Efficient Information Management - How to Filter Information

I particularly like a term called “digital literacy”. Mark Hurst, the proposer of the “user experience” concept and best-selling author, refers to it as “productivity in the era of information overload”. There’s a very classic statement in his book:

People are more inclined to attribute personal failures to external causes, and the explosion of information and rapidly changing technology become convenient excuses. Only by stripping off this cloak of “excuse” and returning information and technology to their roles as tools can their power be fully utilized for human use.

To put it more bluntly, the harsh truth about information anxiety is: it’s not just about technology, tools, and the internet, ultimately it boils down to the individual’s lack of information management capabilities.

The media and service providers of information are constantly changing. Are you becoming a more and more proficient information management expert, or are you being swept along by one internet product after another, using the same old methods, being consumed by more and more apps, spending increasingly scarce time, and mired in the quagmire of information?

Build Your Own “Exclusive Intelligence Team”

In this era, “more” is increasingly not an advantage, but has become the main cause of people’s anxiety. The ideal state of “processing all information” is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. Those who peddle information are trying all means to make you feel that this information is especially important, must be understood, must be learned. However, we all know that resources are limited, most people can only process non-work information for maybe 2-3 hours a day. “Life is limited while knowledge is infinite” is a timeless dilemma we can’t escape.

In fact, mankind has created many good ways to solve this problem. We don’t need to start from scratch, to reinvent the wheel, but just need to emulate, and try to transform and optimize with modern tools such as Evernote, read-it-later tools, task management tools, mind mapping tools, etc.

Speaking of which, what are some proven, practical methods that we can draw upon? The answer is: “The Intelligence Team”.

We know that the higher the level of leadership in the government, the broader the field they oversee, and the more information they have to process each day. But the leader’s time is limited, and it’s impossible to read all the information line by line. That would make decision-making too inefficient. Therefore, in most agencies, there is a dedicated team responsible for “providing carefully selected important information to the leadership”. With a few documents each day, the leaders can understand the important events happening at the moment in the shortest possible time. This group that provides information services specifically for leaders is called: the internal reference team.

In fact, not only in government agencies, but many companies have also set up similar departments to provide information intelligence services for senior management. For example, Li Ka-shing spends time every day after getting up and playing golf to browse information, and a project team assists him in screening and translation work, ensuring that he can grasp the overall situation and master the core data in the shortest possible time.

In the present, we haven’t had the chance to become leaders yet, nor do we have as much money as Li Ka-shing, but the amount of information we face is no less than theirs. So, for us who can’t afford to hire an intelligence team, as young people in the digital age, do we just face the “ferocious” information helplessly?

Of course not. Through modern tools and methods, you can also build an efficient information screening mechanism, and enjoy the exclusive internal reference level services that only leaders and entrepreneurs can enjoy at a low cost. In other words, these excellent tools and methods are our exclusive intelligence

team.

Next, I will introduce you to 4 simple and easy-to-use good methods.

Method One: Be Ruthless, Clean Up Your Subscription List

Building an intelligence team with tools is not a one-time thing. Don’t expect to have a perfect and efficient information screening system after adjusting for a day or two. In fact, even the real-life intelligence team is dynamically adjusted with time, with additions and definitely deletions.

However, I find that many friends around me have downloaded many Apps indiscriminately, subscribed to one blogger and up host after another, bought several knowledge paid products, and then, they can’t bear to throw any of them away. They fall into the endless information flow created by these information sources and never get out.

Actually, most people’s problem boils down to “caring too much” and “fearing loss”. The solution is also particularly simple: “Be ready to unfollow, unsubscribe, and block at any time.” In other words, you need to consciously “train” your information sources and be ruthless.

Let’s take Facebook as an example. Some people use Facebook purely as a social tool, liking and commenting, maintaining relationships. Some people use Facebook as an important way to acquire information. However, many people find that when the number of friends added reaches a certain amount, the quality of the information flow gets worse and worse. Not only can they not get valuable information, but they feel even more anxious after scrolling through.

Actually, you still have the initiative. You only need to do one thing: every time you scroll through the information flow, once you find the garbage information for you, don’t just swipe past it, click on the person’s avatar, browse their recent 5 pieces of information. If you find they are all ads, motivational quotes or other information that has nothing to do with you, don’t hesitate, block them.

The same method can be used on various platforms like RSS, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. to establish such a “elimination” mechanism. You need to protect your information timeline like you’re defending your territory. Once you see spam text messages, spam emails, low-quality articles, and uninteresting information, don’t just swipe past them and endure them. Don’t bear it, get rid of it directly! Otherwise, they will eat away at your time like termites, without end.

Method Two: Proactively Intervene, Achieve Fine-tuned Information Management

Apart from the blunt methods of unfollowing and unsubscribing, sometimes we encounter more complex situations. For instance, you follow a blogger on Weibo, whose usual content is of high quality, but they’ve recently been promoting a variety show every day. You want to temporarily mute them for a month. Maybe you follow many tech bloggers, but you’re not interested in the Android and Windows system updates they share and don’t want to see related content. Perhaps a certain topic is currently hot, and you don’t want to waste time on this social issue. Many of these tailored information needs can be met with the tools available today.

Additionally, RSS subscription tools such as Feedly and Inoreader offer powerful keyword filtering features. You can also try Flipboard and other moderately customizable information aggregation tools, which have preset mechanisms to provide you with a better information filtering experience.

Besides these methods, which rely more on following specific content providers to get news, platforms like TikTok are also increasingly mainstream, pushing information to you based on big data and algorithms. Of course, I remain cautious about this. But what I want to share is: Even TikTok does not keep its algorithms entirely in a black box without giving you any opportunity to interfere. It provides quite user-friendly mechanisms for adjusting your information sources.

If you adjust these settings patiently for a while, I believe that TikTok is fully capable of becoming a primary channel for obtaining information.

One thing that needs to be particularly emphasized is: Information source management requires effort, they won’t naturally optimize. You can’t follow a bunch of celebrity gossip accounts, open only funny videos every day, and then turn around and complain that the information pushed online is lacking in substance.

You might ask, isn’t it just reading online news? Is it necessary to go to all this trouble?

There is a viewpoint:
A person can only process 7 units of information at a time, and the minimum interval for attention switching is 1/18th of a second. Assuming a person lives to be 70 years old and is awake for 16 hours a day, the total amount of information processed in their lifetime is 185GB. This 185GB is the sum of our lives, less than the capacity of a mainstream hard drive, it needs to be used wisely.
With a total of just 185GB in our lives, the information we can process each day is even more limited. Even if we never sleep, the information we can process in our lifetime is just that much. So, at the end of the day, collecting information is, strictly speaking, a reasonable distribution of limited resources. If you can’t bear to miss out, you’ll not only waste time on low-quality information but also miss the opportunity to read content that truly has value.
So don’t hesitate, start building a basic awareness now: Anytime, anywhere, be ready to unfollow, delete, unsubscribe, and block to train your “internal reference team”.

Method Three: Design Your “Minimal Reading List”

We talked earlier about being ready to unfollow at any time, to establish higher quality information sources. However, no matter how strict you are, without massively sacrificing work and family time, it’s difficult to read every piece of content that interests you.
Therefore, you must find a way, under the premise of limited time, limited resources, and the inability to read all content, to establish an effective mechanism to handle top-quality content. It sounds a bit complicated, but simply put, it means one thing: Design a strictly prioritized reading order. Rely on this order to get rid of all uncertainty and define your own “minimal reading list”.

In these carefully selected high-quality information sources, at least two main categories should be distinguished: a must-read list and a selective reading list. As the name implies, the content on the must-read list is your primary reading priority. This should closely match your available reading time. This not only includes the time for quickly scanning most of the information here but also these information sources should be able to contribute 3 to 10 high-quality articles for deep reading each day, helping you keep up to date with essential knowledge.

Designing your “minimum reading list” is not an easy task, like “evolution”, this too involves a brutal process of “survival of the fittest”. Your once-beloved podcast might have to be ignored because you bought an online course that costs hundreds and thus have no time to listen for three months. Many people feel anxious and torn in this situation. Don’t be. Information processing involves costs, which ultimately boils down to a structural issue. Most of the time, it’s a matter of survival of the fittest. Among the motivational writers, success gurus, second-hand knowledge piecers, seasoned industry experts, counselors with 10 years of experience, and Nobel prize-winning professors at Stanford, adjust your list based on your current research topic and optimize the cost structure of information acquisition.

For all other information sources, adopt the “if I can’t finish reading, then so be it” strategy. Remember, only these must-read information sources should create a certain amount of anxiety in you. Moreover, if you find that you can’t achieve all your reading goals for a whole week, then adjust drastically to a quantity you can accept at this stage. Be realistic in this matter. Let’s repeat:

Most online information really isn’t that important. I encourage you to establish a robust information intake mechanism, but it should not become your information burden. They are not your mandatory work or study tasks. Reading should be enjoyable, without stress.

The RSS reading tool Inoreader I mentioned earlier also supports grouping. Therefore, we have set up a “minimum reading list” on all information acquisition platforms, which together become our most stable provider of high-quality information every day.
Besides content preferences, you can also choose the frequency of information updates according to your situation. For instance, I subscribed to Product Hunt’s Newsletter, but I found the pressure of checking their daily messages too great. So, after several weeks, I adjusted it to a weekly newsletter, which significantly reduced my reading pressure.

Method Four: Choose the compression ratio of information based on ranking

Once you’ve ranked your information sources, you’ll have an initial prediction of the value of the information. With this judgment as a basis, or rather, based on the importance you place on different topics, you can choose the main form of information.

The form I’m talking about here mainly reflects the compression ratio of information. To give a very exaggerated example, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” has over one million words. It can be made into a 120-minute film, summarized in a 1000-word abstract, and even further refined into one sentence. Any information can have completely different compression ratios and corresponding forms of carrying information. Just like the internal reference team we mentioned earlier, in a sense, their main duty is to screen and compress information, conveying the core gist in the most concise and efficient way.

In this era, the speed at which knowledge is generated in many fields does not allow us to slowly integrate and absorb information in the traditional way. On the other hand, most of the time, there is no need to start from the original form of most information, such as how to write a humorous joke, how to avoid awkwardness when chatting with strangers, how to think like a programmer. Is

it really necessary to buy a book on “On Drama”, read more than 300 pages of “Language Logic”, or learn a programming language from scratch?

Although it’s not completely unfeasible, please note that these are not our core fields. For information outside our core fields, we really don’t need to go through the whole process of information compression and decompression. A more cost-effective approach is to directly enjoy the knowledge outcomes that have been arranged and interpreted. Often, learning through expert interpretation, sharing by professionals, and book breakdowns by the knowledgeable will yield better results than reading the original text word by word. In my discussions with some friends, we’ve had similar feelings. We’ve read the books, but when we hear experts interpret them, we realize that we completely missed the most essential points. Thankfully, listening to the interpretation saved us from ignorant self-satisfaction.

So, we have to accept, and even moderately pursue, a considerable portion of the content in the information sources that has been compressed, and in a high-ratio compressed form. Considering the cost-effectiveness, accepting a certain degree of information loss is necessary and worthwhile.

As Michael Simmons said,
Nowadays, there are many ways to condense knowledge. For example, the author of a book can summarize and explain it in articles on social media. There are also book excerpts, and the author may participate in TED talks and podcasts to spread their views, etc. These are all condensations of the knowledge in the book. There are more and more forms of knowledge condensation, such as posts on social media, published books, book excerpts, and thinking models. The compression ratio of their information is getting bigger and bigger. We certainly know that the books that have been repeatedly revised and arranged are more complete, but they may not necessarily be the most suitable way for you to acquire knowledge.

With the development of the times, there will be more and more “knowledge service providers”, including Google’s AI product Sumly, which are screening and compressing information for us, providing us with more cost-effective ways to acquire knowledge. Don’t be tied by traditional ideas. Go back to the source of knowledge in your core field and stick to reading “primary materials”. In non-core fields, enjoy high-quality knowledge services freely. Accept various ways of acquiring information such as audio, video, interpretation, and quick browsing, to deepen professionalism and broaden knowledge.

Final Words:

We’ve introduced the truth about information overload and gave you 4 methods to create an information filtering mechanism:

1. Determine your theme, focus on quality content providers on each information distribution platform, and continuously unfollow low-quality irrelevant information sources.
2. Fine-tune each platform’s information sources, block content producers, keywords, topics, etc., to optimize the relative quality of the information source.
3. Classify the content providers on each platform into two categories: “priority reading” and “just browsing”.
4. According to the theme and quality of the information, choose different information types and processing methods, like taking notes while listening to some content, and just skimming through some at double speed.