Everyone is becoming their own media outlet - with the capabilities to easily create content (written, audio or video) and share it with a specific audience. This has led to a world of information abundance. 

On any given topic, there are several perspectives that we must sift through to build our own opinion. An event can now have hundreds of blog posts and thousands of mentions on social media - all with different opinions. 

As humans, we’re no longer capable of remembering all the information that we come across. From a learning perspective, this is incredibly problematic as we need to re-learn concepts the hard way (through experience). This problem is compounded by the fact that social media platforms are designed to profit from stealing your attention. 

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So What Do We Do?

A lot of people have asked me how I can read so much on a weekly basis. The reality is that we all consume a lot of information. Some of us are fed ‘garbage information’ that have limited future value. Others do a terrible job of capturing information in a way that’s easy to retrieve for our future selves. 

We need to use digital tools in a way that augments our brain’s capacity to consume, store and share information. Through a couple of courses and conversations with productivity experts, I’ve identified a number of workflows that have improved my ability to ‘digest’ information. . 

All of these workflows start with the habit of taking notes. For a very long time, I never took notes. I took pride in remembering everything and not having to rely on a notebook or a digital note-taking tool. I’ve now realized that it was a huge mistake. 

The tool that I use today is Evernote. It allows me to create a workflow that helps me capture information without reducing my ability to consume information quickly. Notion is also a great tool and more in-line with today’s design standards. However, the fact that they have not built out their API makes it hard to work with. 

Reading Articles: I use a read later app called Instapaper. This tool allows me to save articles that I come across in random conversations, social media or work. After, I use Instapaper to read and annotate articles - looking for tidbits that I find interesting. Using this IFTT integration, my notes automatically go into my Evernote instance - keeping all my notes in one location. 

Reading Non-Fiction Books: Before you read a book or research a topic, I start by creating an overview or mental model of the book or topic. Then, I’d take a look at the table of contents and try to understand why the chapters are ordered the way they are and read the last few pages of each chapter to see how the author is concluding their thoughts. This helps me get a high-level picture of the book. It also creates more context for the information you're learning and starts to build connections.

Podcasts and Videos: I try to listen to podcasts while I’m driving, in transit or working out. The challenge I have here is that I don’t have the time to take notes on anything I find interesting. To solve this, I upload my podcasts onto Otter.ai - an AI-based transcription tool. This helps me highlight and store excerpts that I found interesting. 

A course that taught a lot of these workflows is Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. His work is based on concepts introduced in Getting Things Done by David Allen. 

Building Long-Term Memory

While these tools have helped me consume, capture and share information better, I still haven’t cracked the code when it comes to creating habits that build long-term memory. 

This is where I find the work of Quantum.country by Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen to be fascinating. Their introduction of building a mnemonic (pattern-based) medium to teach the idea of quantum computing and mechanics has been quite effective. Here’s how it works:

1) Users are asked to create an account, and quizzed as they read on whether they remember the answers to those questions. 

2) Few days after first reading the essay, the user receives an email asking them to sign into a review session. In that review session they're tested again, in a manner similar to what was shown above. Then, through repeated review sessions in the days and weeks ahead, people consolidate the answers to those questions into their long-term memory.

3) Questions start out with the time interval in-text, meaning the user is being tested as they read the essay. That rises to five days, if the user remembers the answer to the question. The interval then continues to rise upon each successful review, from five days to two weeks, then a month, and so on. After just five successful reviews the interval is at four months. If the user doesn't remember at any point, the time interval drops down one level, e.g., from two weeks to five days.

It’d be really cool to see a read later app that tests you on random facts based on what you’ve read in the past. This will help build long term memory and likely generate new ideas for those who consume a lot of information. 

Conclusion

It is really important to be mindful of the following:

Your Information Diet: If you feed yourself with high quality content - you’re more likely to learn new things, find connections and create new ideas. 

Taking Notes: There are a number of workflows that now make note-taking incredibly easy. Take advantage of them! 

Engaging With Your Knowledge Bank: You don’t need to build a mnemonic medium to make this happen. I’d just start by making a habit of reading content that you’ve created in the past (emails, notes, blogs, assignments and etc). You’ll be amazed by the new ideas you can generate for this activity.