- Thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this video
and supporting my channel.
Hello.
So if you clicked on this video,
you are probably interested in this here
hunk of metal, glass, and silicon
which is a good thing because I have some thoughts
and some experiences that I wanna share with you.
For the past month or so,
I have been doing a lot of my creative work
on this iPad Pro
and in this video I am going to walk you through my setup
and my creative process that I use
while using this device.
I have to say I tried this experiment
once a couple of years ago
and that ended in failure.
The iPad running experience, the time left,
quite a bit to be desired.
But at the urging of my editor, Tony,
who does a lot of his creative writing
and creative work on an iPad Pro,
I decided to give it one more go
and I must say that now this may be
my favorite device for certain parts
of the creative process,
namely reading, research,
and initial drafting when writing scripts.
I still like doing the in depth revision
and editing and final drafting on my computer,
it feels a little bit more precise there,
but for initial stream of consciousness writing,
for getting a first draft down on the virtual page,
I really, really like this.
So, I am gonna organize this video
by each of the three stages.
Reading, research, and writing.
And for each of those stages,
I'm gonna show you the setup that I'm using,
along with one unique app for each of the stages
and how I use it
and maybe give you an overall kind of verdict
on whether or not this may be worth
your time and money.
So let's start with the reading stage.
Earlier this year I talked about
how I take notes from physical books
using those little colored flags to mark my spot
and by actually underlining and highlighting
parts of physical books.
This and specifically an app called Readwise
which is on iPad, iPhone,
and it's on browser extensions,
it's basically on everything,
has me now using Kindle once more
and there is a very good reason for that.
You can actually highlight passages in Kindle books
using the Apple pencil or using your thumb
if you don't wanna buy an Apple pencil
and in the past it's always gone
to your Kindle highlights for that particular book.
But Readwise actually syncs those highlights
from Kindle to a Readwise app
where you can look at your highlights every day,
you can do daily review,
you can even do spaced repetition
style memorization exercises,
but Readwise has integration with Notion
which means that now all of my Kindle highlights
go to a Notion database
and I can put my regular book notes
in there with my highlights
and I find that that is a great process
for doing research which I'll talk about a bit later.
First, a few words about the overall hardware
as it pertains to reading.
I went with the 11 inch Pro
which is quite a bit lighter
and quite a bit smaller than the 12.9 inch
which was the one I bought back when
I got the first generation iPad Pro
and I have to say the size difference
is actually really nice.
I have not missed the additional screen real estate
and the difference in size and the weight reduction
is a really, really nice thing while reading.
Anyway, onto step two of my creative process
which is research.
So in addition to reading a lot of books on the Kindle app,
reading a lot of physical books,
I also do a lot of article based research
for writing my videos.
I was digging into tons and tons of interviews
with people like William Gibson
who wrote "New Romancer," with Steve Jobs,
tons of people in the research for my last video
and there is a specific app on the iPad,
also on the iPhone,
that really, really helped with that process.
It's called Command and it is an alternative browser
to Safari that actually allows you
to highlight what's on the page.
Now there is a Readwise extension that works
with mobile Safari so if you want to
highlight a passage and sync it to Readwise
in mobile Safari you can do that,
but Command actually takes it a step further.
Number one, there is far less friction in the process.
With the Safari version,
you gotta highlight the text
and then you gotta go to the share menu,
you gotta hit the Readwise button,
there's a whole big process you have to go through.
With Command, you simply highlight
whatever it is you wanna highlight
and you hit highlight.
That will automatically sync it to Readwise
which again syncs it to Notion
if you have the integration set up.
So that means in Notion I have a centralized
database of all of my highlights,
all of my research from not only Kindle books,
not only physical books
because you can actually take pictures
of physical books and highlight that way in Readwise,
but also all the articles I read.
It gives me a centralized repository
for everything that I might wanna reference for a video
and then I can use the back link system
while doing my research in my initial drafting process
to create links to those research sources.
It is awesome.
And beyond just the Readwise integration,
there are a couple of other features of note.
One is tab groupings.
You can actually create different sets of open tabs
so you can group your tabs by different research projects.
That's very helpful for somebody like me
who often has a few different research projects
going all at once
and when you highlight a passage on a page
and then reload that page later,
it stays highlighted.
This actually wasn't something
that was originally in the browser's build,
but I asked the developer to implement it
and they were really, really quick about it.
So now if I've got that database of Notion links
and I wanna open up the original article
to see a highlight in context,
I can go right to that highlight,
see it in yellow,
and then you know, get the context
from wherever it was in the article
or the interview.
That's really, really nice for good, deep research.
And that brings us to the final part
of the creative process that I do on this iPad
which is the initial drafting for all of my scripts,
along with any sort of initial stage writing.
For instance, I've been getting up every morning
and trying to write every day
because I find that when I have a daily writing process,
even if it's a stream of consciousness writing,
even if it's not stuff that I'm gonna use,
my writing gets more interesting.
I tend to use more stories,
I tend to use more analogies,
it just gets better,
so I wanna keep that habit up
and I've been doing that every day
in a little daily writing notebook in Notion.
And that is actually where I do all of my writing.
We've got a content ideas area
where whenever I have a video idea,
I'll write it down there,
I write down some initial notes
and then whenever we know we're gonna create a video,
I spawn a video project from a template we've created
which has a deep research area
and then a scripting area.
Now there's one little gripe that I have
about Notion on the iPad.
Well, at least one that I'll talk about here
and that is the fact that you cannot do
split screen of the exact same app
with Notion right now.
I believe that certain apps now have that capability
where you can put two instances of the
same app side by side,
but the dedicated Notion app
does not currently have that ability.
But there is a workaround for that.
Because Notion is essentially just a web app in a wrapper,
you can open up one instance of Notion
in the Notion app
and then open it up in Safari
and put it right next to it.
So I've done that for when I wanna do
some initial scripting, initial drafting,
but I wanna have a bunch of research
to the side as well
and I can independently scroll through the research
while also writing my draft.
I've experimented with having the research
next to the drafting area in one page of Notion
but it means that if I wanna scroll to see something
in the research I am losing my place
where I was writing.
So this hack is a little bit better
than doing it that way.
Now while we're talking about the writing process,
I gotta talk about the keyboard a little bit.
This is great, again, for resting in my lap
when I wanna read a book,
but how good is it for actually writing.
Well the first I'll say is that going with
the 11 inch version involves a bit of a compromise.
The full size 12.9 inch version of the iPad Pro
has a full size keyboard on the Magic Keyboard case.
This one does not.
They don't have a bunch of room here,
so they had to shrink some of the keys,
including the dash key here,
the shift keys are a little bit smaller,
the return keys are a bit smaller
and initially I thought this was going to be an issue.
My editor told me that he got used to it,
but my hands are kind of big
so I was a bit worried about it.
But actually after a couple of days,
I got used to this and I'm able to context switch
between this and my laptop
and my mechanical keyboard on my desktop pretty easily.
So that's not really a big deal.
The main thing that I see as a benefit with the iPad is
I don't have Slack on this.
I don't have email on this.
I don't have social media on this.
This is kind of a single context device.
I use it for learning,
I use it for research,
I use it for content creation.
That is it.
And I value having tools that keep me separate
from the bits of my work that are
a bit more tempting to get into
when I don't wanna be doing my writing
or when I don't wanna be doing deep research.
So that is quite valuable to me.
And like I said earlier,
when I tried this experiment a couple years ago,
the software was really not up to snuff,
the experience wasn't good.
Now I think they've rectified a lot of that.
The Magic Keyboard is a big improvement on its own,
but the addition of the touch pad here
and the touch pad drivers in iOS means that
this kind of operates almost like a laptop.
There are still certain compromises,
but for my purposes in content creation,
none of those compromises matter.
Beyond that, Notion has all of the same
keyboard shortcuts I'm used to.
I remember that being a huge frustration point
when I was trying this before.
A lot of the apps I would use on a desktop
either weren't on the iPad
or if they were,
the keyboard shortcuts were just not there half the time
or they were different
and almost always the experience was
a bit of a downgraded one
and like I said,
Notion still doesn't work quite as well
as it does on the desktop side.
You know, dragging blocks around
doesn't work quite as well,
you can't do multi column layouts.
But again, for just getting ideas out of my head
and for doing research, it's perfect
and that integration between Command
and Kindle on the research and reading side,
Readwise is sort of a glue between everything
and then Notion as my central database
for all my research and as where I write my scripts
is just awesome for me.
So final verdict.
Should you use an iPad Pro for your creative work?
Well I do think that with the pricing
on both the iPad Pro, the iPad Air even,
and then the edition of the Magic Case,
this thing gets near the price of a base laptop,
even a base MacBook Air,
so if you're trying to decide between
a computer and an iPad,
if you're on kind of limited budget,
I still think that a computer is a better investment,
a laptop or a desktop.
But if you have the means,
if you're looking into, you now,
using a tablet alongside a laptop
or maybe you're an artist
and you also do a lot of drawing,
you also get a lot of value out of,
say, the Apple pencil,
this is now a much better contender
for being a laptop replacement.
In the past I would have said absolutely no.
Now it's a bit of a toss up.
Either way, what I wanna leave you with is this.
Whether you're working on an iPad or a regular computer
or a sheet of notebook paper in a notebook,
set up your tools and processes
to enable you to do focused work
for long periods of time, to work deeply.
One of the problems with these all in one devices
is that everything is at our fingertips
which means that when we feel the slightest
bit of resistance towards what
we're supposed to be doing,
an alternative is just a click or a tap away.
So by building separation between tasks
in our devices, in our tools, in our workflows,
we better cultivate the ability
to focus deeply on one singular task
for a long period of time
and that is one of the number one qualities
that's gonna help you elevate your work
and stand out from the competition.
Another quality to help you do that,
by the way, is cultivating the ability
to solve tough problems,
to come up with creative, innovative solutions
for those problems
and if you wanna cultivate your ability to do that,
Brilliant is an excellent resource
that you should check out.
If you're interested in math,
science, and computer science,
Brilliant has a library of more than 60 courses
that can teach you them in an active way
and the team Brilliant knows that just
passively intaking information isn't the best way
to learn some things
which is why when you get into one of their courses,
like their new statistics course
or their Python programming course
or any of the courses in their
comprehensive math library,
you're gonna be immediately thrown
into challenging, bite sized, logically structured problems
that will frustrate you a little bit,
but that little but of frustration is a good thing
because it forces you to actively wrangle
with the concepts you've just learned,
use them, and retain them for longer.
So if you wanna give Brilliant a try,
if you want to start developing
your creative problem solving abilities,
you can head to the link in the description down below
and check it out.
And if you're one of the first 200 people
to use that link, you're even gonna get 20% off
their annual premium subscription.
Big thanks as always to Brilliant
for sponsoring this video
and supporting my channel
and thank you as well for watching.
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hit that like button to show the
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If you're still on a break,
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distraction time, that's not a word.
But you know what I mean.
Anyway, I will see you in the next video.