Reducing Inputs
NOTE: This is a living article that I am updating regularly throughout 2021. By the end of the year, this will likely be a massive piece.
I am an information hoarder, and I say this with no amount of exaggeration.
I remember taking the StrengthsFinder test for the first time and getting Input as one of my top three "strengths." I've honestly never felt so seen by a personality test. Here's what it means:
People with strong input talents are inquisitive. They always want to know more. They crave information. They like to collect certain things, such as ideas, books, memorabilia, quotations, or facts...A few minutes of surfing the Internet may turn into hours once their curiosity takes off. The constantly acquire, compile, and file things away.
There are many good things that come with this input tendency. I love my natural hunger for learning and expanding my perspective. I love my genuine fascination with and curiosity about most of the people I meet. I love my brain full of random information, all floating dots in my mind just waiting to be connected or shared when the time is right.
This quality has, by and large, made me a better person. But here is the downside that feels like its compounded over time: I'm holding on to way, way too many inputs, and it's starting to effect my cognitive load and clarity of thought.
Here are the many places I try to "hold" inputs at the moment:
Twitter lists (people to follow)
Feedly (RSS feeds to peruse)
Pocket (articles to read)
Evernote (notes I want to revisit or organize later)
OneTab (currently thousands of saved tabs to "get to later")
Spotify (podcasts)
Instagram (saved posts to come back to later)
Pinterest (don't even get me started)
Amazon (book lists, etc)
Airtable (spreadsheets of reference info)
Email Inbox (countless newsletters, for starters)
YouTube (hundreds of videos saved to "Watch Later")
Slack ( 😳 🤯 enough said)
Google Drive, Dropbox (all the random uncategorized things)
Desktop files (...more random uncategorized things)
Notion (I'm starting to switch over to this, God help me)
iPhone (no joke, 35,000 photos/screenshots and dozens of apps)
Kindle (so many books to read...)
Bookshelf (even more books to read...but at least they look pretty and color-coded!)
Physical "stuff" (papers, journals, loose notes, planners, etc.)
I'm honestly not even convinced that this list is exhaustive, and it doesn't even include fleeting "inputs" that take a toll on my brain (like processing a social media feed, or information on the news, or emails I scan and delete, or Slack messages I breeze past). But I'll stop my list at 20 for the sake of attempted sanity.
For anyone, just this sheer NUMBER of inboxes is unmanageable. For me, it feels 10x worse because I want to save and organize everything.
The Reality: I'll never get through it all.
Of course, I'm never going to get through all this stuff. For example, I currently follow 47 (!!!) different podcasts on my Spotify app. Let's say each one puts out two episodes a week that are 40 minutes in length. That is over 64 hours of content each week, conservatively (a lot of the podcasts I enjoy feature 1-3 hour interviews). I listen to about an hour of podcasts a day, which means I'm only getting through about 11% of the podcasts I'm tracking.
This logic holds for every single platform. There is a point of diminishing returns for information consumption, and I am WAY past it. And I'm absolutely tired of it. So, what now?
The Solution: Fewer Inputs, Less Saving, Better Guardrails
Fewer Inputs. One by one, clean each "input channel" in 2021.
Less Saving. Say no to saving almost everything, and have one place for everything I do save.
Better guardrails. Come up with a process for processing all of this stuff.
I'll add to this article with updates as I tackle each input channel this year.