece of technology I own. You connect it to the hose. Water starts moving through it and the thing begins to spin. It throws water in a circle until I go shut it off. No power. No manua
Stop saving articles you'll never read (opens the original)
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Another app showed up in my feed this week. I had to start a new thinking session in Ember for it. The pitch was “Save anything in one click, and AI will handle the rest.”Ok. So what?I don’t save articles I’ll never read. I save sentences.Here’s why:People don’t remember books; they remember sentences.Morgan HouselThink about the last book that changed you. You probably can’t retell the whole thing. But there’s a line in it you still carry around. That line did the w
How to Never Have a Writing Dry Spell (opens the original)
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If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. — Ray BradburyFound this quote tucked away in my commonplace book. The phrase “dry spell” showed up in America around 1885. It started as a weather word. A stretch with no rain, long enough to hurt but not long enough to call a dro
Obsidian vs Ember: Managing Your Ideas or Thinking With Them (opens the original)
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I’ve downloaded Obsidian more times than I’d like to admit.Every time, I started with big hopes. I used the daily note. I watched the graph grow into a little galaxy of dots. I linked notes both ways. Near the end, I even had a Claude skill that searched my vault for related ideas.And every time, the same thing happened. I’d drop a thought into the vault, close the app, and never go back. Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about my ideas and started thinking about where they should go.A
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