Information Distillation

While listening to a podcast in January I was shocked to hear that one of the host’s New Year’s resolutions was to read the articles on his Twitter feed before retweeting them. I honestly didn’t realize people might retweet, favorite, or share articles without having read them first. It would never occur to me to share something that I hadn’t read first or at least skimmed through in its entirety. If I didn’t know what the article was really about, how would I know it was worth sharing?  Some headlines are intentionally sensationalized to get people to read something, or it seems, to share it without even knowing what it was really about.

We’re all inundated with information daily. I understand the temptation to scroll through headlines and tweet-sized summaries to get an overview of what is going on in the world. Or to skim through a succinct list of bullet points, numbered items, or catchy headlines like:

  • “Top 10 ways to…”
  • “Top three habits of…”
  • “Seven things that will…”

These types of information distillations are everywhere. Instead of committing a few minutes to read through anything in its entirety, or to research the source, we’re seduced into thinking a few lines of catchy-sounding highlighted statements provide us with enough information to share something, or talk about it with authority.

When dealing with a never-ending stream of information, each one of us has to devise a strategy to stay current with the things we care about in a way that doesn’t consume our time 24/7. There has to be a balance. I aim for balance with a two-part strategy. The first part is prioritizing quality over quantity. To accomplish this I limit the number of notifications I receive automatically by subscribing to a select number of services. If I’m interested in learning more about something, I can always perform additional searches. Every once in a while, I re-evaluate the automatic notifications. If I find that I’m consistently deleting them without clicking on the content, then I unsubscribe.

The second part of my strategy is allocating time each day to read a few things. I’ve discovered that if I save interesting things to read later, this almost never happens. Instead, I reserve about an hour each day to read news, or articles related to my profession. I fit in the fun, leisure reading around that.

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