How to Sort Through Information - Not A Genius: important dumb details

500 years ago, you were fortunate to own something someone else wrote. 100 years ago, most people could hold about half a dozen of them in their pocket. This article today is easily reproducible and effortless to share, and there are billions of them.

Most trends have a historic precedent, where something gets done faster and better, but mostly the same way. History typically gives us principles, if we’re willing to learn them.

Multiple information technologies across history have gotten us here, but the Information Age has very little precedent. Each technology has magnified our information availability and increased its flow:

Writing gave people the means to share and send information. Philosophers bemoaned what it did to everyone’s memory, but it allowed anyone to be educated by long-deceased people if they knew how to read and had access to a library.
The printing press magnified writing, and the only constraint to permitting many people to read was money.
Photographs allowed us to send slices of time across the world, meaning we could see farther alongside understanding.
The telegraph made the entire exchange instant with small bits of that information, allowing us to act faster.
Radio permitted us to deliver entire lectures to anyone in a region, irrespective of price, and the telephone let us hold conversations irrespective of distance.
Moving pictures let us capture and share human existence in its most raw form, and television made it commonplace and even more accessible.
Electronic games and animation permit us to express fantasy to each other in a tangible medium.
The internet has removed the need for much money to do all of the above, first for writing, then for everything else.
Virtual reality and augmented reality bring the entire experience together, limited only by imagination.

The only thing even close to being similar is the invention of the automotive. Our minds are configured to handle the information flow of walking speed at 2-3 mph, and horseback riding maxed out around 25-30 mph. Driving a car that can easily surpass 60 mph is a dramatic normalization of what would be considered an overwhelming experience.

The Over-Information Age

In the mid-1990s, some geeks built a vast rat’s nest of networked computers called “the internet”. Once the trend caught on, every member of society on all tiers of social status could access everything as soon as they could get to a computer.

By the 2010s, nearly anyone with a portable computer (e.g., a cell phone) and a reliable internet connection had instant access to far more information than kings had a century ago.

This trend has Balkanized many established, long-standing monoliths of information exchange, leading to their general obsolescence:

Why go to the library when the book is online or on your Kindle? As of now, a library’s primary feature is that it’s a quiet place, and its digital equivalent is a DRM enforcement vehicle for publishers.
Why ask a friend about their hobby? You can find just as much information on literally thousands of hobbies on numerous message boards or online videos.
Why pay for college when the information is freely available online? For many industries, colleges only exist to communicate competence to specific social networks.
Why consult scientific journals? The information is on SciHub or floating around online elsewhere.
Why go shopping anywhere? You can just buy things online, and once VR/AR is perfected, you can even test the product online for the most part.
Since COVID-19, why go to church? You can practice your religious observance from the comfort of your own home.

Our present social trend is the Over-Information Age, and I anticipate this era will continue well into the 2050s. AI adds much more semi-decent information on top of what we already have, and a glut of ever-increasingly high-speed computers only magnifies the means to manipulate, store, and transmit information.

The Over-Information Age consists of each individual person possessing many lightweight connections across the world, irrespective of geography but dependent on technology, and comparatively few in-person interactions with their predecessors.

While information itself used to have value, most of the competition has now pivoted to a desperate competition for everyone’s scarce attention. While it empowers compared to the past, it now creates a new problem of endless distraction. The most cosmopolitan regions of the world are a perpetual, monotonous hum of inattentive focus that provokes us to be unhappy and unsuccessful, mindlessly pursuing tasks and substances that don’t resolve our concerns or give us meaning. It’s the human condition, but fast-forward.

This issue isn’t merely my opinion, either. Someone at Google in 2013 made a call to minimize distraction, and time is now officially our most limited resource.

Where We Stand

In this era, there’s a lot of information available, on pretty much everything:

The internet gives thousands of articles on almost any subject.
Most of the “fact-checking” sources are supposed to distill the truth, but they have a bias, and their information may not be accurate in specific domains.
For the first time in recorded history, our ability to filter out bad information is more important than our ability to gather it.

For various reasons, most information doesn’t have much value:

People don’t apply much common sense to the subject, or are repeating what everyone else says (which can get much worse when AI assists with the creative process).
The creator has intentionally made the information inadequate to provoke people to pay more money to get the complete information.
The creator’s bias overshadows the truth.
The goal of the content is to influence people by distorting the truth.

Everyone has a limit on how much information they can consume.

When we reach that limit, we become distracted, unhappy, unable to retain information.
Over time, we can adapt that distracted and miserable state into habitual, mindless autopilot.
We can train that limit to expand a little, but it’s mostly hard-wired into our personalities.

Being frequently inundated with information is not healthy for us:

We adopt a heavily biased and judgmental culture from many people who have extreme views that either radicalize a more moderate (and balanced) belief we may have or make us attack the opposite view.
Perpetually being online can become addicting, and its symptoms demonstrate from few to no other hobbies and adapting meme language for offline use.

Without awareness and making decisions that enforce limits, we tend to perform “crash diets” of information control:

Passively permit too much information to flow in, waiting for meaning to arise from it.
In a reactionary fit of overwhelm, vow to “purge” everything for a while.
Revert back to passively permitting too much information to flow in, with no long-term solution to fix it in the future.

Fix 1: Slower Inputs

The first part of the issue is both a blessing and a disguise.

There are many accumulated, semi-curated piles of information online. There are dozens of guides on the CSS spinner element, making carburetor cleaner, and how to make gluten-free strawberry rhubarb pie.

In comparison with the people of 50 years ago and now, the information from then traveled very slowly by comparison. Imagine the methods to get a recipe for soup:

Read a recipe book if you had one, which meant a few minutes of leafing through it after consulting the table of contents. If you wanted a specific type of soup, there were no guarantees unless it was a soup-specific cookbook.
Talk with someone who can cook well, like a friend or a neighbor, via the phone or in person. You probably had to make sure they were home, unless you knew where they worked.
Visit a library to find a cookbook, preferably soup-based. This required sifting through a paper index card database of all the books, understanding the Dewey Decimal System, or asking a librarian for help.
Visit a dining establishment and ask around, though that frequently may not work.

Now, it’s on allrecipes.com, or r/cooking, or Pinterest. You don’t need to leave your couch. Or you can text your friend if you want their specific recipe.

Task	Time back in yore	Time it takes now
1. Think of the information you want
2. Get to the information repository	minutes to weeks (e.g., library, book)	<30 seconds
3. Sift through that information source	seconds to minutes (e.g., table of contents)	<5 seconds
4. Copy or learn the information you want	seconds to minutes (e.g., handwriting)	<10 seconds
5. Travel back and use the information	minutes to hours	<30 seconds
Total time consumed for information	minutes to weeks	<5 minutes

There’s a time and place for both, and slowly consuming information has tremendous advantages:

You spend more time focusing and meditating on it, which builds a deeper attachment to other experiences.
It took more time and effort to acquire that set of details, so discovering information is far more rewarding.
The lead time waiting for the next stage of the information’s gathering/using/communication process means less misstatement and misunderstanding.
Other people likely helped provide that information, which creates the primitives for building up a community.

If you observe recorded media from even 50 years ago, people had a certain type of civility and inherent critical thinking capacity missing from today’s culture. Most of it came from increased internalization of that information, which was first inspired by the comparatively longer time between information-gathering events.

We find meaning through qualitative experiences (i.e., how we feel), but computers are inherently configured for processing things quantitatively (i.e., math). Thus, while computers are impressive tools, they can become a source of meaninglessness.

The absolute worst thing to do with information is to half-mindlessly consume it on an endless algorithmic feed. It increases breadth, but at a tremendous cost of depth.

Anything works if it slows down inputs long enough to more accurately process its relationship with the rest of our lives:

Religious exercises
Meditation, guided or otherwise
More small talk in person with others about the information
My personal solution is to “churn” the information repeatedly until it becomes a corpus of commonplacing

Fix 2: Limiting Streams

We do well enough with any set of information, but the trouble arises from having too much information at once.

To be successful and happy, we do need at least some flow of information.
We must receive enough information to feel reasonably informed about what may affect our decisions, but never so much that it provokes us to unhealthy thoughts or the urge to step away.

Learn to say “no” to more information.

Every new piece of information provides less meaning than the last (i.e., diminishing return).
When we start feeling boredom or fatigue, we must stop adding more information to our present pile.

While it’s our impulse to think of each article and subject as one thing, it’s more useful for us to imagine the information flowing through a type of “stream”.

Some streams (e.g., latest news headlines) run very rapidly, almost to the point of overwhelm simply by skimming them.
Other streams are comparatively slow (e.g., monthly newsletter).

These streams have a natural speed, based on their origin:

Emails
Physical mail and newsletters
Social media and online forums
News websites
Blogs
In-person discussions and events with others
Public announcements like advertisements and government alerts

Our intuition is a valuable detection system for risks, so pay close attention to experiences you’re feeling toward each of those domains, then scale back the flows to reflect it:

Cut out or limit specific social media or news, especially if it’s because you’re bored.
Swap out a particularly addicting social media for a more thought-provoking one.
Swap out a news feed for a news aggregation service.
Unsubscribe from newsletters and email lists you keep deleting.
Avoid subscribing to new things.
Spend more time working and less time chatting with others.

Fix 3: Mindfully Sift

We consume because we’re trying to stay informed about a few domains:

Large-scale events (e.g., natural disasters)
The latest trends, especially when they’re connected to our industry.
Specific people we want to follow, such as our friends or celebrities.

These each require a different approach:

For large-scale events, we don’t really need a lot of information. The fact that we hear about tons of unimportant news means we’ll know quickly about wars, earthquakes, droughts, and other large-scale disasters even if we’re not seeking for that information. They’re also relatively impossible to predict, so we’re sacrificing our happiness in the process.
Trends constantly cycle, and the newness of the trend determines how fast they move. We must stay trendy to the degree it’s useful for making educated decisions.
Following people should never be unpleasant unless those people could create risks that we may have to manage. Therefore, the experience should be a hobby, unless those people are simply the conduit for trends.

The constant stream of data is valuable to us because it sometimes yields something we like, which can chain us to a gambling addiction that risks our time and attention instead of money.

The media industries advance this stream because they want you to stay casually inattentive to them (more time on their services means they make more money from advertising).
Work as hard as you can to attach whatever you’re consuming to something legitimately practical.
Most people stop after they’ve burned out, but leave as soon as you see 4-5 consecutive things that weren’t worth your time.

Reading and watching content is much less effective than writing summaries.

While you don’t need a rigorous method, it’s important to do something with that information to add any meaning to it.

You must enjoy what you’re consuming to pay attention to it.

We tend to consume mindlessly when we’re bored.
If we want to remember and use that information, it must be at least somewhat entertaining to us.

Doing is faster than reading, and reading is faster than seeing.

Everything you consume should direct toward some type of creative project.

If you wish to multitask, pair up mindless tasks whenever you can (e.g., listen to music or a lightweight podcast while doing something relatively repetitive like household chores).

However, do not pair thought-heavy tasks with anything else.

To study or understand information, do nothing else at the same time, with the possible exception of listening to quiet instrumental music.
If the information is boring, but you still must work with it, feel free to doodle or something else mindless, but only to focus more easily on the boring information.

Fix 4: Create More Slowly

There’s tremendous wisdom in the slowness of speech, and the framing of society created an inherent slowness of speech (or writing) when someone was trying to present information to large groups of people. It usually took weeks or months to propagate a discovery:

A casual life improvement like a soup recipe or cleaning tip would arise as tribal knowledge in small talk at the church service, town meeting, or Tupperware party.
Since news about the world was typically at daily or weekly intervals, we’d take comparative days or weeks to deliberate on what we should do with that information.
Slower input from the prior section meant learning new things and developing new skills required more spare time practicing and meditating on tasks.
The limitations on what we could do with technology created more meaning for every individual contribution we made compared to now.

The Over-Information Age has effectively reversed the constraints:

Within 3 minutes, a casual life improvement can get 300 votes from others on social media, with a 10-15 minute video or blog post adding extra emphasis to the experience.
The endless pipeline of news, updates, emails, notifications, and distractions can agitate us into taking action almost immediately if any of that information happens to be relevant.
We can learn just about anything almost immediately, which can easily build a chain of endlessly developing amateur skills in something without polishing that understanding or task into mastery.
Information technology allows one person to perform the work of 20 people from 100 years ago, which can add value through better results but also diminishes the entire experience.

Our inherently social nature, mixed with the ubiquity of social media, have passively engineered us to perform off-the-cuff communication, which shortcuts the neocortex.

The sheer supply of information will create an economic devaluation, but off-hand information means that much of that excessive information will be bad information. That thing you wanted to say will become more semi-decent noise for others to sift through.

As an extreme artistic depiction, Minus gives the farthest end of the scarcity of our resources: 100 posts for life. Nobody, however, needs to be that dramatic.

Instead, we must all be slower in our speech in small ways:

Only hit “send” after you’ve taken a few minutes’ break.
Only reply with information that adds value to the dialogue.
Terminate conversations that don’t lead anywhere.
Avoid pointless discussions.
Keep things simple, then expand on them if anyone cares.
Focus on meaning more than impact, and let the impact take care of itself.

If you’re recommending media to others, your journey will not be theirs:

You’ll do a better job by distilling the best parts for them, since people often don’t have time or desire for reading or watching self-help, philosophy, or textbooks.
Keep your list very, very short and have a hidden extended list for the 2% who would care.

All of this requires a specific type of humility—that nothing is truly new. You’re not that important; nobody across the billions of people here has truly gone beyond what others (or even God) have thought before.

Fix 5: Well-Managed Information

Now that we’re not drowning in too much information or socially poisoning our environment with regurgitated information, we must manage the higher-quality remainder.

Maintaining information requires sacrificing your attention.

Your information-gathering should advance a particular purpose, or it’s simply a computer-based version of hoarding.
Consistently ask whether that article or set of articles is still useful.
If it’s hard-to-find information, ask why it’s difficult to find, and if there are better alternatives instead of holding on to it.
If you need to, distill it into your own personally curated library or useful web tools.

Very frequently, it’s much easier to save the information than actually do something with it.

We can often find a greater sense of meaning by immersing ourselves in many domains of quasi-understanding across many domains.
If you can’t cross the threshold to make more from that information, it’s not necessary to save.
We often maintain non-practical things because we still find them beautiful, which is fine if we know why we’re keeping it and don’t expect anything more from it.

If the information may cause an adverse situation (e.g., intellectual property or illegal content) ask if it’s worth the risk to store it yourself.

Certain nations have laws other nations don’t honor, and some nations have various conditions on how you can own or distribute content.
Frequently, only part of the content is illegal, and the rest may be perfectly fine.

Our technological tools are very effective at managing raw information:

Starting with the idea of the memex in 1945, we can use a wide variety of productivity and tracking systems to directly collect and sort all our information.
Wellness apps can fulfill every conceivable need, ranging from sleeping to eating to working out to making friends.
Even further, human nature is predictable enough that software algorithms can find intervals connected to our habits and prepare just before we have a need or want.
Artificial intelligence, such as machine learning, heavily expands on any previous algorithms’ scope and can learn behaviors simply by observing tens of thousands of iterations.

However, these tools have built-in limitations:

Productivity systems help you accomplish what you want to do, but they don’t tell you what to do.
Wellness apps can fulfill our needs and help us survive, but thriving requires meaning, which ironically requires the responsibility we may have otherwise found by not having the wellness apps.
An algorithm can be configured to predict what we want, but not whether it’s a good idea for the context.
Machine learning algorithms act according to averaged-out behaviors, so exclusively trusting the algorithm will lead to a very average experience by an entity with zero understanding of how or why those things exist. Machine learning strips away context from each sentence, which will only make complete paragraphs worse than before.

We typically trust the social media algorithms to sift through them, but we need more well-managed information, not just a better way to sift it.

Information is, by its very essence, linked to many other pieces of information. The only way we are even capable of understanding anything is by “tagging” all the information in our minds with other information.

To that end, all the decent organization systems have a few built-in features:

Tagged groups, which are non-exclusive and user-made.
The means to create more tags as needed.
Permutations, divergences, and convergences of groups, as needed.
A built-in “miscellaneous” section for any groups, as needed.

However, this isn’t well-organized enough to combat the heavy piles of information presented to us, and we need a more direct assault. We are frequently unaware of our own philosophical precedents, so we incessantly presume the meanings of words without clearly understanding them.

Clearly demarcating exclusive categories (where it can only be one or the other) forces us to confront cognitive dissonance:

Multiple perspectives are acceptable for working with the information, but only one perspective is “truth” for the purpose of organizing.
Any “sporks” or “miscellaneous” elements must become new categories or sub-categories, even if not explicitly stated.
If the “truth” perspective starts becoming unreasonable, the entire system requires re-analysis, with the possibility of rebuilding all or part of the entire system.

Language codifies how we understand, and high-quality language builds information into as few words as reasonably possible, where the meaning we’ve built directly corresponds with our intuition.

Once something seeps into our subconscious, we start developing principles, which slowly form rules for how we should live. Over time, a type of “mental automation” frees us up to better work with information.

Fix 6: Detect Bias

Learn to detect language that demonstrates the types of bias people often maintain.

Since we all have a bias, expect a pre-existing value system that misses at least some details.
Typically, people share most information because they perceive specific facts they want others to know.
Most of the time, if the tone is depicted as unbiased, it probably has more bias than one where they fully own their slanted perspective.

The true information tends to accumulate bias as stories are retold and distilled.

The raw scientific study or story is usually the most reliable.
- e.g., “a study has found that eating a pound of sugar a week is bad for your health”
The press release is usually more vague.
- e.g., “sugar is bad for your health”
The social media posts about the press release are typically sensational.
- e.g., “we must disavow sugar use forever”
Hearing about the social media posts from others (e.g., a news article) quickly becomes complete misinformation.
- e.g., “new anti-sugar cult has taken social media by storm”

The language’s tone can indicate many aspects of bias:

The article must adequately question its values and others, then point out potential flaws and complications with that particular view.
A content creator is typically paid to advance a particular perspective, so find out who pays them.
If you can, look at their past beliefs and projections, and whether they withstood the fashions of that time (use an internet archive if you can).
Examine why they’re focusing heavily on one aspect or neglecting another aspect.

If the perspective implies “unbiased facts”, sharpen your instincts:

Trust the information if it’s common-sense.
Don’t trust the information if it’s difficult to verify or confusing, and slow down to learn more about it if it’s relevant at all to you.
Learn to identify specific demands for more rigor without an equal amount of demand to the contrary.
- e.g., demanding scientific proof of God without demanding equally scientific proof of God’s absence.

Watch for misused language:

Adapting nouns to evoke a stronger feeling (“carnivorous mammal” instead of “cat”).
Adding adverbs and adjectives to make the story more sensational (“brutally slaughtered” instead of “killed”).
Beginning the story or paragraph with emotionally charged words (“Tragedy strikes at the…”, “It is a terrible day in history when…”).

Large media organizations frequently use an abundance of information to overwhelm.

Their reasoning is that if you’re overwhelmed, you’ll trust them because they clearly have much to say on the subject.
The most profound version of this comes from an abundance of poorly gathered data.
AI-assisted media makes this tactic even more powerful.

There are many, many ways to distort image, and technology constantly opens more possibilities.

To discover the truth, take time to methodically sift through the presented information.
If you can understand the ideas behind what you’re consuming, everything that repeats the same idea will be easier to process.

Typically, finding truth becomes increasingly hard when at least one side of a viewpoint is controversial.

Usually, if there’s “consensus” without much explanation, any contrasting views will be difficult to find.
To save energy, carefully consider if even knowing a competing viewpoint has any use to you.
If you’re willing to wait 6 months not learning anything new about a topic, the trends will typically have shifted, and the truth will slowly unveil itself.

If you may need to know the opposing views, consider both of them.

You’ll understand more about a topic by reading 2 articles each from a conservative and liberal publication than about 15 of them from only one side.
The more harsh the divide, the larger the middle ground between them, and the more likely there’s a wide variety of perspectives buried by attention toward the extreme views.

Fix 7: Focus on Known-Good Trends

New trends have a distinct pattern:

Destroy existing conventions via dominance in the public space.
Overwhelm the public space to the point where everyone is tired of the trend.
Stop existing because another trend took its place.

Then, after history exonerates them, the old trends with any long-term value will surge back into the public consciousness. They will sometimes become a fixed object in everyone’s mind, sometimes signify an era (e.g., bell bottom pants represent the 1970s) or permanently (e.g., the Federalist Papers).

To avoid the inundation of useless information, it’s wisest to aim behind whatever anyone’s talking about today. Unless you’re doing it for fun, following what everyone is raving about is simply too much information to consume.

So, this opens up a new set of constraints:

Aim to consume trends that have been around for at least a few years (but preferably 10–20).
When creating, aim for the style of proven trends, with your creative spark guiding the rest.
All other aspects being equal, prioritize older things over newer things.

Some people may disagree with these ideas, but everything is a remix, and nothing is truly “new”. If they would rather not admit that connection, they’re probably a technical idiot and could stand to integrate their shadow a bit.

Fix 8: Stay Practical

Naturally, even old things can become nearly useless. Horsemanship skills, for example, no longer apply as much as automotive driving and maintenance skills.

Now, no information is ever completely useless. There’s always historical value, secondary value, data-scraping value, and aesthetic value to almost anything, even if it became useless for its dominant purpose. Archaeology, for example, is the science of mostly digging up nature’s trash to find out what happened.

So, with any object, we must be able to sufficiently answer what hypothetical (yet possible) scenario a piece of information could serve to benefit us (since it always has one). Then, we must respond accordingly:

If you can’t answer it, shove it out of your workspace and deal with it later.
If you can answer it but can’t act on it, shove it out of your workspace, but organize it somehow.
If you can both answer it and act on it, make sure it’s a reasonable goal, then get to it.

For myself, I also have a few dogmatic rules to avoid unproductive information:

There is always truth, even when it’s unknowable or without consensus, and the only meaningful dialogue comes through discussing whatever truth we have.
Truth won’t contradict itself later, though it may be imprecise and need clarifications later. It’s a reliable truth if its broad-sweeping practical implications don’t change.
No matter the truth, someone in the room will disagree, and that conflict has two productive uses:
- The extra hardship against the assertion will burn off the citation. Mussolini, Kennedy, Joseph Stalin, and Gandhi all had valid points.
- The conflict sheds light on the relative power of the individuals holding that view. This is highly useful to see how soon trends about taboo topics will shift.
The highest form of meaningful living requires love for others, which considers others’ interests equally with one’s own. Love focuses equally on the truth and the individuals’ feelings about that truth.
Agrippa’s Trilemma means the place for truth isn’t self-referenced and is inherently a religious matter. We fight and kill over where that information resides, but the only solution (albeit not very reliably) is to incorporate love.
We learn most things through trial-and-error before they’re “known good”, so there will be many screwups along the way. It does save tons of effort to know what is deductively true (Rule 1), but nobody will agree on it (Rule 3).

Your own dogmatic rules will vary, but they should distill into equally potent axioms.

Most information is a waste of time, but don’t sift out valuable information:

Specific, timeless, career-relevant information
Important information about friends and family
In-person, speaking with actual people

The entire end of this, after all, is to add meaning to life:

The absence of information allows us to manufacture high-quality stories.
Taking life every day often means ignoring what came yesterday and what will come tomorrow.
We need boredom to find creativity.

Occasionally, it simply makes sense to release all of it and have fun doing something else or take a vacation.

Specific Media

Generally, all the rules for optimizing a routine apply, but each type of media has very specific methods for cutting out useless information.

Text

Avoid low-information content:

Doesn’t summarize its information within the first 1–2 paragraphs.
Language emphasizes the impact of emotionally intense experiences (e.g., deaths, hospitalizations, bankruptcies, unemployment).
Heavy on extreme words (e.g., catapulted, killed, transformed, radical, destroyed, utterly)
Hedging words (e.g., seems to be, experts have stated, [noun] is known to be)
Many prepositions (e.g., in light of that, on behalf of our organization, in spite of this)

Develop a habit of skimming text without inserting your judgments before reading it thoroughly.

For books, read the table of contents and focus on the chapters that centralize the concept of the book.
Read the first and last sentences of the paragraph.
Read the first and last paragraphs of the work.
Look for keywords and clarifying concepts, such as proper nouns.
Once you have the gist of an article, move on to something else, unless you’re interested in the writer’s opinion.

If you find big words, research what that word was, since it’s likely the most important.

If the book has many big words, it’s possible the writer doesn’t know how to simplify their content, and you might want to read a different book.

Video

Freely jump ahead in the video.

You don’t have to watch the intro, promotional content, or 5 examples of something you already understand.

Always turn on subtitles to easily catch something you missed.

Unless it’s a visual step-by-step procedure, treat it as audio with an occasional visual.

If you can, get a transcript instead.

Stop and rewind parts of the video if you suspect you missed something important.

If possible, run a cable to your TV or invest in a 2nd computer screen.

Task-switching doesn’t take much time, but adds up when you do it 50 times a day.

Avoid automatic playlists.

If the video cycles to a related video on an automatic feed, you’ll be stuck with lots of information in your mind with nothing to do about it.

Short videos tend to be more packed with information than long videos.

Long videos often have long gaps of time between new information, and tend to pace it out with many examples and discussions.
Short videos (especially when they’re designed with a 3-5 minute goal) often contain lots of information that require more focus.

Before watching a movie or TV show, grab the Wikipedia summary to see what it’s about.

Don’t worry about spoilers, since scientific studies have shown we like stories better when we know the ending.
Critics often cover themes and sensations, but the lack of spoilers often draws out the entire experience more than it should be.

Audio

It’s harder to jump around with audio than with video, but you can still do it if you know the creator’s general production format.

If you’re listening to an album, the first 2–4 tracks are often the best.

If you’re curious about the rest, they can often be more interesting or unique than the first few tracks, but the memorable music is at the front.

Only consume at a speed you can comprehend.

If you listen at 2x speed or more, be careful to not ignore the information.
A small bit of understanding will go 100x farther than barely comprehending something at 3x speed.
If you only prefer consuming the content at faster than recording speed, they’re a bad communicator and you should find a better one.

Podcasts are generally a waste of time unless your personality prefers a social experience about a typically non-social topic.

Photos

Look for themes and patterns that can exclude information.

Charts and infographics take much more work because they’re also text, so sift through them last unless you’re looking for specific information.

Forums/Comments

Only consume comments out of curiosity or to answer a specific question.

Only comment if you thoroughly understand the content, or you’re adding to the useless pile of information.

Chat Rooms

There’s usually tons of back-and-forth, so read about 2–3 lines of text for every 50 lines of dialogue to get a gist of the content, then read the last ~10 most recent lines.

Specific Content

Web Search & Lots of Data

Curate the information into classifications to process it more quickly.

Consuming the same content of one subject will more quickly educate from the patterns you’ll detect across the articles.
If you have more than 100 media items and more than 2 broad categories as you observe it, taking the time to organize the information will save you time in the long term.
If you need, sub-categorize as needed.

Don’t read things that bore you, since there’s likely someone else who made a more interesting version of the same information.

If you must read it, skim the headings to understand the main ideas.

Practice speed-reading.

Speed-reading is easily trainable with practice, and absolutely critical in an academic environment:
- The average university student will read 6,000,000 words in 4 years, which at 250 words/min becomes 400 hours.
- At merely 300 words/min, that reading time drops to 333.33 hours.
Stop mentally reading each word out loud as if you were saying it.
Pace yourself to read quickly for relatively familiar content and slow down for things you want to more intently want to focus on.
Avoid jumping around or getting distracting by scanning your finger along the text you’re looking at.
Learn to group larger chunks of frequently used words together (e.g., “there will be a” instead of “there will” and “be a”)
For non-fiction, skip over tons of details by only reading the first and last sentences of each paragraph.
However, it’s a complete waste of time if you don’t understand the information, so don’t speed-read to where you don’t remember anything.

Avoid commentaries on the subject you’re reading.

Use advanced search operators to clarify exactly what you want, then work outward to a broader topic if you can’t find it (e.g., img HTML, PDF, “solved”, “best recipe”).
Book summaries often fail to capture the spirit of what the book’s author was trying to present, so generally avoid them unless it’s for textbooks.
For an image, add as specific a description as possible.

Typically, reading through all the results is a waste of time.

For a broader understanding, grab snippets of various results.
You don’t need to finish the book to understand it, especially if it’s a self-help book.

When sifting through numerical data, learn to “feel” the numbers.

Pay close attention to unusual numbers and ranges of numbers that draw attention.
You’re catching the oddly high or low numbers, so reverse your perspective to see the most frequently used numbers.
If the unusual numbers are less than 5% of the entire set, they are statistically irrelevant.
If you must verify, filter out the unusual ones and count what’s left.

Get rid of or consolidate duplicate information.

Use the source that’s the most convenient or direct and delete the rest.
If you have several systems that manage the same kind of information, try merging them together into one system.

News

Most news is useless hearsay.

If you read the news headlines about 1 month from when they break, about 85% of them were already disproven.

Most news headlines tend to give the actual events at about the 2nd or 3rd paragraph, so skip ahead to it.

Whenever possible, avoid news videos unless they’re curated for time.

Most news coverage time involves drawing connections to other things, which should be your job as the consumer.

For more accurate news, find a good journalism website.

Save several of the most interesting articles for each journalist you want to follow.
Wait about two weeks.
Compare what they’re saying with the news updates about the matter since then.

News organizations are typically funded by governments and corporations to spread propaganda.

This never really stops, so no news outlet is “safe” from bias.
The only way to fully understand is to consume both sides of the story (where the hero politician is the villain, and vice versa).

Generally, smaller news organizations have different reasons than larger ones to distort the truth.

Independent journalists tend to be more sincere because their credibility can’t take the blows a reputable outlet can.
However, they also can have sincerely extreme opinions a popular media organization wouldn’t be able to maintain.

News outlets work very hard to trigger emotions.

People are more inclined to continuously read stories of injustice and catastrophe than updates on what’s actually happening.
Continuous consumption is in the news outlet’s best interests, so they prioritize sensationalism over journalism.
Feeling concern over things may make us feel connected, but it’s a poor alternative to legitimate friendships and meaningful activities.

A social media website is simply every user submitting information into a database for everyone else’s consumption.

The quality of a social media site comes from what people create on it, so avoid wherever most of the users are petty, toxic, or generally unsuccessful.

Most people addicted to social media are more drawn to the chance at social interaction without the risks of in-person engagement.

Look for more interactive social experiences that involve getting out of your home and going somewhere.
Generally, one-on-one interactions over the internet create much more meaning than large groups.

Heavy Content

Most people can’t reliably penetrate heavily made content because their thoughts are too busy arguing with the author to purely understand what that person has tried to say.

Every writer, regardless of who and no matter how smart, has a distinct and specific problem they’re trying to solve, which is critical to understand why they spent their time addressing a topic.
Often, the cultures of the past can make ideas very impractical, though also often very educational about human nature.

A specialized author is generally writing for their field of expertise.

To read a reliable philosophy or history text (as well as spinoff domains like economics), it usually helps to understand the culture of that specific time, as well as their perspective of history when they looked back.
To read math and trade-related information (such as science), it requires clearly and simply understanding the basics of the discipline.

When consuming something particularly dense with information, you must try to think like the author.

The medium of text is limited, so a writer often has to use many words to describe a view that would be straightforward in a more visual or practical example.
Before making a judgment on the content (and adding new information from your views) skim through all the creator’s works that could associate or contrast the idea you’re consuming.

In Conclusion

The fixes can be distilled into a set of questions, which can be asked for every bit of experienced information:

Am I consuming too much information?
- If so, turn off the valve for a while.
Do I have too much information to consume?
- If there is, get rid of portions of the inbox.
Am I learning fast enough with the information?
- If it’s too slow, aim for better-quality consumption.
Does my information add value to anyone else?
- If not, stop providing information for a while until your subconscious reloads.
Have I sufficiently organized my information?
- If not, turn off the valve, stop creating for a while, and get to organizing.
Am I consuming cutting-edge stuff?
- If so, stick it on a calendar and consume it later.
Am I fully certain of the bias of the information?
- If not, learn who made the content, and why.
How do I plan to use this information?
- Use it, organize it, or shove it out of your workspace.
Does anything else work?
- If it does, make it a principle.

This information blast trend will only slow down when two conditions happen at once:

The culture shifts to hate “junk” information, which requires them to at least somewhat agree on what’s important.
The culture normalizes sifting out the bad information and tuning it out, which involves them all being tech-savvy or novelty-resistant enough to not overconsume.

The approach would start with a well-managed social media outlet, then work outward as the higher-quality content went viral. Or there’d be a civilization “reset” from a particularly ugly political conflict.

Since this will likely not happen soon:

Opt out.
Unsubscribe.
Avoid the endless wall of “feeds” by self-curating your streams.
Limit RSS use.
Limit podcasts.
Make hard limits on your read and watch lists, or work hard to shave them down.
Find security in a community, not in a system.
If you’re doing anything mindlessly involving consuming information, pay more attention to what you’re doing.
Try to only do important things with your life.

In other words, move slowly when everyone else moves fast, and don’t move at all if it’s not worth your time.