| I have been struggling with this for years now. I read articles on Medium, watch YouTube videos, daily check Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc. When I find a paper I like I queue it to to my Mendeley list. When I like an article I add it to Pocket. When I like a tweet I bookmark it. When I have time I try to consume some of the stuff I save. Yet it feels like I'm not making any good use of the information I'm putting into my brain. Many of the things I added I lost interest in because too much time passed, and others I just skim through even though I should be reading it in more detail and taking notes. When I take notes I struggle to organize them and make them easily searchable for posteriority. This leads me to ask you how you go about dealing with the tons of information that internet makes available to us. I want to call this the "information distillation pipeline". What sources do you use to learn new things and keep track of the novelties in your field? How do you decide what is worth reading deeper into, spending more time on, etc? How do you organize yourself to queue the information you want to dive more into when you have time? How do you take out the bits of information that actually matter to you? Do you record them somewhere? A diary? A mind map? How do you browse the information you have recorded? Do you try to memorize it? Add tags? Just basic word search? Complex folder structures? A related post is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20847508, but it only talks about books. Certainly they are one important source of information and the post gives many good insights, but I would like to revive the conversation with a broader spectrum of sources and focusing more on the whole pipeline and searchability of your saved knowledge. |
1. Articles and posts are the worst length for information. Tweets work great because they distill wisdom in only a few words, and super successful people have time to spare writing them. Books are ideal, because they can explore a topic inside out, whereas an article has to stop or doesn't have room to come to terms.
2. Podcasts and videos are poor for the same reason. Elite people rarely have time to do them.
3. In this era, it's become really common to write for the purpose of marketing a service or getting a job. Avoid places where people do this, e.g. LinkedIn, Medium, DEV.
4. When in doubt, don't read it. If it's important, you'll see several references to the same thing.
5. Improve your comprehension. It takes active, tiring, effort to get it up. I'd say 90% comprehension is a good goal, but even 50% is fine.
Long story short, the brain is not designed to comprehend words. It comprehends pictures great. So you want to train your brain to convert words to pictures in milliseconds. A lot of great mathematicians think in diagrams, not formulas. That way you can take on harder books.
6. Follow what you're interested in now, don't structure it too much. A lot of books refer some interesting ideas to other books. Don't be afraid to drop a book and jump to another one. I've probably only read a few pages in Tools of Titans. Mostly it's been a reference to find better books. You also know very different things to other people; the books that fascinate you are different to the ones that fascinate others.