Stop 'Saving Things For Later' and Start Triaging Instead

We are not living in our parents world.

Today you have to deal with more information coming at us than any other person in history. Every day, as humans collectively we create roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Even if you tried to consume it all, you couldn't.

We've hit an information overload crisis.

We spend our lives casually scrolling through our screens, occasionally clipping interesting things into the black holes of Instapaper or Pocket, with the promise to ourselves that we'll finally get to it a later time. Let's be honest, later never comes.

We need a system to deal with this crisis. Which is why I treat EVERYTHING in my life like a triage centre.

Collect. We all know how to collect of course. And this is probably the easiest part. I clip articles into my Notion Library daily, I save tweets into my bookmarks like everyone else. But collection alone will not save you from the black hole of information overload.

Process. To get this wheel turning you need to build in processing times into your days and weeks. Triaging is about getting everything assessed and put in its right place. It needs an entirely different focus from scrolling and collecting.

Engage. Once everything is processed into the right place it's time to engage. Engaging is not mindless scrolling. It's intentionally sitting down to ENGAGE with the information that you've collected and processed. Relish the article, dive deep into the task.

To escape the black holes of information overload, start by building a processing center in your day. Collect everything that came in and put it in the right place ready to engage.

Tomorrow I'll talk about how to start to build trust in your system.