Many years ago I discovered a set of tools and procedures that allowed me to be most productive. Since then, I have pretty much stuck with those same tools and with that same system, save for a few minor tweaks here and there. (See Do More Better)

In the past year, though, I have discovered a few new tools that have swiftly made a big difference to my life. These have not replaced any of my existing tools, but instead settled in alongside them. Knowing that some of my readers are interested in such things, I thought I’d share about them. The first two pertain to reading, retaining, and engaging with information while the third pertains to time management.
Roam Research
Roam Research is a note-taking tool that allows you to enter, organize, and then re-discover information. It is, I suppose, a tool for personal knowledge management. Some call it their “second brain.” It has proven truly life-changing for me and I keep it open at all times.
I have long used Evernote to store notes, receipts, and other important information, and it follows a standard hierarchical method of putting notes in notebooks and notebooks in notebook stacks. It’s perfectly suited to that purpose. But what it doesn’t do well is relate one piece of information to another. This is where Roam Research comes into its own. It uses a non-hierarchical method of relating notes to one another with its “bi-directional links” creating relationships between related pieces of knowledge.
Consider, for example, this note I took while reading Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self:

The brackets and hyperlinking of “Philip Rieff” show that I can click on his name. This will open a page displaying all the other references to Rieff across the entirety of my Roam database—both the links I have made deliberately by employing those brackets and others one that I may have missed. These links may have come from books or articles I’ve read, articles I’ve written, podcasts I’ve listened to, or just about any other source of information. The same is true of “psychological man” and “safe place,” and could be true of any other word I care to bracket. If I do click on “Philip Rieff” I can see that I have also run into him and bracketed his name in Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies and the multi-authored Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson, and can read the contexts in which his name appeared.

Additionally, I can see a “graph view” which shows the relationships between terms. So, for a term like “Critical Social Justice,” I can see which resources and terms it most relates to.

Roam Research also has a daily notes function which is extremely useful in its own way. To be honest, though, it’s all quite hard to explain, so instead of writing thousands of words, I’ll link to a couple of explanatory articles and then suggest that you check it out, especially if you work in areas where relationships between knowledge could be helpful. And then be sure to read about Readwise and how it interacts with Roam. (Introductions to Roam: 1, 2; as an alternative, you can look at the similar app Obsidian)
Roam Research is free for 31 days, then has a moderate subscription fee. “Scholarships” are available to researchers, people under 22, and people in financial distress.
Readwise
Readwise is an app designed to help you get the most out of your reading, and especially reading on the web or e-reader devices. Again, let me tell you how I use it so you can take that as a test case.
I read the great majority of my books on my Kindle. As I read, I highlight important passages. Readwise’s job is to collect those highlights and to do two things with them.
The first is to build a daily newsletter which is sent to me in the morning. This newsletter contains a selection of highlights from the books I have read in the past. It selects them randomly from all the books in my library, except the ones I have specifically unselected. I can weight some books as more important than others, or books I’ve read recently as more or less important than books I read a long time ago. These daily newsletters have been an extremely helpful mechanism for helping me re-encounter and retain the information from those books. I have Readwise send me 6 highlights per day and I take the time to read each one. It is 2-3 minutes well invested.

The second thing Readwise does is export all the highlights from my books into Roam Research. So what I highlight on my Kindle is automatically entered into Roam Research a few hours later. Here, for example, are some highlights from Theodore Cuyler’s How To Be a Pastor:

After the highlights get exported, I go through them briefly to bracket keywords (or add hashtags, which accomplishes the same thing). Each highlight includes the Kindle reference so I can easily navigate back to that spot in the book with a single click. If I read books the old-fashioned way, I can still add my highlights, but either have to type them in manually or use Readwise’s scanning function, which works middlingly well.
Readwise is free for 30 days, then has a modest subscription fee.
Tempo
The final resource is an email app called Tempo. Its unique feature is that it delivers email in batches based on a customizable schedule. So for those who, like me, struggle with email self-control and seem unable to stop themselves from checking it all day and every day, Tempo allows you to determine the times of day at which it will fetch your email. This has proven to be exactly what I needed to wrestle back control over my email habits.

I have Tempo setup to check email in the early morning, at noon, and at the end of the workday. That is all I need and it works absolutely perfectly. It has other features as well, including a wonderfully minimal workspace, but batching is its best one. Its iPhone app is in beta, but works very well. Android and Windows support is coming in the future.
Tempo is free for 30 days, then requires a subscription.

Grace and peace to you today, my friends.

There are just two Kindle deals this morning.
Logos users will find some good deals in the Back to School sale.
Afghanistan, the Pulpit, and the Myth of Progress
“If we’re to truly remember the world’s tragedies in our ministries, what we need to retrieve isn’t simply what our Christian forebears taught in their ministries. We need to also retrieve their sense of the world which lay behind their ministries – a sense that the world is unstable, violent, and harsh.”
Weakness May Be Your Greatest Strength
This is good and helpful: “It’s easy for us to see our strengths as assets. But most of us naturally consider our weaknesses as liabilities — deficiencies to minimize or cover up. But God, in his providence, gives us our weaknesses just as he gives us our strengths.”
Pain Will Not Have the Last Word
Sarah Walton says, “No one lives this life untouched. We all experience the brokenness and frailty of this world in one way or another. Whether we face daily disappointments, an aging body, a life-altering illness, abuse, broken relationships, or loss, the pain we experience becomes woven into the fabric of our lives. It changes us, sometimes leaving us with scars or a limp.”
“I’ll See You in Court!”
Jesse Johnson digs into the biblical prohibition about suing other Christians. “The business had workman’s comp insurance, but the insurance company was requiring that the injured worker’s personal insurance company file a claim in court in order to compel payment. The bottom line: in order to get covered, a believer (or his insurance company) would have to sue another believer (or his insurance company).”
Bethel, Jesus, and Dove Dung
Lionel Windsor shows just how awful some of the teaching is that’s emerging from Bethel. “Before I read the book, I was hoping to find something positive to be able to say. Anything. But I could find nothing. In short, as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, I found this book extremely disturbing (especially one part of it).”
How Difficult was the Book of Revelation’s Journey into the Canon?
Despite the uniqueness of the book of Revelation compared to the rest of the NT, its acceptance into the canon was not particularly tempestuous, as Michael Kruger shows here.
In the Quiet
Melissa reflects on the quiet in her home now that the kids have returned to school.
Flashback: Two Gifts You Give To Others in Your Sanctification
Your sanctification is a gift to others. Your continual growth in holiness is not something you emphasize merely for your own benefit or your own assurance, but something you pursue for the benefit of others.

God never made a soul so small that the whole world will satisfy it. —William Hendriksen

Good morning. May the Lord bless and keep you throughout this day.

There’s a small but still good list of Kindle deals today.
(Yesterday on the blog: We Are Never Without Beauty)
Do You Know Where You’re At?  
Sylvia Schroeder reflects on her father-in-law’s confusion. “‘I don’t know where we’re at,’ Phil’s dad used to say from the front seat of his handicapped van. In his later days my father-in-law, sweet and intelligent seemed to live in an anxious state of lost. He leaned far forward against the taut seatbelt, and peered with squinted eyes at the road ahead. The road he’d traveled many times had not changed. Then he turned toward his son, my husband at the wheel. ‘I have no idea where we’re at. Do you know where we’re at?’”
Where We Draw the Line
Alistair Begg: “For centuries in the West, and perhaps particularly in the United States, Christians have enjoyed being in the rooms where things happen. But now the wind of society is less at our backs and more in our faces. For the first time, perhaps, we need to learn how to live well in Babylon.”
Deepfakes and the Degradation of Truth
Jason Thacker looks at what I’m sure will soon prove to be an extremely important issue: deepfakes and the degradation of truth.
The Take Trap
Samuel James coins and explains a term: the take trap. “A take trap is a situation in which the perceived benefits of forming an opinion on something quickly and sharing that opinion outweigh both the learnedness of the opinion and even the heartfelt sense of the opinion’s importance.”
Unsatisfying Endings
“We’ve all experienced the disappointment—you come to the end of a good book, or you reach the conclusion of a great series, or you sit somewhat sorrowfully as the credits begin to roll. There is something inherently disappointing with endings. Okay, so there are occasions they are immensely satisfying—but more often than not that satisfaction does not last. When matters draw to a close, we are strangely left wanting. Why is that?”
A New and Quiet Type of Suffering
This article looks at transgenderism from an important perspective–the perspective of the parents.
Flashback: There Is No Better Life
God is glorified in your holiness, not in your sin. Do you grow in holiness so that God can be glorified? God is glorified in your selfless deeds, not your selfish ones. Do you love and serve others?

Before a sin, Satan tempts you to believe repentance will be easy. After a sin, Satan tempts you to believe repentance is impossible. —Garrett Kell

I stepped out my front door this morning and stepped into a veritable work of art. I stepped out for my morning walk and stepped into God’s own gallery.

The sun was just beginning to peer over the eastern horizon, its earliest light warm and brilliant gold. The clouds that stretched across the sky faded from east to west, from thick to thin, from heavy to light. Each cloud caught the golden rays and reflected them in a fiery swirl of red, orange, and yellow. God himself had mixed up a pastel palette, a work of art that was not quite realistic and not quite abstract. It was, though, absolutely breathtaking. “Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee / How great Thou art.”
I stood for a moment and soaked in the scene. I had an urge to wake Aileen and to tell her to step outside with me, for surely such beauty is best shared. I had an urge to grab my camera and race down to the shore of Lake Ontario, for surely such beauty is best captured. But I knew that the best beauty of a sunrise lasts for only a few moments and that by the time I woke Aileen and led her outside, the light would already be fading. And I knew that the best beauty of a sunrise cannot be captured by camera and lens, for even the most high-quality of sensors can only capture a small slice of the scene and only a small portion of the spectrum. And so I stood and enjoyed the beauty for the brief moments it existed, for the brief moments before the sun’s light cooled from gold to white, before it no longer reflected off the clouds, before dawn became day.
So many of life’s pleasures are as fleeting as a sunrise. Yesterday Aileen looked wistfully over her garden and said, “It is already past its peak.” What was planted at the end of May has already given us the best of its beauty even though the calendar shows only August. The flowers that bloomed bright yellow and pure white and brilliant purple have faded and fallen. The leaves that grew vivid and green have become ragged and discolored. Caterpillars have chewed, rabbits have nibbled, sun has scorched. Sunrises, gardens, and so much else all tell the same tale: Time is no friend to beauty.
Yet as we live with opened eyes, we will see that we are most truly never without beauty, if only we will accept its fleeting nature, if only we will cease lamenting the past and look to the present. The sun that rose will set and there will be fresh delights to behold in the evening sky. Even as the wonders of plants and flowers begin to fade, the trees high above the garden will explode with their brilliant fall colors. Snow will fall and coat the ground in a clean and dazzling white. 
We are never without beauty in this world—never without displays of splendor. We are never without beauty because God’s divine fingerprints are impressed on all he has made. We are never without beauty because we live in a world carefully crafted by the one who is himself beautiful, who is himself Beauty.