Optimizing your information diet

Just like with foods, if we don’t explicitly think about it, we can find ourselves living with an unbalanced information diet that doesn’t suit our goals.

Our focus and our time is our most precious resource.

Just like how only 12 percent of American adults are metabolically healthy, I believe that only a small proportion of us around the world have a healthy relationship with our information intake.

Tactics

I continuously am thinking of ways to use my time better. Here are some tactics I have adopted. Please let me know if you have any technique that has worked well for you.

We must build our own great filter. Recommender systems are abundant and even commoditized now. Almost every service uses them. So use them as much to your advantage as possible. Be ruthless in muting, flagging, thumbs-downing, or otherwise signaling content you don’t want to see. Make platforms like YouTube and Twitter into tools for discovery.

Focus is a differentiator. I am incredibly grateful for my time learning and teaching piano. There is no doubt that practicing extended periods of focus in my youth has proven to be a massive advantage.

Avoid Attention Traps. Beware of analysis paralysis! Quickly narrow down choices when faced with many options (and do so for your potential customers when possible).

Beware Technological Footguns. Tabbed browsing has greatly enabled productivity, but if not used deliberately, it can easily became a massive killer of time and focus. In a modern Macbook, the OS lets you open up to 16 different desktops. On each of those desktops, you can easily open a few browser windows that each have a dozen tabs. It isn’t difficult to quickly accumulate hundreds of open tabs of different and interesting things.

But these tabs are not without cost. I have noticed there is a big asymmetry in how long it takes to click, “Open Link in New Tab” and how long it takes to process it and decide whether to keep it or close it. Even if it takes between 10-15 seconds to decide what to do with each tab, if you have six desktops with 6 browser windows each that each have 10 tabs (and this is far less than many people I have observed!), and it takes 10 seconds to handle each tab, that is 3600 seconds, or a full hour! I personally have taken this hour just to declutter and resolved to find better ways!

The accumulation of these tabs slows down everything else you are trying to do in the computer. By not focusing, we are sabotaging ourselves in other areas.

If we are not careful, we can do this to ourselves cognitively. There are so many interesting topics, places, and other things in the world. How many tabs do you juggle each day in your brain?

As far as attention goes, if something is not an enthusiastic yes, it is a no.

Actionability

I know many people who regularly watch “the news” (I quote these terms because I want to encourage thinking about it). Among the older cohorts in the United States (Boomers and older), many people actually have cable “news” programs continuously running in their houses.

I have often asked them why they have Fox, CNN, etc on. “To be informed” is a common answer. But few seem to have great responses when I tell them, “what is something you have heard from the news that made you take a different action?”

I urge my peers to be proactive instead of reactive.

I often get frustrated when I see reports of a great event online. How is that helpful to me? I wish I could have heard about it beforehand so I could actually attend!

Self-sovereign Technology

I recently came across an ad for baseballs. I know many great people who enjoy the sport or tossing the ball, but I am not one of them. This ad was a lose-lose for both of us. My user experience was diminished by seeing something I don’t care about and the advertiser (who I can’t even remember) threw money away by paying for it to go on my screen.

There are some ads that I have been genuinely delighted to see. I have been led to products, publications, and events that I would not have otherwise found (I even left graduate school to try to make something in this space!).

There are many people who have also been frustrated by this experience and looked at solutions. How many of us would love to be able to explicitly set our interests and not be bothered by things we don’t care about? How great would that be to be able to take these preferences with us to different websites? As someone who has moved to a new country and set up new accounts for local services, it would be helpful to have my preferences transfer.

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) includes an evolving set of technologies that promise to help make this possible. I encourage readers to look into this technology, as there are many areas that SSI can improve.

Food Parallels

There are more parallels with between our relationship with food and information.

Regular fasting is helpful. I try to unplug for an extended period of time at least once per week. It is during these times, I can let go of what is in my brain’s RAM, and be deliberate about what I put back in there.

Avoid Multitasking. When I was furiously coding apps in my late twenties, I would often eat with my teammates with our laptops open, so we could discuss code as we ate. Later on, I noticed that my fiancée and I would sometimes eat while watching and discussing something together on an iPad. In line with my Millennial habit of being always connected, I realized that I enjoyed pulling up and sending over relevant citations during conversations. In the spirit of experimentation, I tried to disconnect from the phone or computer in more situations, and found that I was having thoughts and ideas that were otherwise blocked by the bandwidth taken by devices. I encourage those who have similar habits to try resisting the urge to touch devices and try writing down notes in a physical notebook.

Eat the rainbow. Most of us like to consume a variety of foods. It has been argued that it is healthy for us to try new tastes and textures. Many cuisines balance things like spice, umami, and bitterness. Some surprise and serendipity in our food and in what we read and think about helps us avoid getting stuck in

Learning from the best

I enjoy surveying people. If you have talked to me in person, you have probably noticed that I can easily ask many questions and even get into “survey mode”. Even before I studied statistics or tried to build any apps, I found it important to think about how other people view the world and really put myself in their shoes.

Something useful about many social media platforms is that you can see how others use the platform. I have looked at the Twitter and LinkedIn profiles of people I admire and observed how many people they follow and interact with regularly. What conversations do they join and which ones do they not join.

In general, I am interested in how very effective people manage their lives, including effectively handling an order-of-magnitude higher amount of emails, invitations, and other communications.

I have often been pleasantly surprised to receive quick email responses from people who I know are incredibly busy. Dunbar’s number describes an approximation of how many different relationships of different kinds we can maintain. How may this change as we are augmented by AI and other tools? How can we have and learn from more of these important human interactions?

An Information Detox?

I recently came across an online course describing an “Information Detox”. I haven’t taken the course yet, but it goes deeper into the “information diet” metaphor, discussing things like “emotional triggers” and how we may compensate using information. Fascinating.

I regularly encourage people who find themselves distracted and distressed by “news” to take a few days off. After time addicted to those cycles, the detox can help resensitize one to the things that uplift and inspire. It may be helpful to write these down. Sometimes adjusting the recommendation systems is not sufficient, and one may need to do a complete reboot of the accounts the get back to the state that you want.

I hope these observations prove insightful and helpful. I am always happy to learn from others on this topic.