Changing How I Process Information

For years, one of the thing I’ve prided myself on is my ability to quickly take in swathes of information, store it, and put it to use. This ability served me well during exam season at school and university, allowed me to learn new programming languages quickly, and to quickly master game rules. I also enjoyed being able to read around and about subjects and store it away for when it became relevant. Long before I wrote code as a hobby I would read about programming, and later on I put that information to use.

More recently though, I’ve found that the things I’d read started to feel like noise, and so I’ve been doing some spring-cleaning to give me more headspace to think. My phone no longer shows a “Discover Google” sidebar, I’ve blocked Twitter from my PCs, and I’ve started agressively purging my RSS feeds on Feedbin.

I’ve also started being more selective about what long form content I want to read; books have replaced articles for me, and I’m deciding to focus my attention on the things I want to learn rather than things that just enter my orbit.