Newsletter Week 30 | 2021

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Hey there.I hope you've had a great week.

What I've Made For You

New book notes: Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky — Summary & NotesThe book reads like a cookbook of tactics you can employ to get more energy, focus better, and find a daily goal.

Processing inputs from the Internet

You're browsing the internet and find something that sparks your interest. Say, an article.

Do you read the article right away?Let me try to convince you that you shouldn't, and what you should do instead.

The system consists of four phases.

1. 🌐 Discover — interesting resources

2. 📥 Input — to your inbox

3. ⚔ Filter — the noise

4. 📖 Read — the signal

The Discover and Input phases are the ingestion of information, while Filter and Read is the digestion of information.

The four phases

🌐 Discover

The discovery phase is where you find all the inputs that you want to digest.

Just like you should limit junk food in your diet, you should also limit it in your information diet.

Is the kitchen clean? Am I getting my information from the right sources?Am I ingesting that which is good and healthy for me, or is it informational junk?

You have found an interesting article; it is time to move to the Input phase.

📥 Input

Everything you find interesting will be sent to your inbox. Whether it be articles, videos, podcast episodes, tweets — you name it.

The idea is to save content for later, such that you can move on with what you were doing now. You become more proactive in prioritizing what you do. You are not just reacting to what is sent your way anymore.

This is an important mindset shift. What may seem interesting and important now may be completely irrelevant and uninteresting in a few days.

There are many services you can use to save content to your inbox, but Instapaper and Pocket are very popular. You could also just use a note on your computer. All you really need is a way to save the link.

⚔ Filter

Filter the signal from the noise.

From Vilfredo Pareto comes The Law of the Vital Few. 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes (the 'vital few'). This is to say that there are disproportionate outputs to some inputs.

Aim to read the 20%.

📖 Read

Don't be afraid to discard whatever you are reading if it does not serve you.

Troubleshooting

Is your inbox growing in size, and you aren't getting anything read?Try to make it a habit by scheduling time for it.

Don't like what you read?Remove or replace sources that you aren't including when you filter.

This was a WIP article. When it is published, there will be much more detail.

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To your success. Regards,

Christian Bager Bach Houmann