[usmur]

I am the OP of the post.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the result and can't decide whether it's a case of ‘writer's perfectionism’ (=overthinking it).

That said, I decided to publish it anyway because I believe it contains useful information ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°). Otherwise, I might have fallen into an endless loop of trying to perfect it and never actually posting it.

BTW: I prefer harsh (but constructive) criticism over encouragement.

[latexr]

I abandoned the post halfway and was simply going to move on to something else, but then read this comment and went back to read the rest and give it a fair shot.

I found it incredibly boring, repetitive, and unoriginal. It’s just yet another flawed post in a long tail of posts about useless remembering which could make its point in one fifth the length. It’s a post for fans of Cal Newport who want to force themselves to be someone they’ll never be because they define their self worth by how productive they are.

> Listening to a podcast isn’t encoding, reading a book isn’t encoding, watching Netflix isn’t encoding...

> You need to get your hands dirty to encode seriously

> Take notes, write down why you liked it, and reflect on what you’ve learned.

> Don’t be an average TikTok scroller!

Or, you know, relax and enjoy yourself for a little bit. Unless you’re preparing an essay on a piece of media, which almost no one is, it’s fine to just consume it, have some initial feelings, maybe verbally share them with a friend for a laugh or insightful discussion, and carry on. That can be more useful and enriching than “encoding” the information for later retrieval.

Yes, too much mindless consumption is bad for you. But the answer is not to take notes and reflect on anything that comes into your head.

I used to “encode” what I consumed. I have copious notes, insights, and ideas written down. I rarely look at them or remember they exist. Most have become uninteresting to me when I go back to them months or years later. The ones which are still interesting, I rarely act on. They’re clutter. Yet there are powerful insights I never wrote down but internalised without effort and that continue to be useful. Here’s one, which I found to be absolutely true for me:

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

[usmur]

Thank you very much for taking the time to read the post and comment.

I still have to calibrate the right length of the posts. At the moment I have tried to stay on 1600 words which is considered a sweet spot on Substack. In this sense I probably got too hung up on this number by adding more detail than I should have and ended up making the post boring.

Perhaps I failed to convey this correctly, but the post does not say NOT to relax and enjoy a media EVER. The intention was to explain a general outline to the optimal learning method, which is to be applied when one wants to learn (what I call ‘usable’ information).

Rather than for fans of Cal Newport, it is more aimed at fans of Nick Milo and Tiago Forte, let's say in general of the PKM world.

[latexr]

> At the moment I have tried to stay on 1600 words which is considered a sweet spot on Substack. In this sense I probably got too hung up on this number by adding more detail than I should have and ended up making the post boring.

I once read a blog post that stayed with me. I don’t remember the author, I took no notes on it, and I’m struggling to find it to link you to it. Yet it was so powerful I can paraphrase all of it, in its entirety, right now:

“There is no rule that says a blog post has to have more than one idea or more than one sentence.”

Perfect.