Refining my Information Diet

Snacking dominates my information diet.

Snacking on the wrong things. Snacking on too many of them.

The new year is an opportunity to mindfully select what information I consume and how that relates to what I create.

In 2022, the portion of information I consume from Twitter and TikTok was higher than I wanted. This was obviously bad in three main ways.

• Low ROI. Too much irrelevancy. Forgetting most of what I consumed.

• Fragmented attention and the downstream impacts of cheap dopamine thrills. 

• Opportunity cost of consuming better sources.

Apart from social media being fun and habit-sunk, there are strong reasons why I do keep coming back to both Twitter and TikTok.

• Pulse-check from scenes. Most of the ahead-of-the-curve information I have accessed in the past year has come from here. I don't have a strong viable alternative.

• Serendipity filter, a randomness button. Twitter and TikTok have opened up new areas for me, and injected novelty and interestingness to my reading.

But on balance the costs outweigh these benefits. And I don't have good replacements for these beyond time-limiting and more strictly curating sources.

I would like my information diet to lean heavily toward creation and consumption of deep, high-quality material.

It should look more like this: a clearly defined hierarchy weighted to the left-hand side.

Creating Things > Writing >  Books > Papers > Articles.

Interwoven with the bias towards snacking is that I often cannot recall what I read, let alone the details within. The slapdash context-switching of Twitter and TikTok are prime offenders here.

Instead, on any given day I would like to be able to list off what I wrote, and what I read. Like this:

1. I created this. [One sentence summary].

2. I wrote this. [One sentence summary].

3. I read this chapter. [One sentence summary].

4. I read this paper. [One sentence summary].

5. I read this article. [One sentence summary].

With very clear understanding to myself of what I have consumed and why it's relevant.

Here's what yesterday would look like in this format (without the summary).

1. Published short-thought on Machiavelli.

2. Wrote a quote-article about the Ineffable from Le Corbusier.

3. Wrote a paragraph on Parenting Principles.

4. Read Ch1 of Sacred Spaces by James Pallister.

5. Read Sections 1 and 2 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Simon Armitage.

6. Read Ratizinger on Europe's risis of Culture and On the Roots of European Culture.

7. Watched the Green Knight.

That was the day's information diet. Input and output. Short and simple.

Of course, even simpler would be better. More focused, and hence more compounding. Ideally more detailed in terms of concepts described, combined or internalised.

But a good start.