(upbeat music) - All right, what do we got here? Who's our next question? - Next question's from Greg and it's about information overload. - Hi Cal, I struggle with information overload. Basically, I think I read too much. All the amazing articles, books, papers, newsletters and blogs that are available by the thousands, no matter how narrow a person's interest is.

I mean, I'm interested in programming Haskell and just for that, I have a dozen papers, three books and about 50 bookmarks. Even if I try to drive my reading backwards from goals and have a philosophy of just in time, not just in case, there are other reasons to read widely, like the responsibility of being a good citizen, the steward of family wealth, or even being the head of the household.

This all means keeping up is important and that involves a lot of general reading. Have you thought about this much? It seems like FOMO, but is less frivolous. Thank you. - Yeah, Greg, it's a good point. It sounds like you probably are reading too much, but more importantly, you're probably putting too much pressure on yourself about all these different things that you need to master.

And so I'll give you a couple of practical suggestions for structuring what I think is like a reasonable, aggressive, but reasonable life of reading. So you have your books and you wanna read a fair number of books each month, that's fine. So you have some sort of goal like that.

I read five, whatever you want your goal to be. Don't care too much about what they are, diverse different types of books, different genres, examples. So you're kind of keeping that intellectual life going. When it comes to mastering a topic, so you have a personality type, which is common, but not everyone has it, where you really like mastering a topic, reading a lot about a topic and mastering it.

I think that's fine. And you wanna lean into that, but do it sequentially. Sequentially, it's a hard word. So what's the thing I'm trying to master now? Okay, I'm doing Haskell now, or there's a personal finance thing I'm gonna obsess about now, or I wanna learn about whatever, some new hobby or something like that.

I think that's fine, but just do it one at a time. Like here's my obsession of the moment. And if that's your personality type, it's fine to have an obsession, but just do one at a time. And maybe have a nice place for actually keeping notes on that if you want.

You can use some sort of system where you type up a lot of notes and keep track of them and do your research so that you're not losing that information, and that's fine. But you just do one of those things at a time, so you don't feel this pressure if I have to keep up with everything.

So now, so we have books. I wanna keep reading books, wide variety. Your singular obsession, only one at a time. Now that obsession might include books that will influence what some of your books are, but don't let your obsession take over your monthly book quota. The final thing to add in there is serendipitous, entertaining, or shorter form reading.

So you have newsletters and magazines, and there's these type of things. And you find some benefit to this. A Cal Newport article that I get might get me thinking about this, and maybe I subscribe to Ben Thompson's "Strategery," and that gives me some interesting insight into the world of business.

And maybe you subscribe to "The New Yorker," and there's a YouTube channel of someone you like to watch but it's more funny. So you have all this type of stuff too. So what do we do with that? And I would say for that third category, work backwards from time slots.

So you see that all as programming, like on a TV channel, like HBO or something. And you put aside time you watch HBO. Like, okay, it's Saturday mornings, and I like to take a long lunch break on Fridays, or end my day early on Fridays, or whatever. Like you have it figured out.

There's certain times where I just wanna expose myself, and I don't wanna overthink it, to the interesting, the random, the serendipitous, the funny, all what the internet has to offer. And maybe this is where social media comes into play too. There's this platform I like to go on. I follow these people, I wanna see what they're up to.

Set the times, and then work backwards to what am I drawing from in those times? So when I'm out of time, I'm out of time. So that leads to a natural curation. Like, okay, well, I don't usually pull from these four podcasts, so I'm gonna stop, you know, listening to those.

And these email newsletters I don't read, but I usually like this guy's email newsletter, so I'll keep subscribed to this guy, I'm not gonna subscribe to those. You can use tools like Flipboard, et cetera. There's a lot of tools like this where you go Instapaper, where you can kind of pull information from the web in various places into like a clean, easy format.

You can put it on your tablet, and bring that tablet to the coffee shop, and that's where you sit and read. I'm a big fan of that, so pull it out of context. But you have a set amount of time, and that puts back a natural curation. For someone like you, Greg, that's interested in information, likes information, likes having obsessions, like understanding things, that's my three-pronged suggestion.

Of a fixed number of books you read, have an obsession, but you only do one obsession at a time, and for the serendipitous, random, and funny, have set times you do that. And if it doesn't fit in that time, you don't get to it, and that will naturally curate what you actually pull from.

Do those things, I think you have, you're keeping up with your responsibilities, you're keeping life interesting, you're gonna be exposed to a lot of interesting things, but you're not gonna have that stress of I can't keep up with everything, and you're not gonna have the accidental side effect of, let's say the frivolous or serendipitous takes over all your time from the deeper book you wanted to read, or the obsession gets in the way of anything interesting in your life.

This gives you a nice balance. (upbeat music)