
Ask HN: How Do You Optimize Your Intake of Information? - reedwolf
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.<p>Ideally, I&#x27;d make peace with that fact and choose one or two parts of the Universe to really care about, but my mind just doesn&#x27;t seem to work that way. I&#x27;m not even sure I&#x27;d want it to.
======
ryanchants
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
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
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
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.

~~~
lizmat
Just for the record: Perl 6 has since been renamed to Raku
([https://raku.org](https://raku.org) using the #rakulang tag on social
media).

~~~
brudgers
Back in 2015, it was still "Perl 6" as it had been for more than a decade and
as it stayed until about six months ago. Rakudo Star 2015.09 had come out as
"a useful, useable" release which was why I tried it. In a sense, the renaming
points to how much still remained to be done over the next four years. Lots of
little things that create small frictions. And it's easy to say "Well,
just..." to each of them, and for other people that's surely enough but I
learned that I didn't want to deal with it. Ultimately, it was a case of not
fitting with the Perl 6 community, not because of hostility or anything
negative. I didn't fit because Perl 6 assumed a background I didn't have and
addresses an important set of problems that I don't have either. That's one of
the important things I learned since selecting techs back in 2015.

------
kirubakaran
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\. [https://histre.com/](https://histre.com/) \- 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.

~~~
theflyinghorse
I'll checkout histre.com

------
karlicoss
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 immediately

For 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 information

One 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] [https://beepb00p.xyz/axol.html](https://beepb00p.xyz/axol.html)

[1] [https://beepb00p.xyz/orger-todos.html#reddit](https://beepb00p.xyz/orger-
todos.html#reddit)

[2] [https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-
search.html#personal_information](https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-
search.html#personal_information)

[3] [https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/](https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/)

~~~
overfitted
Thanks for sharing! Feels like you've thought about this.

I've been trying to lesser the amount time spent on reading and listening to
news. I always feel that I haven't actually missed out on much (anything) when
getting home from a one or two week vacation not consuming news daily or
multiple times a day.

Have you or anyone else here found a good way to "batch process" news? Say
weekly.

RSS feeds I'd use more for interests. Or at least that's how I've thought
about it.

~~~
karlicoss
Yep, agree that in hindsight most news feel quite unimportant. Personally, I
stopped following any, except for specific topics I'm interested in (say,
'space exploration news'). I figured in most cases it just makes me frustrated
(i.e. how dumb politicians are, or how ignorant are people, etc.), and in most
cases I can't do much actionable about most of this frustration.

If it's something really important, it would seep through my twitter feed or
even here on Hackernews. I understand it can be hard though, and it took me
some conscious effort and time to get used to this.

Although I can't see why you can't use RSS? Then you can skim though the
titles once a week, and read the ones you find the most important. It feels
that it would be much easier to prioritize because you'd have an overview of
everything that happened.

