Jeroen Sangers

“So what I’m hearing is that you’re trying to balance structure with flexibility. Is that right?”

I pause. That’s exactly what I’ve been circling around for the last two minutes without quite landing on it. “Yes,” I say. “That’s it.”

I’m not talking to a person. I’m talking to Tana’s voice chat, and it just did something I didn’t expect: it helped me think.

Last September, I wrote about how voice interfaces were improving my productivity. The combination of good transcription and AI cleanup meant I could finally get my rambling thoughts out of my head and into usable text. That was a game changer.

But this is different.

The difference is the conversation

With voice transcription, I’m essentially dictating into the void. I talk, the AI cleans it up, and I get a polished version of whatever I managed to articulate. It’s useful, but it’s still one-way.

Tana’s voice chat is interactive. It listens, yes, but then it responds. It asks questions. It reflects back what it’s hearing. It offers feedback. And that changes everything.

When you’re just talking into a recorder, you’re limited by your own ability to structure your thoughts in real time. You can only develop ideas as far as your internal dialogue can take you. But when something asks you clarifying questions or points out connections you hadn’t noticed, you think differently. You go deeper, faster.

I’ve been surprised by how much this helps. I’ll start with a vague idea, and through the back-and-forth, it becomes something clearer and more developed than I would have reached on my own. It’s like having a thinking partner who’s infinitely patient and never gets tired of asking “Can you say more about that?”

What actually makes it useful

Three things stand out.

First, the questions it asks are genuinely thoughtful. They’re not generic prompts. They’re based on what I’ve just said, and they push me to clarify or expand in ways that feel natural.

You can also fine-tune how the voice chat behaves by adding custom prompts and instructions for each supertag in Tana. This means the assistant can adapt to different types of thinking sessions, whether you’re brainstorming, planning a project, or working through a problem.

Second, the summary at the end. After the conversation, I get a concise overview of what we discussed. This is surprisingly valuable. It’s one thing to have a conversation; it’s another to see the key points distilled afterward. It helps me understand what I actually figured out.

Third, the visual outputs. I can quickly generate flowcharts or sketches based on our discussion. This isn’t just a nice-to-have. Seeing ideas in visual form often reveals gaps or connections that weren’t obvious when they were just words.

What this means for how I work

I’ve used plenty of AI tools. Most of them are about output: write this email, summarize this document, generate this image. They’re useful, but they’re transactional.

This feels different. It’s not about getting something done; it’s about thinking better. The tool isn’t replacing my thinking; it’s scaffolding it. It’s giving me a structure to develop ideas I couldn’t have developed as well on my own.

I’m sure I’ll be using this more often. Not for everything, but for the moments when I need to work through something complex or when I’m stuck and need a different angle.

If you’ve ever wished you had someone to talk through an idea with, but didn’t want to bother an actual person at 11 PM on a Tuesday, this might be worth trying.

What’s your experience with AI thinking partners? Have you found something that helps you think, not just produce?

Mobile phones are a major source of distraction in our daily lives, even when we are not actively using them. Research shows that just a notification, a beep, or a vibration significantly disrupts our performance on tasks that require concentration. Remarkably, this disruption is as great as when someone is actually on a call or texting. You don’t even need to look at your phone to get distracted; that little sound or vibration is enough to lose your focus.

The reason these short notifications have such a big impact lies in what happens in our minds afterward. A notification triggers a series of thoughts unrelated to what you are doing. You start to wonder who sent a message, what’s in it, if it’s important… in short, your thoughts wander. This phenomenon, also known as ‘mind wandering’, lasts much longer than the notification itself. Even after the sound is gone, those thoughts linger in your head, and your performance continues to decline.

This explains why distraction by your phone is so persistent: it’s not just about the time spent checking your phone, but mainly about the mental interruption that lasts much longer. Our limited attention capacity must be divided over multiple things simultaneously, and when a part of it is consumed by thoughts about that notification, less is left for the task that requires our full attention.

Related:

• Attempting to do two or more attention-demanding tasks simultaneously reduces productivity
• Avoid excessive task switching to increase efficiency
• We pick up our phones over 350 times per day, almost four times more than in 2019

When I booked our flight to New York for August 12th, 2026, I was thinking about connections and arrival times and whether we’d need to sleep on the plane. What I wasn’t thinking about was the sun disappearing in the middle of the afternoon.

It hit me later, almost by accident. August 12th, 2026. That date rang a bell. And then it clicked: the solar eclipse. A once-in-a-lifetime celestial event, and we’d be somewhere over the Atlantic when it happens.

Most people would shrug and move on. You can’t see an eclipse from a plane, right? You’re too high, the windows are small, the timing never works out. But I couldn’t let it go. I had to know.

So I started digging.

Our flight takes off from Barcelona at 6:30 PM. The eclipse reaches totality around 5:50 PM in Reykjavik, Iceland. The path of totality sweeps from Reykjavik, passes under the United Kingdom and Ireland, reaching Spain by approximately 8:30 PM. We’d be airborne right in the middle of it. But being in the air at the right time isn’t enough. You need to be in the right place.

I pulled up the flight path. Barcelona to New York doesn’t go straight across; it arches northward, following the curvature of the earth, passing beneath Iceland. And the eclipse path? It follows a remarkably similar trajectory.

The pieces were falling into place.

The seat selection problem

Now comes the practical part, the detail that makes this feel real: which side of the aircraft do I need to be on?

This isn’t a question you can leave to chance. Window seats get claimed early, and if I’m on the wrong side of the plane, I’ll be watching other passengers crane their necks while I stare at clouds and ocean.

The eclipse will be to our north and east as we fly. That means I need a seat on the right side of the aircraft, looking out over the North Atlantic. I’ve already started checking seat maps.

Getting those seats won’t be easy. I suspect I’m not the only person who’s done this math. There are probably dozens of amateur astronomers and eclipse chasers on this same flight, all eyeing the same row of windows.

When plans become something more

I almost missed this entirely. It was an oversight, a detail I didn’t think to check when I clicked “confirm booking.” But now it’s become one of the things I’m most excited about.

There’s something about these unplanned moments, these cosmic coincidences that you stumble into rather than orchestrate. They remind you that the best experiences aren’t always the ones you engineer down to the last detail. Sometimes they’re the ones that find you.

We might not see it. Weather could interfere, the angle might be wrong, a thousand things could go sideways. But the possibility alone has transformed this flight from a means to an end into something worth experiencing in its own right.

Have you ever discovered something extraordinary hiding in your ordinary plans? I’d love to hear about it.

This weekend, a post by Matt Webb kept appearing in my feeds, shared by Simon Willison and others. It discusses something Matt calls “context plumbing” in AI systems.

This context is not always where the AI runs (and the AI runs as close as possible to the point of user intent).

So the job of making an agent run really well is to move the context to where it needs to be.

But I think we’ve got this backwards.

The real question: Where should AI live?

Instead of moving context to the AI, we should move the AI to where the content already lives. This isn’t just a technical distinction. It’s a fundamental difference in how we think about AI’s role in our work.

The big AI companies want to create “everything apps.” They’re building platforms that pull all your content, all your context, into their systems. And the motivation is clear: they’ve made enormous investments and need to avoid AI becoming a commodity with razor-thin margins.

But what actually benefits you as a user?

AI as feature, not platform

Having AI incorporated into the tools you already use makes more sense than abandoning those tools for an AI platform. Apple may be lagging behind in the AI race by some measures, but their vision resonates with how people actually work. Apple Intelligence in the Mail app is one of my most used AI features precisely because it’s where I already spend time managing email.

Or consider my workflow in Tana, where I manage my work and knowledge. I can run AI, any model I choose, right on my task list. On my meeting notes and transcriptions. In my journal entries. The AI comes to where my thinking already happens, rather than forcing me to export everything to a separate AI platform, or, as Matt Webb calls it, create a plumbing system to get my context into the AI.

This is the difference between AI as infrastructure and AI as destination.

The platform trap

When AI becomes a platform, you face a choice: either duplicate your work across systems or abandon your existing tools entirely. Neither option serves you well. Duplication creates synchronization headaches and version conflicts. Abandonment means losing the specialized features and workflows you’ve built over time.

The alternative is simpler. AI becomes a feature that enhances the tools you already trust. It’s there when you need it, invisible when you don’t, and it never asks you to restructure your entire digital life around it.

I see AI as a feature and have no intention to use it as a platform. The question isn’t whether AI is powerful or useful. It clearly is. The question is whether that power serves your workflow or disrupts it. Whether it meets you where you work or demands you come to it.

The answer shapes not just which tools you choose, but how you think about the relationship between your work and the technology that supports it.

November is the month in which I massively unsubscribe.

My personal rule is simple: if you send me a Black Friday offer, I unsubscribe immediately.

Why such a drastic rule

It’s not that I hate offers. It’s that Black Friday has become something that goes far beyond a day of discounts. Now it’s an entire month of constant bombardment, artificial urgency, inboxes saturated with messages screaming “LAST CHANCE!” when we know there will be another “last chance” tomorrow.

When a brand I trust decides to participate in this circus, it’s telling me something about its priorities. It’s telling me it prefers noise over value, the quick transaction over the lasting relationship.

And I prefer silence.

The hidden cost of attention

Every email I open, every notification I read, every offer I evaluate costs me something. It costs me attention, that resource we all say is limited but treat as if it were infinite.

The brands I respect understand this. They don’t abuse my inbox. They don’t confuse frequency with relevance. They don’t assume that more communication equals better communication.

Those that participate in Black Friday have made a decision: they prefer volume over precision. And that’s fine, it’s their strategy. But I also make a decision: I prefer less noise in my life.

A way of voting with attention

Unsubscribing isn’t an act of rebellion. It’s simply coherence.

If I say I value my time and attention, but allow any brand to interrupt me whenever it suits them, I’m lying. I’m letting others decide what deserves my attention, instead of deciding it myself.

Every time I unsubscribe during November, I’m voting. I’m saying: “I prefer brands that respect me over brands that chase me.” I’m choosing quality over quantity, intention over opportunism.

What really interests me

I don’t need more offers. I need fewer things that truly matter.

I don’t need discounts on products I don’t want. I need clarity about what I do want.

I don’t need artificial urgency. I need space to think.

The brands that understand this don’t need Black Friday. They build value every day of the year, not just when the calendar gives them permission to shout louder than everyone else.

And those are the brands that stay in my inbox.

We all have different ways of processing our thoughts. My wife thinks by talking; whenever she needs clarity, she starts a conversation with me or whoever’s nearby. It’s her version of the programmer’s “rubber duck debugging” method.

In contrast, many personal knowledge management experts insist the best thinking happens through writing. Their standard advice: “To think clearly, write it down.”

My mind works differently from both approaches. I’m not effective at thinking while speaking. When I try, my speech becomes awkward, filled with hesitations and lacking structure.

My process is sequential: first I think, then I speak. I need to mentally prepare what I’m going to say. Only then can I express myself with clarity and organization.

With writing, something similar occurs. Before writing any text, I construct it completely in my mind. I review ideas, identify inconsistencies, and refine the structure. When I finally write, the text is already essentially finished in my head.

I don’t think while writing; the thinking has already happened. My mental clarity doesn’t emerge from the act of speaking or writing, but from the time I dedicate to processing ideas internally.

This doesn’t mean my wife thinks better by talking or that experts think better by writing. I simply recognize that my best thinking happens in silence, within my mind, before any external expression.