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How to Deal With Information Overload
Ideas on optimising what you consume and filter
My web browser is like a hydra — every time I close a tab, three more come to take its place.
There are 10 million blog posts everyday. Every minute, 400 hours of video content is published on Youtube. And this isn’t everything we consume — podcasts, tweets, images, pins and newsletters.
In such a world, information overload is a problem. There’s more content than what you can consume. You’ll never get to everything you want to read, see or hear.
I face this everyday. So much that I can’t deal with the 100 open Chrome tabs. This is excluding all the articles I’ve saved on Pocket to come back to. Excluding the interesting newsletters I subscribe to. Oh, did I tell you about my podcast backlog?
This looks like a problem to solve. How should we deal with information overload?
Most content is absolute shite. Then there’s some mediocre content, and then there are the gems.
If I were optimising for the best content — paradigm shifting or insightful — it makes sense to look at the gems.
However, can you figure out something is a gem before reading it?
