How I (try to) consume information

Guidelines to Self

Struggling to balance deep and shallow consumption of information?

Here are some guidelines to help you prioritize and make the most of your time.

#InformationConsumption #SelfImprovement

1. Do Long Duration. Have a “minimum duration limit” on consumption. For example, “a video should be at least 30min”. Avoid short, click-baity articles. Instead, read articles that are long enough to build a reasonable argument.
2. Do Make Time. If we consciously make time to do something, we are more likely to make better use of that time. Conversely, if we sneak in some activity into time during which we were supposed to be doing something else, we are more likely to spend it unwisely. Most shallow consumption happens on this “stolen time”. On the other hand, if we consciously make time, we are likely to spend it on deep consumption.
3. Do Finite. Limit consumption to information which is finite. Hence, I avoid infinite feeds of information, and apply some “bounds” that make the information finite. With news, I’ve restricted myself to the print version of papers — even when reading it online or in different formats For example, I consume the Economist print edition, in audio form using the Economist App.
4. Don’t follow suggestions. I watch a lot of videos on YouTube, but don’t follow YouTube suggestions. Instead, I search for the content that I want to watch. Most of the suggestions by YouTube belong to a small subset of topics that I’ve watched in the past, and, were I to solely follow suggestions, would result in me getting passively “siloed” into consuming solely these topics.
5. Do Active. More generally, I try to actively pick what information I consume, as opposed to follow passive suggestions and feeds.
6. Do Repeat. Often when I like a book, I read it again. Often, I find that I learn many new things on the second read. Sometimes, I also consume the same information in different ways. For example, I might first listen to an audio book, and then “manually” read it off a hard copy.
7. Don’t Chain. I’ve shifted to consuming Newsfeeds more like “News-papers”, where I will look at my feed (say) once a day, and consume a limited number of articles. This applies to Facebook, Quora, Twitter and LinkedIn. To limit passive chaining, I’ve uninstalled all apps with feeds from my phone.
8. Do add friction. One reason it is easier to shallow consume, is because it has a lower initial cost. We can get around this by artificially adding friction to shallow consumption tasks (e.g. block social media websites on your browser),
9. Do remove friction. Conversely, we can reduce friction to deep consumption tasks. For example, you can keep a book where you can see it. Or proactively buy a ticket to a concert or movie — forcing you to go.
10. Do Offline. Sometimes, deep consumption can only happen offline. This is particularly true with the information transmission that happens (or should happen) with human relationships. The internet simply has insufficient bandwidth to transmit all the nuances that must be sent and received.

DALL.E-2