Ask HN: How Do You Optimize Your Intake of Information?

35 点作者 reedwolf大约 5 年前

As someone with varied interests, I feel myself being pulled in a thousand different directions of things I want to know more about. This leads to a sense of anxiety and dread as I realize life is much too short to pursue all my interests.Ideally, I'd make peace with that fact and choose one or two parts of the Universe to really care about, but my mind just doesn't seem to work that way. I'm not even sure I'd want it to.

6 条评论

ryanchants大约 5 年前

General interest/articles/websites: I choose a few aggregate newsletters, a few specialist pages, and combine them all via RSS. I use NewsBlur as my reader, and kill-the-newsletter to convert subscription newsletters into RSS feeds. This gives me one place to check a few times each day, rather than constantly checking the sites individually.Books: I have a To Read list on my public library account where I keep track of books I want to read. Normally when I'm at the library I'll check to see which of those is available(a feature of their webapp) and grab a few.News: I subscribe to Up First by NPR and PBS NewHour podcasts. This gives me a little over an hour of news each day, 10-15 minutes in the morning and an hour in the evening. This keeps me in the loop without feeling like I need to constantly be reading more.Social Media: I only use instagram, and I only follow my friends and artists/craftspeople that work in media that I have personal interest.Takeaway: I built a source of inputs that I value and lean heavily on those. Essentially, I have a small pool of information to consume, rather than drown in the ocean of what's available. I also routinely prune all of these sources, adding a few and removing a few.

gitgud大约 5 年前

This question resonates with me, as I feel the same internal conflict as you. There's so much I want to do and learn, but I know I can literally never do it all... Which can just feel overwhelming at times.What has helped me, is to accept to accept that we only have a few years in this life, figure out what actually matters to you and do that.If optimising the intake of information is what matters to you, then do that!

tmaly大约 5 年前

I still rely on books written by subject matter experts. Books are still the most dense for of knowledge, so you really get a good bang for your buck.If you more general news type information, I would recommend a newsletter. They aggregate and summarize the information for.

brudgers大约 5 年前

In late 2015, I wondered what it would be like to spend six months learning a single "tech" instead of flittering around. The wondering occurred in my journal -- I journal -- and I started listing candidates. The list grew longer over several entries and eventually got up to 57 "techs" as candidates.My first thought was to pick something new so I "would be ahead in the game." In one or the other order I tried Perl 6 and Elm. Perl 6 lacked a coherent set of systematic resources at the time and Elm was then so unstable that tutorials fell apart within a few minutes of the most basic 'Hello World.'I regrouped and decided to avoid the cutting edge and started thinking about learning things that are extremely stable instead. For me, these were Emacs, Linux, and Javascript. Javascript because I had been avoiding it (hence Elm); Emacs and Linux because I was using them all the time.It's true I don't spend a lot of time learning Javascript, Emacs, and Linux these days. What happened was I learned enough of each that it's easier to learn more if I need to for example, sometimes I start with the man page before Googling and other times I stop Googling and just read the man page.I'm not recommending Javascript, Emacs, and Linux per se. But what they gave me was a framework for deciding what to learn. It has to be worth spending a year with. It has to be small enough to fit in one person's head from scratch -- a small head in my case. Team sized technologies are out of the running.To put it another way, I focused on learning "techs" I could live with. And one of the ways of recognizing those "techs" was that I was already living with them and that was in part because they had long lives. Sometimes I was using them already.

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kirubakaran大约 5 年前

I struggle with this too. So much to learn, so little time! Here is what I've been doing to cope with that feeling:1. I prefer books as the source of information, rather than materials online. This gives me structure, and stops me from jumping around like a highly caffeinated monkey. I can sit with a book and progressively relax and get deeper and deeper into a subject.2. <a href="https://histre.com/" rel="nofollow">https://histre.com/</a> - It's an automatic knowledge base that I'm building, and it helps me relax that nothing important will be lost. Links I browse are saved and can be easily found later. I also tag links, so that I can batch process related information later. I'm working on automatic tagging by subject.3. Mindfulness Meditation. It helps me let go of the grasping. When there is mental churn, I sit with that and watch that feeling. I feel calmer and I'm able to work in a more relaxed, efficient manner.

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karlicoss大约 5 年前

I feel the same. So many cool things I'd love to learn about, but not enough time.I try not to cut myself off the information, but instead I change the way I process it and interact with:1. Minimize the time spent discovering the information.Obvious step here is using RSS so you can read about interesting stuff when you feel like it, not when it appears in your news feed.Another thing I'm doing is setting up search alerts for topics that interest me, so I can look at them once in a while (e.g. once in two weeks), skim through and bookmark the most promising ones for reading later. I'm using a tool I wrote myself that can search over hackernews, reddit, twitter, github, etc. for topics that interest me and convert to RSS feeds. It's kinda like Google search alerts, but nicer. I haven't documented it properly yet though, but started it here [0].2. Prioritize reading, don't read immediatelyFor example, I would only read Reddit once a week, going through the weekly top (and all of new posts for some select subreddits). On the first pass, I only bookmark stuff, I don't read it immediately (unless it's something really exceptional, or it makes sense to comment as soon as possibile). Another benefit is that I can also do it on the go, without spending mental resources on proper reading.Now and then I would go through the list of saved items, and choose what I want to read next. That way it doesn't feel like I'm missing out on anything, I'm aware of the information and can find it in in case I want to catch up later.Most apps offer a pretty horrible experience for such workflow (i.e. you can't put priorities/reorder/search), so I've got my own workflow using org-mode to process the information. That way I can also leave comments, or refile it in my knowledge base immediately. I'm describing it in more details here [1]3. Make it easy to find informationOne big thing that reduces my FOMO is knowing that I can instantly find whatever interests me on my filesystem when I need it. I describe my system and setup here [2]. You can also get a glimplse at the public part of my wiki/knowledge base here [3][0] <a href="https://beepb00p.xyz/axol.html" rel="nofollow">https://beepb00p.xyz/axol.html</a>[1] <a href="https://beepb00p.xyz/orger-todos.html#reddit" rel="nofollow">https://beepb00p.xyz/orger-todos.html#reddit</a>[2] <a href="https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#personal_information" rel="nofollow">https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#personal_information</a>[3] <a href="https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/" rel="nofollow">https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/</a>

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