I’m on my fourth attempt to read the Innovators by Walter Isaacson. By now, I have the first few chapters, all about the early computing theory of Ada Lovelace and the 1800s, all but committed to memory.

Back in those days, information was scant. Books were not new, but not old either. They were still expensive as fuck and reserved for the upper crust.

We live in a profoundly different world. As Kevin Kelly pointed on the Tim Ferris Podcast, no one alive 30 years ago would believe there was a free service that could find any information you can imagine (thanks Google).

Slowly, then quickly, we moved from a society where a library contained at most 300 books to one where I can hold 3000 books in one hand (thanks Amazon).

The hunger for information that led might once have led to success can just as easily lead to insanity today. I know it well.

Today I’m going to muse about how to deal with information overload, dealing with each part of my information process separately:

I referenced input obliquely in my article about my friend Neil, but went to work in earnest today during a therapy session. My first order of business in think about input was to get a feel for what amount of input makes sense. What can I reasonably expect to do?

Too Little: No reading at all. Rarely happens, but usually when I’m obsessively doing something else. Not a good state of being.

Just Right: 3 books at once, plus 7 articles a week. This seems to be a pace I can keep up.

Too Much: 1–2 books a day, plus articles. I can only do this for 2 weeks at a time. If I’m doing this without a reason (research paper, book, etc) then I know I’m not doing well.

As I looked over my above list and thought about it, I realized with great shame that I will not read every book in existence. Even if I did read a book a day for every year of my life, I’d put nary a dent in all the world’s books.

It was this realization that led me to realize that I’ve been straining at the wrong lever most of my life.

The lever to push on in reading is not the amount of information consumed, but the type of reading and the type of processing you do to it.

I’ll get to processing in a minute, but first a quick note on the type of reading lever. Ever since I read The Wright Brothers, who were first talked about in “Gleanings in Bee Culture” (all the major outlets ignored them) and heard Balaji say on the Tim Ferriss Show that, “The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed,” I’ve been considering how to find weird sources others ignore.

My little hunch on the value of this type of input was confirmed when listening to Kevin Kelly on, you guessed it, the Tim Ferriss Show. On the show, Kelly said something like, “The future is unbelievable now and what’s believable now isn’t the future, it’s a projection of the past.”

The gist of all this is that interesting ideas don’t come from the mainstream. By the time they’ve reached the mainstream (via a Seth Godin book), those ideas are widely distributed (which someone like Balaji might argue indicates low quality).

The really interesting ideas require digging in obscure places. Whatever you think of him, Nassim Nicholas Taleb does this well in his book Black Swan, which is part of what makes it a worthwhile read. Taleb digs up old, obscure ideas, combines them with new ones from psychology, and repackages them into something interesting.

So, given all this, my new input strategy is to limit my inputs to a sustainable pace (3 books, 7 articles) and find original stuff at the margins.

What’s your input strategy? Let me know on Twitter! I’d love to hear about it.

In the past, I wouldn’t have even considered processing. Before I picked up writing, my sole goal was to consume as much information as possible.

Part of my movement to information health is in the recognition of a need for a pause, to process the information. The first step to towards this realization came from increasing my output, back when I wrote every for more than 70 days.

What I realized in increasing my output was that I did my best if I had material on hand to write about. Not an article, but the start of my thoughts on a topic. Most days, that was all I needed to get going, a wisp of a thought.

Later, once I’d stopped writing daily, I switched gears to doing something with my inputs after discovering Obsidian and the Zettelkasten Method. All of a sudden, a whole new world opened up to me. I’d never considered doing anything with what I learned while reading.

Sure, I would write it up from time to time but I found that boring and a slog. What I learned over time is that the work required to write an idea from my inputs was hard because I hadn’t processed it.

So I began tentatively finding my way, finding yet another answer to the question, “What can I reasonably do?”

Too Little: No processing whatsoever. Information goes in, never to emerge again. My thoughts on the topic are lost forever.

Just Right: I pull out relevant ideas from my reading and leave the chaff (random factoids) by the wayside.

Too Much: I highlight the whole book and comb through it a second time trolling for information I missed.

The key difference between each of these levels of processing is whether or not I’m focused on important ideas.

What I realized about processing is that the key lever here is the number of interesting ideas I pull from the reading.

When I first started processing, I tried to grab every tidbit in the book. After doing this for a few books, I found myself exhausted and dreaded even looking at the book I finished, knowing how much work remained.

Then, I went on a processing fast, doing none of it for a time. I’m just emerging from my fast, hopefully wiser in my ways. The key difference is that I want to be focused on important ideas, not fleeting details.

The fleeting details are fun and there are low cost ways of keeping track of those (like Memory Palaces). But, when I process information, I want to keep the useful bits because if I’m going to go to all this trouble to find interesting inputs, I’d better get the best from them.

So my goal in processing information is to keep it interesting, focusing on key ideas from the uncommon sources I surface.

Of all the parts of the process, I feel the most comfortable with output. My output is most like my canary in the mines. When the rest of the process gets out of control, my sweet singing output, which keeps my spirits up, disappears.

That said, I’ve done my Goldilocks treatment on output as well.

Too Little: No writing at all.

Just Right: 1–2 articles a week.

Too Much: Writing daily. Worst case scenario. Not only does my quality take a dive, I start to hate writing in this zone.

I’m not sure why keeping writing under control is so much easier than keeping inputs or processing in check. It could be that writing is something I’ve grown to love, whereas I was born loving reading and just found processing.

It could be that writing is so hard that it’s hard to abuse. I’ve never known writing to be an easy escape. Reading makes a perfect escape, as does processing. Reading because it takes you into other worlds and processing because it allows you to explore your own.

Writing has this gritty quality to it that’s missing in the more ethereal reading and processing. Don’t get me wrong, reading can be gritty and so can processing a big idea, but it’s not a requirement.

Writing always has an edge to it for me, I think in part because it’s hard to write without facing the truth. In the end, I think it’s the connection to the real world that makes output hard and hard to abuse.

By putting something out into the world, you must weigh it’s truth, which is no easy task.

But enough about me.

What do you think of the 3 categories, input, processing, and output?

What does your process look like?

What’s the hardest part for you?

I ask tough questions because I'd rather know hard truths than comfortable lies. https://mailchi.mp/e1b0dc1230df/thgispeed