Develop Strong Criteria for Input Triage

"How in the world. You need less Twitter in your life."
I had just shared two very different tweets with a close friend of mine, covering the wide range between software startup valuations and American domestic politics.
"My timeline is crazy this morning" I told him when sharing, and the quote above was his reaction. He was right.
I had, again, discarded my guard rails of attention design and failed at input triage.
You need to develop strong criteria for Input Triage
If you don't, the moment you open any channel of input – be it Twitter, Instagram, Slack, or Email you'll be swamped by things that are low-level enraging and distracting.
Thing is, you can't avoid and actually want input from different channels. But if you don't take care of what info enters your brain, you'll be tossed around by whatever the algorithms throw at you – and the algorithms aren't designed for your benefit.
Developing strong criteria for what you want to see let you counter this, though. So let's talk about ways to design your attention and tame the algorithms.
1. Lower your bar to unfollow.
This is the easiest fix for your timeline – if people post things that enrage you...unfollow. Even brilliant people can have really bad takes. The more people you follow the higher the number of bad takes, even if their individual rate is low.
#2. Train the algorithms.
The algorithms are designed to keep you in the app and engaged.
If you only engage (like, share, click links) with things that you want to see more of, the algorithm is going to learn.
#3. Use tools that make it easy to input triage.
The default apps for social media aren't built to make it easy for you to curate your inputs. Use lists, mute conversations, and look for tools that are design to let you filter.
If you (and I!) do these three things, we'll be much less distracted while still getting the good stuff out of social media.
To read all of my atomic essays, visit cortexfutura.com/atomic-essays/

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More from @cortexfutura

31 Jul
You don't need to take notes on everything

If you're into #PKM, note-taking, and productivity it's easy to get a severe feeling of "Note-Taking FOMO" if you're not taking notes on everything you're reading.

I call BS. 🧵
What's the quickest way to kill curiosity? Making note-taking a job.

Why did you get into note-taking? Likely because you read a lot. Why do you read a lot? Because you're curious and enjoy learning new things.

Note-Taking FOMO is counterproductive.
So how do you get rid of Note-Taking FOMO?

By reading with intention.

Ask yourself: why am I reading this? For entertainment, because I want to learn more about something, or because I need to for my job?

The way you answer leads to completely different ways to read.
Read 7 tweets
31 Jul
What trekking through Iceland taught me about knowledge work

In 2016 I did a self-supported 10-day trek through Iceland with a group of people.
Rain, glaciers, and 25kg on my back taught me more about knowledge work than you'd think.

The physical informs the mental. 🧵 Image
One day, we hiked for three hours through the rain. In a circle.

In bad conditions, navigation becomes tricky. If you find you didn't make any progress, do what we did: rest a bit, take a bath (icy lake optional), and then continue.

Oh, and don't make the wrong turn twice. Image
Train up for hard efforts

Before we set off on that trek, we did a bunch of hikes in the Alps together to check we were up to the task. You can't just jump from couch to trek without training.

The same is true for knowledge work: long hours of focus require training. So train.
Read 8 tweets
30 Jul
5 Things I learned about PKM from my PhD

Working on my PhD over the last four years has been the hardest thing I've ever done. It has also taught me a lot about note-taking and personal knowledge management.

Here are five big things I learned 🧵
#1: You can't read everything

Whatever you're interested in, there are more books and articles written about than you could ever read in a lifetime. So don't try to read everything.

Instead:
- read the best things
- read them deeply
- skim a wider selection and compare
#2: Good note-taking requires effort

Reading deeply and comparing widely takes time and effort. No matter how fancy your tool or efficient your system is, there is no way around this.

Accept this, make time for it, and invest the effort. You'll be glad you did.
Read 8 tweets
29 Jul
When we look at note-taking apps as a tool for collective sense-making, an additional consideration to make is what I'll call Multiple-Mind Friction.
When I use @RoamResearch individually, it molds itself around my personal preferences and style of thinking. It becomes a second brain insofar as it becomes a reflection of *my* brain and thought patterns, externalized into text. (Goes for any note-taking app you use, of course)
But when I use Roam or something else with others, we face the same friction as when joining a verbal discussion: we need to find common ground in terms of communication patterns.
Read 8 tweets
28 Jul
Collective sense-making happens in the discussion around creating a communal artifact. If we want to have or build #toolsforthought that make collective sense-making easier, faster, better, we need to tie these together.
Collective sense-making happens in the comments of GoogleDocs or over coffee. Having access to atomic thoughts of others is *super* valuable, but it's in the *collective synthesis* that we actually crystalize common understanding.
Of course, you can also understand collective sense-making as an emergent process resulting from better information for the individual and better ways to integrate that information individually.

In the end, it's prob a spectrum and we'll see where the tools position themselves.
Read 5 tweets
28 Jul
I don't know why, but for some reason YT keeps recommending me "Americans reviewing Germany" videos. It's a hidden genre where Americans basically discuss what they experience as differences between the US and Germany. This time: playgrounds!
Naturally, Germany has a national ISO-like standard for playgrounds, DIN EN 1176:

hst-spielgeraete.de/en-1176-en-117…
I really like this comment below the video, paraphrased by a TÜV Engineer:

"A playground can and should to a degree be dangerous, kids need to be able to hurt themselves to understand that their actions have real world consequences and to train their decision making abilities. /
Read 4 tweets

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