Mediations #33: Overcoming Content Overload
while increasing the quality of the content and ideas you encounter
In the dopamine economy fed by infinite content, our relationship with content turned to mindless consumption. The profits from getting attention bred the arms race of dopamine-inducing weapons disguised as comfort delivered through sloppy content. However, this comfort became costly.
The engagement with the content decreased, causing cognitive overload, resulting in one way relationship based on seeking low-quality content to satisfy our dopamine addiction. In turn, this behavior (also known as doom-scrolling) promoted even sloppier (sometimes AI-generated) content consumed in greater quantities.
This whole ecosystem is what I’ve been fighting against on a personal level for the last few years.
Also, I often feel stressed by the amount of content I want to read, watch, listen to, or learn. This stress lowers my guard against crappy material and shifts my aim to consuming more rather than qualitative engagement with the content. Both to reduce my stress and improve my content pipeline, I set out to find an approach.
(If you don’t want to read the whole post, scroll down to the TL;DR section.)
Friction, Inconvenience, Constraints
Before I go into details, I need to talk about friction.
Friction is often considered unpleasant. The inconvenience it creates is the undesirable sin everyone is trying to avoid. As Fatih says, “[Friction] is a constant force against you. And the hard part of it is that most people don’t realize that they live their lives with friction all over the place.” Most people are not aware of the inconveniences. As Fatih adds, “You have a single salt and pepper grinder in your kitchen, perhaps next to the oven. While cooking, you might want to add a bit more salt, so you get up, take the salt grinder, and use it at your dinner table.” Instead of buying a new pepper grinder, people carry it back and forth. They live with that inconvenience.
Yet, when it comes to content, people maximize consumption. Promoted by influencers under productivity, they apply dozens of ways to “easily catch up with the world.” They conceal overconsumption with wisdom.
I consider friction as a fundamental element of productivity and intellect. Friction, inconvenience, and constraints are enablers of creativity, productivity and quality. Learning to live with them, or even leverage them, positions us to face reality rather than an illusion of convenience. Friction forces you to find new ways of doing things.
What I will explain below adds friction to (or causes inconvenience) in content consumption, with the aim of increasing quality and maximizing growth, not the quantity. Rules act as constraints that power creativity and force us to think more, changing the ways we fill our dopamine reserves.
The Method
I repeatedly realized one thing that works: extending the time between first seeing a material and engaging with it.
The longer the distance, the higher the quality of the engagement.
Collecting in a central database
I wrote before that I avoid using algorithmic feeds in almost everything (algorithms are optimized to increase the owner’s profit, not the user’s benefit). I curate my own feed using the Readwise Reader app.
I subscribe to blogs, newsletters, YouTube channels, and others via RSS or set up mail forwarding of Readwise Reader if newsletters don’t support RSS.
For movies or TV series, I use a Markdown file as a watchlist. I add to the list when I get recommendations from people in real life. When I want to watch something, I open that list and choose from there (instead of letting Netflix or AppleTV decide for me).
For magazines, I skim them before buying and only buy when I find at least two things inside that are valuable.
For books, I don’t buy any in the same year they are published. I keep a Markdown file similar to movie-watchlist. When I want to learn a topic, I research books but never read the reviews. When I find one I want to buy, I add it to my list and apply a time test. If I can, I go to a bookstore and skim the book there, reading a paragraph or a page here and there before buying it (this doesn’t always work, as I can’t always find all English or Turkish books in bookstores in Berlin).
The next step after building a list of resources is deciding to take a deeper look.
How I Use Readwise Reader
Readwise Reader has two features I leverage: Feed and Library.
Feed: All content from my subscriptions arrives here (I currently subscribe to ~75 feeds, including blogs, newsletters, and YouTube channels, none of which are commercial media). I never consume directly from the Feed.
Library: All custom-imported content (such as random blog posts) is directly added to the Library. I only consume from the Library.
Once a day, I check my Feed and decide whether I want to engage with incoming content. I mostly skim the content (or move forward and backward if it’s a video), understand its structure and make a decision. By the end, I mostly know what the material is about and its main idea.
If I don’t want to engage further, I delete the document. If I do, I move it to the Library. It takes me 10-15 seconds to make a decision for a single piece.
When I want to consume content, I go directly to the Library section (not to Feed). Pick one piece and ask three questions.
Three questions before engagement
I can’t recall where I read it, but setting expectations from the content before you consume it alters how you approach it and improves your comprehension. Even if it’s only for fun, you enjoy it more when you acknowledge it’s for fun.
Before I read/watch/listen/experience anything, I ask three main questions. My answers often reveal my real intention, reduce mindless consumption and stress. If I don’t have any expectations from the content, I don’t consume it at all.
Before I share these questions, let’s test it together. When you read the questions below, don’t continue further. Pause for two seconds, then answer them for yourself. If you answer with ”no” to all of them, stop reading this post. Seriously. Don’t read the rest; it won’t be worth your time.
Here are the questions:
Will this content tell me something I don’t know and want to learn? Is this the right material to learn from?
Will it tell me something different about something I already know?
Is this something that will give me fun/joy/mindfulness/relaxation/… and I want that right now?
Now, answer them for this text you’re reading.
Did you answer at least one of them with “Yes”? If you said “no” to all of them, stop reading.
If you said “yes,” let me tell you why these three questions work and why not others.
I tried to ask, “What do I expect from this content?” It was a more difficult question to answer, though it covers all three. I needed to think harder and longer to understand what I think, how I feel, and how I want to approach the material in front of me to answer the question.
I talked about why friction is both good and bad. It must be strong in certain places, weak in others. Answering these questions should have the lowest friction (simple answers: yes or no). Hard questions are unnecessary at this point; they put barriers to the goal. With low friction, it gets easier to build this new habit.
Once I have at least one “yes” as an answer, I consume the material. But consumption still doesn’t mean comprehension. I have one more step.
Consumption ≠ Comprehension
In my “About” page on my blog, I wrote:
One day, ten pages before finishing a book, I realized that I had read that same book before. At that point, my perspective on reading and, therefore, my life had changed.
This is a real story. The book was roughly 400 pages, and it took me quite some time to read. Now, I try to avoid that mistake. In the continuation of my about page, I say:
Now, I don’t care how many books I read; I take many notes, connect dots, and share what I’ve found on this blog and my newsletter.
Focusing on understanding what I consume required me to build other habits that I had written about on my blog before.
I almost always read with a pen in hand, use index cards or my reMarkable tablet to take notes, move my notes later to Obsidian, and apply methods from the Zettelkasten system to connect notes with each other. While taking notes and making those connections, I understand. Then I try to share what I understand on my blog to force myself to fully comprehend it, think it through, and reflect on it in my own words.
All of these take time. The optimization here isn’t about catching up on daily trends, reading all the latest blog posts, or watching the most recent movies or videos. It’s about consuming wisely and improving the quality of the ideas or information I’m exposed to.
Time is a very expensive currency; we must treat it as the world’s scarcest resource. By limiting the time available for consumption and adding friction, the quality bar for content at each step keeps rising. Each piece of material should raise the quality bar and deserve its engagement.
The content I route around is pruned at each step, and only the content that is worth attention is elevated for consumption. This strategy, as time-consuming as it is, works for me as I’ve been trying it for a few months.
TL;DR: Step-by-step methodology
When I come across new content (assuming I want to engage with it), I do the following:
I add it to Readwise Reader and never open it right away.
When I have time later for content (e.g., on the subway), I open the app.
I pick a content and skim over it and check if I still find it interesting.
If yes, I ask the three questions I shared above.
If I answer at least one “yes,” I engage with the content (while ideally taking notes if it’s non-fiction).
I move on to the next content.
Later on, I move content notes to my permanent notes and connect them to other notes.
For the content I’m subscribed to, they arrive in the Feed section of the Readwise Reader app.
I open the content from the Feed.
I skim over and check if I still find it interesting or think that it’s something I want to know/learn/have fun with (if it’s a video, I watch parts of it for ~10-15s)
If I think I want to spend time with it, I move it to Readwise Reader’s Inbox.
Clean up the whole Feed by repeating steps 1-3.
I open Readwise Reader’s Inbox and find a piece of content.
I ask the three questions I shared above.
If I have at least one answer with “yes,” I engage with the content (while ideally taking notes if it’s non-fiction).
Move on to the next content.
Later on, I move content notes to my permanent notes and connect them to other notes.
P.S. Some of the above strategies also apply to fiction material, but not all. When I want to have fun, I approach it a little differently. I still collect them in a central database (if digital content, in Readwise Reader; if physical, I add it to my list before buying), but I don’t skim over or engage with them in multiple steps. Once I start, I aim to finish it as soon as possible to keep the story and fun intact.
Good to Great
I share max three things I found interesting, sorted by good to great.
Good: I’ve been using reMarkable Paper Pro Move for almost two months now. I also have reMarkable2. I can say that the device is good. I carry it with me everywhere. The only problem is when the outside temperature is near zero degrees Celcius, the device freezes.
Better: The post, “Why I love Trunk Based Development (or pushing straight to master)” is good. Debunks a lot of myths. We’ve been falling into feature branching a lot recently in my team and I would love to practice Trunk-Based Development more.
Great: No great things this time. They are rare. If you have seen one recently, let me know.
Recently, I wrote about
I shared my notes and review of the book The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday.
Ava wrote this post about offline gaining its value back. I wrote my answer to it.
Somehow, this post I wrote got quite popular in HackerNews. Thanks for reading!
Until next time,
Candost