Curated Inputs
I spend a significant amount of time each day parsing information. This informs my work, but it also informs my thinking. It requires a decent amount of time and energy, but I consider that time and energy to be an investment: it helps me grow, and it helps me do work I enjoy.
That said, filtering and focus are vital to this effort, allowing me to glean more of the valuable bits—the signal— from the global info-stream, and less of the noise that would otherwise overload my inputs.
My specific approach to filtering changes semi-regularly, as my lifestyle circumstances change, my work-load shifts, and as I discover new tools and techniques. But along the way I’ve come up with a few general rules that have proven to be consistently valuable to me, when it comes to panning for gold in often murky, muddy informational terrain.
First, I find that focusing on what I’m reading, listening to, or watching, helps a great deal.
We’re incentivized to keep our ears and eyes open, all day, every day, so that various networks and media entities can send us a steady stream of information and entertainment. The always-on, abundant nature of some information incentivizes multi-tasking: otherwise we might miss something.
To me, this approach is incredibly distracting: the online equivalent of having a loud television blaring in the background all day, occupying part of my attention, even if only subconsciously, and keeping me from ever fully engaging with anything.
As such, I keep all notifications on my phone turned off, I batch-process my news feeds—setting aside time to go through all the newsletters to which I subscribe, the sites I use to keep up-to-date on various topics, and the Twitter feeds I follow for the same—and then, when done, I refocus my attention back on other things; usually some kind of creation to balance out that focused period of consumption.
Second, I carefully curate the feeds I do pay attention to, so that what I’m taking in is more likely to be useful, true, and informative.
This means I follow very few people on Twitter and other networks, I aggressively unfollow and unsubscribe from accounts and newsletters that don’t provide me with sufficient intellectual nutrition, and I maintain a list of sites to check semi-regularly, adding and subtracting from that list over time as my interests change, and as the resources themselves change.
What I curate for myself will almost certainly be different from what you would curate for yourself, optimally. But perceiving this act as curation—as a careful, intentional, valuable process, rather than a thoughtless accumulation of information and entertainment inputs—seems to help. It reframes this effort as something purposeful and worthy of thought and attention. Which it is.
Third, I try to pop informational bubbles when I find them, but to also pre-pop bubbles I might not be aware of, yet.
The more intentional you become with your inputs, the more likely it is that you’ll built yourself an information echo chamber that reflects your own assumptions and values back at you, instead of exposing you to the full, awkward, complicated, frustrating jumble of reality.
It’s prudent to disassemble such chambers when you find yourself trapped (cozily) within them, but also, ideally, to preempt such situations by semi-regularly seeking out alternative perspectives, informed people with whom you disagree, and sources of information from outside your existing comfort zone and realm of knowledge.
This doesn’t mean looking for people espousing extreme opposite views from what you currently believe: it means looking for people who may tell you uncomfortable truths, and who will share with you data that wouldn’t end up in your typical info-stream.
Over time, with a bit of effort, your main set of inputs can become more varied: more three-dimensional, and thus, less biased and limited in perspective.
But this is a lifelong effort, not a destination. Like being intentional in any other aspect of life, recalibrating our inputs is a journey to be enjoyed, a challenge to be faced, rather than an investment we make once and then confidently enjoy, forevermore.
Finally, I find that it’s important to set aside time to break all of my other input-parsing rules.
This is the informational equivalent of eating healthily most of the time, but periodically eating a bunch of cake, or having a few glasses of wine with friends.
Allowing ourselves to just peruse and graze on what’s out there serves as a nice reminder of how much informational mindfulness lessens the stress that can otherwise result from living in a connected society. It can also help us notice aspects of our typical modes of operation that are flimsy, or which blind us to important aspects of the world and society.
Periodic breaks from self-discipline, in other words, can help us see things that might otherwise, wrongly, never make it through our filters—which can help us improve our filters with time, while also helping us maintain habit-related flexibility and resiliency.
There’s no single, correct approach to dealing with the torrent of information many of us are exposed to every day, and if you’re ever feeling truly overwhelmed, there’s no shame in stepping out from under the input-waterfall to take a breather and dry off.
But taking a step back and asking yourself what you hope to gain from your informational inputs can help you develop habits and curatorial guidelines that can help you get more out these resources, while also adjusting the rate and intensity of their flow—making it far less likely that you’ll ever drown in the deluge.
If you enjoyed this essay, and if you’re in a position to do so, consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.
Stockholm, Sweden.
Projects
This week on Brain Lenses I published an essay about Okrent’s Law and a podcast episode about Institutional License (especially relevant at the moment).
This week’s episode of Let’s Know Things is about the drama and hubbub surrounding the opening of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
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I’ve spent the past week learning about how things have changed in the world of HTML and CSS since back in the day, over a decade ago, when I built websites as part of how I made a living.
In short: things are so much simpler and better now. Way, way better and more elegant on almost every level. I was tangentially aware of some of these changes as they emerged, but now that I’ve spent some time focusing on them, I’m agog.
For context, my previous forays into the world of web development mostly revolved around building interactive Flash sites; a standard that essentially disappeared with the emergence of smartphones, and which is finally being officially retired this year.
This upcoming week, I plan to rebuild some of my existing online infrastructure using newer, more streamlined techniques—taking the opportunity to revamp the content of some of those pages at the same time.
Community
I’m mulling over the platform I’m using for the community forum this week, as well.
Discord seems to be pivoting away from being a gamer-focused chatroom/forum to providing tools for more general purposes, and it seems like it would allow for more types of engagement than what’s possible using the somewhat outdated forum platform I’ve got set up, currently.
Does anyone have any experience with Discord? Have any thoughts on it you’d like to share? Other options you think I should look at?
There’s no prompt this week, but please do feel free to say hi on the existing forum: there are good people and some good conversation over there, already.
Interesting & Useful
Some neat things:
Dark Ages of the Web(fun and relevant to the above mention of the earlier days of web development)
Photo Requests from Solitary(very interesting project, and participatory, if you’re keen to be involved)
Standard Ebooks(I’m a big fan of projects like this, which aim to produce commonly available, free resources for anyone to use and enjoy)
Eunoia: Words That Don’t Translate(sometimes having the words for complex, specific things and ideas make them easier to ponder/act upon)
GPT-3 Magical Realism Story Premises(one of many wonderful, often hilarious outputs from an “AI” data collection)
One year ago, today, I had a speaking event Salt Lake City, Utah, as part of a larger, year-long, 50-ish city speaking tour around North America. I’m looking forward to getting back out and doing more speaking—though it’s anyone’s guess at this point when that’ll be feasible/advisable again. (Photo by Yarrow Joy Photography)
Outro
I’ve had several friends tell me in the past few days that they’ve decided to just not pay attention to the news for a while, for their mental health.
This is an absolutely understandable response to the intensity of the moment. And though ideally we all find our individual, optimal balance point in terms of soaking up information without succumbing to a sense of helplessness, perpetual outrage, or inconsolable sadness, as I mentioned in the essay, above, there’s nothing wrong with taking a breather, reinvesting your info-gathering time in healthful self-care, and then returning to the fray: strengthened and reenergized.
Also worth remembering: not all sources of information are equal, in terms of the info they’re serving up, and in terms of the way they do it.
Sources that monetarily benefit from dragging us around by our emotions, incentivizing clicks and shares over actual information (most social networks and heavily editorialized news sources fit into this category), are more likely to drain us than sources that merely provide the raw materials we need to make informed decisions for ourselves.
That said, how’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment?
I respond to every email I get—consider sending me a message and telling me a bit about yourself and what’s been up in your world.
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This is spellbinding: colorized, upscaled video shot in Tokyo, Japan, 1913-1915.