"I estimate that the ratio of useless to relevant reading material is about twenty to one. With that in mind, my advice it to reduce the literary inflow to a maximum of two newspapers a day, two weekly magazines, and two publications in a specialized field. Get off distribution lists. The reward will be an opportunity to engage in that underappreciated occupation, contemplation." - 'Maverick', Ricardo Semler.
Maverick was written over 16 years before the great information Tsunami, i.e., the fastflip, wikipedia, blogs, tweets, the RSS Reader and the other 6,586,4554 ways in which we can get information.
So, while the principle will remain invariant,namely, one should spend time to think, rather than constantly consume information, the prescription needs to be overhauled. In fact, because of the overwhelming number of sources and the rate of change of the medium, it is impossible to come up with any sort of prescription.
When we thought, we had finally settled on the 10 blogs, that we are finally going to care about, a group of people are postulating, that blogs are old and that Lifestream is the new buzzword. It is beyond question, that lifestreams would be replaced by yet another trend.
It becomes more and more crucial that we need a system that would infer one's likes and dislikes, prioritize slivers of interest and constantly prune sources and provide the individual with enough time to what Ricardo Semler characterizes as "Aristotle, who didn't subscribe to The Wall Street Journal once said, 'Thinking requires leisure time.'"
Information overload is an empty term. Just like bees and ants are 'programmed' to work, we need to design a whole species that process data, so that we would be able to spend time on that crucial occupation, contemplation.
I keep notes at a conference for the two tracks in my head, what the speaker is saying, and why I realize because of, or instead of, what the person is saying. One of my most contemplative experiences is listening to a lecture -- no not the usual concept of "multi-tasking," which usually implies doing 4 or 5 or 6 things at once, but the actually typical human process of thinking about something and then also thinking about yourself thinking -- we always have 2 or 3 tracks, no matter what, but we don't have 4 or 5
ReplyDeleteTrent,
ReplyDeleteI like your method of having a discipline of maintaining two tracks. I am curious to know, how you cope up with this information Tsunami, that we currently have.
-Vasu