information diet
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
Critical ignoring is the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. Critical ignoring is more than just not paying attention – it’s about practising mindful and healthy habits in the face of information overabundance.
Ralph Hertwig • When Critical Thinking Isn’t Enough: To Beat Information Overload, We Need to Learn ‘Critical Ignoring’
My information consumption philosophy is simple:
(1) It must have a long shelf life.
(2) It must have taken considerable effort to create.
With these two principles, you can cut out most of the junk from your information diet.
“Information, like food, has a sell-by date. Next quarter’s earnings are worthless after next quarter. And it is for this reason that the information that Zak and I weigh most heavily in thinking about a firm is that which has the longest shelf life, with the highest weighting going to information that is almost axiomatic: it is, in our opinion, th
... See more
There's no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that it was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place. I like to think of it as the productivity technique to beat all productivity techniques: finally internalizing the implications of the fact that what's genuinely... See more
oliverburkeman.com • Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket
To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because t... See more
Oliver Burkeman • Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket
The real trouble, according to the leading techno-optimist Clay Shirky, wasn't information overload, but "filter failure". We needed – and we'd eventually get – more sophisticated ways to filter the wheat from the online chaff. And then we'd no longer feel overwhelmed.
oliverburkeman.com • Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket
It's amusing to reflect that at an earlier stage in the history of the web, information overload was widely held to be a temporary issue.