Ask HN: How can I remedy scatter brain and information overload?
This may seem like a silly question but it's something that's been affecting me for a while now. With the sheer amount of information available in the world today I have simply become overwhelmed. My mind is in a constant racing state. It's calm but not calm if that makes sense. While I could very well be thinking about nothing or something specific like writing this message. My mind seems to have multiple levels. One of which is directed to what I am actively doing and one below it which seems to process information in a never ending manner. I am not actively thinking about these things but it's there. Articles and books to read, shows to watch, things to do in my personal life and at work. Career advancement. All of these things just never stop but I could be calm. I can sleep fine, they don't cause active anxiety. They just linger in the background. Shooting around saying me me.
It's getting exhausting. I like to be informed. I like to know what people are talking about and like to be able to have a point of view. I like to have an opinion and be able to argue it. But I have realized it's just getting to be too much.
Currently my instapaper account has some 800 articles I have yet to read. Kindle has about 10 books I want to read. pinboard account has about 100 unread articles most of which are small books.
Any advice on what I should do? Do I just purge them?
235 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadYou already know who you are. Focus on relationships and finding out about who people are.
An old adage: people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Meditation will help you. If you don't already do it - volunteer your time and skills. Especially to teach those who might not be as confident as you.
Good luck!
What do you need to do? What do you want to do? What things don't really matter to you?
Organize it on paper or whatever medium makes sense. I like OneNote and Trello. I've found its one of the easiest ways to remove those thoughts from the back of my mind is to put them someplace actionable and consistent. A stream of consciousness todo list isn't very productive.
With regards to instapaper or readability, either:
a) Treat it as a bookmarking service, not a read-later service. Then reference it when a topic comes of importance to what you wrote down above or you're just bored.
b) Clear out all 800 articles and start over, possibly being more selective or auto-clearing them monthly.
These are both things the brain does naturally, pruning through attention and focus and long-term storage for future reference :)
EDIT: Formatting
I think jimfleming covered what I was going to say really well, but I wanted to really emphasize that for this to work, you need to be maniacally consistent with using the system.
I use Asana, and just keep a tab open next to my inbox. Sure, having a todo list helped from the start, but it took probably 2-3 months of consistently putting everything (and their anticipated due dates) into Asana before I could really trust the system. Now that it's ingrained into my workflow, though, I know that anything I need to keep track of is there.
Once you get to that stage, it's like a whole different life -- seriously.
Other than that, you just need to accept that you'll never be able go through it all. And prioritize what's most important to your life. And sometimes just lay it all aside and recharge.
But meditation has really healped me with all of these. And in the end it's quite of a high-quality problem.
I would caution that the instruction is given by video recording by S.N. Goenka, who is a man with great faith in Buddhist scripture, and that faith pops out pretty strongly in places (e.g. karmic rebirth). If you can forgive that, he is careful to stress that the practical aspects of the technique and that they are by far more important than theory. I know of no other teacher, organization or venue that offers 10-days of intensive meditation instruction on a donation-only basis, and putting up with a small and frankly harmless amount of magical thinking has actually been good practice for me over the years.
This book was written by one of early Google engineers who has learned meditation and created a class that he has taught to thousands of Google employees. Unlike much of other writing or classes on meditation this one is written in plain language and cites lots of neuro research. It is not even that long.
So go read first half of this book, practice it for 3 months and then reevaluate.
Welcome to HN! I lurked for years before I posted. Even though I am less 'active' now because of various projects, I still use HN as a filter for what might be of interest.
For an easy introduction to this type of meditation, I highly recommend calm.com's five steps to mindfulness. You can find it on Soundcloud here: https://soundcloud.com/mayank-agrawal-14/sets/calm-com
You have no commitment to read these articles. They should serve you, not the other way round.
I would personally purge everything and stop using pinboard/instapaper for a while.
Try to unsubcribe to as many newsletters as you can as well, it definitely helps.
And to put it succinctly, minimize your information firehoses and reject the notion that you need to keep abreast of everything even if it is not relevant to you.
Purge all of your reading lists and resist building them. If you keep any lists or bookmarks, require that they be things you HAVE read and want to keep as reference for later. I do have a "toread" bookmark folder, but I almost never go back to read things there.
Visit only one or two tech sites a day. For example, I come to HN to the exclusion of almost anything else because it does a good job of showing only relevant things. But I limit this to 3-5 times a week and only when I'm bored. It's a good filter.
Lastly, get a personal project that serves as a good source of challenges. Use it to help decide if you should read about a particular technical topic. You'll find that this serves as a good filter, but at the same time you'll magically seem to read about things relevant to your technical challenges in a surprisingly timely manner.
HTH,
One thing I do is take notes on most things I read. Just a couple sentences. This helps in several ways:
1) If you're not willing to take notes on something, it's not worth reading. So you read less.
2) It limits your rate of consumption, because writing takes time. So you read slower.
3) Having it written down and organized reduces the burden on your brain. It's like the GTD system. You want to relieve your brain of holding information. Your brain will know it is one click away if you have organized your notes properly.
4) When writing notes, you are relating it to things you already know. It forces recall. This prevents your brain from being just a jumble of useless disconnected facts.
Notes rock. I agree with 1, 2, 3, and 4.
I like tasks and reminders in any of a variety of systems. I send myself a lot of emails to process later.
I took one of those self tests and it came back ITSJ
Please note that this is not about MB, it's about getting hints about who you are and how you use the information you seek.
I was not aware of MB until a friend IRL told me that I might be a certain type. I took the test, and from there my world seemed to open as I at least had a way to learn more about myself.
I read the term "information diet," and I think that is what it comes down to. I've had to do this time to time. Having a motivating side project to help you pick between what is and is not relevant to you at a particular time is a good idea.
Anyway, good luck.
Anything vital you do miss on will come to you through the social network you could be building instead of reading through all this stuff.
Moreover, reading more won't give you a point of view. It'll only give you others' points of views. Only you can create your own point of view.
As for the POV's. isn't that what we all do, throw around others point of views? I wasn't educated in a way that fostered original idea.
For example I like to bake bread as a hobbyist and do no knead from time to time. She also likes to bake but given her arthritis she can't do it anymore and she really missed it. I got her everything she would need but she wont have it.
I'd love to see some pre-internet articles complaining about the pace of publishing and strategies for coping with the onslaught of information at that time. It seems reasonable that it would exist, and I'm sure we'd all find it rather quaint :)
1. Put yourself on an information diet, and
2. Filter out any reading that you cannot turn into an actionable item.
For instance, I have pocket open right now. There's an article named "Cache is the new RAM". I just removed it. Why? Yes. It is interesting. But the information cannot be translated into something of value with respect to what I do.
Believe me, you won't miss out on the things you forgot existed.
I'm in a (some would say privileged but it isn't) situation where money just falls into my bank with little effort by myself. (Shareholdings.)
I am at a total loss as to which of the many "hobbies" I have surrounding me that I should educate myself with each day. I'm learning about 100's of things from Lego lighting projects to basic electronics right now; I don't know where to dabble next.
The way out, I feel, is to sell many things, leave my phone at home, don't connect to WiFi after 8pm at home - and try and just Be.
With respect to this paradoxical situation, I found reading the Tao Te Ching very interesting. It suggests that you should stop focussing on wisdom and simply accept that things will go one way or the other. This might give you some rest.
If taoism is a bridge too far, then you may want to get started in meditation or mindfulness.
I'll check out the Tao Te Ching book. Thanks.
This might be the root of the problem. You have to accept that most of the time you need to make decisions with your _current_ understanding.
There are some situations where you will need to seek information in order to make a better decision. (Trust yourself, you will know the difference instinctively.)
In those cases gather only the information you need to do a good enough job.
Decide what is important to you and ignore the rest.
Also focus on people and friendhsips, sports even. The human mind isn't meant to work without involving the body at the same time.
(I dare you to check your iphone or think about your reading list while trying to surf a wave for example :-) )
- Learn to prioritize important vs useless info
- Impose yourself a limit on time/amount of data daily
- To support the above set some offline time to do something else, something useful and relaxing
- Organize your data and just delete all that you know you will never have time to read
- Learn to accept that you will never know everything, it's impossible, so it's not a big deal if you miss some info. No, really, no big deal at all. Relax :)
Miraculously, that didn't drive them away and, now, just over a year of dating later, I've noticed I've developed new mental habits to train myself to remember details, in order to avoid the negative reinforcement of my S.O. nagging about my forgetfulness.
And, in practice, these days, I'm quite a bit more effective at identifying what details are relevant, reliably persisting them to memory if needed, and identifying/purging/ignoring irrelevant details, which actually end up getting in the way of storing the important ones (this, of itself, was a problem that, when solved, yielded lots of forward progress for this issue).
Sorry, I'm not sure if this is something you can very effectively optimize for (and maybe shouldn't!... 'seeking partner to help fight scatter brain'), but it's a true story, and one angle, at least. :)
It doesn't have to be a romantic relationship that does this—I've worked with people whose personalities balanced out mine, and together we had a similar good thing going on. Creativity and ability for the mind to wander is a great thing for inspiration and discovery, and then bringing in the focus is great for making ideas real.
So, seek out other people who balance your personality. The fact that your mind works the way it does is not necessarily bad, and there are people all around you who can compliment you.
Two things that I'm trying out now:
1) Write down things that you learn each day and review them weekly. I find this helps me to filter out a lot of the extraneous information and focus in on things that could be useful in the future.
2) Monthly or bi-monthly focus on one specific skill or area of knowledge. Out of all the things I could read/watch/listen to, I try to concentrate on things that relate to one thing that can make me better. Bookmark or save interesting things that you come across, but limit your attention to just books or articles about one topic for the rest of December and January. The other stuff will still be there when you come back to it.
The tl;dr is to write out your goals and come up with a plan to achieve them. Focus on one and set aside time each day to make incremental progress. Everything else will take care of itself.
Most of those systems focus on aggressive prioritization and removing lists of tasks from your mind and moving them to paper.
Be aggressive about not storing stuff anywhere else. I used to have 10+ items that I semi-actively thought about - now I've reached a point where I have nothing at all loaded as "I must think about this/remember this/do this" - that stuff is all written down.
After that its just practice and repetition. Any time "I should do X" pops up, write it down in your system, or say "thats ok, I have it written down in the system" if you already have.
Doing this isnt all good - there are times that I miss having a long list spinning in the back of my head. It means you need to load the list actively if you're actually going to have discussions about what you are planning to do. Its weird in the start to go "Uh I have no idea, let me check" if you're asked what you're doing today/this week or asked if you have some great ideas about random topic X. But its overall a lot more effective to be focused on whatever you are actually doing rather than what you could be doing.
As overplayed as it is, GTD really is pretty good. It basically boils down to: keep lists, use them religiously, and focus on one thing at a time. But the book itself is good and goes into significantly more detail, all of which is useful.
Any system will do, as long as it's trustworthy, and you actually commit to using it.
As W. Edwards Deming said, "A bad system will beat a good person, every time." Couldn't be more true. You can try try try to be as good as you will yourself to be on your own, but regardless, even a poorly implemented system can do better than you can on your own. This applies to many aspects of work, and your own system is just the beginning.
I got the Internet as a birthday present on my 8th birthday, and pretty much disappeared from normal society for the next few years. The Internet was (and is) fascinating - I could learn anything, interact with people I'd never met with, and, notably, do adult things without anyone doubting me because I was young.
But as I got older, the Internet, and therefore my mind, just got busier. Eventually it was not only random articles and a few chatrooms, but dozens of apps and sites that are programmed to give us a dopamine hit. Being online to me feels like walking around in a casino trying not to gamble.
I don't think I concentrated on one thing for more than 20 minutes for years, and outside of school I didn't have to. So I just convinced myself that school was archaic, skipped as much class as I could, and ended up a mental butterfly. It was working for me.
Except for when I wanted to get stuff done. I probably started learning to program 100 times, but I would get distracted with cat pictures or something, and even though I loved computers more than anything else, I couldn't do much to create with them. I was diagnosed with ADHD, but I didn't really care; I don't think that experience is unique to either me or people who have been diagnosed with ADHD.
Then, all of the sudden, I went on a Mormon mission in eastern Ukraine. Two years with 30 minutes of Internet a week (at an Internet club 45 mins away from my apartment). My entire life was structured in a way I never would have structured it in order to get me to concentrate on the things I considered most important for that period of time.
My mind slowed down - in an almost literal sense. I had only finished a couple of books in my entire life before the mission, and on the mission I could easily read the Old Testament for hours on end, paying attention to intricacies of text I never would have realized before.
Then I got home. I jumped on Facebook, and right back into my old habits. My mind was gone for weeks. Not gone in the sense that I wasn't learning anything -- I would pick up tidbits here and there, but I never got deep enough into anything to make any of that learning useful. It terrified me.
So now I spend a lot of time on very strict information diets. I severely limit my time on HN, Reddit, Facebook. I try to keep my reading on a Kindle so the Internet isn't even an option. I would love for someone to create an app (that works) that limits what sites I can use so I can go into "wired in" mode when I'm programming.
In short, don't be afraid to place restrictions on yourself. Let your mind slow down.
Works well. It cannot be turned off and you can set it for a specific amount of time. You choose the websites you would like to block.
Your phone is obviously a weak point, but it's a start.
I severely limit what's on my phone - no social apps, for example, and it's enough of a pain that I don't browse the Internet on it much. So I've mostly solved that problem.
I kid. It still works, although I use rescuetime now and it's pretty useful seeing how much time you waste on certain things. Costs money though.
I almost stopped using the app due to the lack of an off button, after my boss asked for some data and I could not get it on time because the website was not on my whitelist.
Luckily, there is a way of turning it off. If you don't want to know it skip the rest of this comment, and otherwise here it is, in case someone needs it: the app uses the local time, so by changing your computer's time forward you can end the block earlier.
It should be possible (if slightly annoying) to disable restrictions, but it should only ever be temporarily disabled.
Copy & paste?
You can eliminate large swaths of the internet from loading in your browser and control what sets of sites are blocked when.
Just having that schedule imposed on me for a few days was all it took for me to get out of the habit of opening a new tab and heading to one of the aforementioned sites any time I ran into a difficult problem. I've noticed an increase in my productivity, and I don't really even feel the need to twiddle away that time anymore.
I change up the image every few days but I try to have it point to something like the recent Orion launch or a trip photo from the Portland Hikers Field Guide. Instead of redirecting to Google's homepage (which is what I did at first), seeing the image gives me positive reinforcement to pause and be more mindful about what I'm doing, where my head is at, etc.
It's been an enormous help in instilling my habit to stay focused.
The only solution that worked for me, which I figured out years later, was controlled caffeine intake with just the right calorie balance plus an interesting career that isn't affected by delayed sleep phase. With those two things, my motivation increases, scatterbrainedness decreases, and I can get significant things done.
Would you mind sharing what kind of career you have chosen, or examples of others that fit this description?
But, as a counterpoint to the "beneficial" Mormon story, I would like suggest that my early experience in the organization was not very good (I left as soon as I was old enough to legally do so. I would have left at 13 had parents permitted.).
I am firmly convinced these types of organizations often induce strange mental problems of their own which are often far worse than the sins they are trying to cure.
Not to slam anyone's beliefs, just a counterpoint to "hey, this helped me!". It didn't help me, and it has very much unhelped a lot of people I have known. And I guess I really question whether this type of thing helps humanity as a whole.
I agree entirely. People well served by their community have little motivation to question it, but that doesn't mean that everyone would benefit from membership in that community, or even that the community is beneficial to society as a whole. I have many thoughts on the subject, and maybe one day I'll write more.
I half wonder if I am not meant to work in front of a computer the rest of my life. I sometimes think it would be more beneficial to pursue something more blue collar like becoming an electrician or something similar. Sure, access to a smart phone these days still provides plenty of access to distractions, but what if my job wasn't so involved with actually NEEDING to be in front of a screen all day?
No idea if I could ever make the leap, but I do often see the appeal.
Source: I did this myself about 5 years ago, following a complete burnout on being a C++ developer. Worked as an electrician for about 18 months.
What helped me was signing up to newsletters. Once a week I get newsletters summarising the most interesting links for HN, and also ones about Python, Big Data and Data Science.
I redirect HN/Reddit/Facebook to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file, because going to these sites is an automatic reaction in a browser, and all I need is a 404 to remind myself why I no longer visit them all day.
Lastly, I only use Facebook for chat but I get distracted by the feed. So I unfollowed everyone on my feed and now I don't have one.
1. http://www.hndigest.com/
Would love any feedback on the service!
I can see this happening in the near future. People using some technique to measure and restrict their Internet binge.
Great productivity booster
Edit: whoops forgot the link. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...
Anyways, it's bit of a time consumer setting up said software initially but you benefit from a lot of angles once done. (Network security, content management, less likely to back track on systems that take more work to implement, as well as having a sophisticated and global system across all devices routed through the proxy server.) I believe some software packages even allow for the management of access times as well as content type. White list only a couple sites/ url's / IP's you use and white list them for only the time you need to be able to use them. Have someone else change the computer password on the server that you trust and boom. Just don't get distracted trying to circumvent security now...ha ha
Just a casual suggestion based upon experience as a school system administrator. Normally though if I am having a problem that starts in the mind, I develop a solution that either starts there or starts at whatever triggers it in my mind. Just a thought. Hack yourself you know?
There's also the idea of the "circle of influence" (i.e. worry / do something with the things you can _actually_ influence, forget about the rest - slightly comes back to the 24 hour news thing for me). Perhaps you might enjoy reading "The 7 Habits of Highly effective people"
Good luck :) You're certainly not alone.
I did this too, and it feels great. I can't remember where I heard it from but I'm stealing it:
A lot of what you see on TV and read in newspapers is either advertisements from PR firms disguised as news items or propaganda. This is even more so if it's election season.tl;dr: Turn off your TV.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/politics/27voters.html/
To start, minimize intake. When I tried to stay on top of things, I found it weighed me down, limited productivity, and didn't _really_ help. Skimming topics is almost as useful as actually reading them. The benefit there is that you acquire a lot of assorted bits of background info, which might come in handy. But you don't need to deep dive and worry about getting through all the material. Just knowing it's there is enough. And even then, consider limiting the scope.
The whole "being informed, having an opinion, arguing" -- it's really not productive. I look back over all my HN interactions, and the vast majority of it isn't really productive. Your opinions don't matter, and nor do the arguments. If I spent the time I've wasted saying shit on HN doing something useful (even reading fiction books), it'd have been better spent. (Now reading threads I've learned a lot, and getting some of my statements corrected has been useful.) But there must be some low-level psychological drive, since here I am. Mostly it comes from periods of boredom or depression, where I can't get over the initial impulse to work. Eliezer covers it here[1].
When I've taken HN breaks for extended periods of time, and I don't fill in that gap with another "news" source, I start to feel more peaceful, focused, content.
1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3kv/working_hurts_less_than_procrast...
Good point.
> The whole "being informed, having an opinion, arguing" -- it's really not productive. I look back over all my HN interactions, and the vast majority of it isn't really productive. Your opinions don't matter, and nor do the arguments. If I spent the time I've wasted saying shit on HN doing something useful (even reading fiction books), it'd have been better spent. (Now reading threads I've learned a lot, and getting some of my statements corrected has been useful.) But there must be some low-level psychological drive, since here I am. Mostly it comes from periods of boredom or depression, where I can't get over the initial impulse to work. Eliezer covers it here[1].
Another good one. It doesn't matter.
I also use Pocket to save articles to read later, but overtime I became more agressive in filtering what to read. If I don't feel to read it, I just trash it. Now it's kind of a habit. (I still do have articles saved in Pocket from several weeks before. But they are MUCH less.)
I agree with others, I would definitely recommend you try to meditate several times a week. Start at 15 mins every day & work your way up.
Also, exercise more!
There's a few things going on, and they're specific to me.
Primarily, I'm a judgmental person. And mostly to myself. I judge myself really hard for not doing enough or going fast enough. This book is teaching me to stop doing that, even though it may sound "heroic" to always push myself. I think I get that impression from elite athletes, and I think "well I should be doing that to myself so I can be the best at whatever I'm doing." At some point along the way, I forgot that most of what I learned wasn't the result of that type of thinking. I learned everything from speaking to programming simply by doing, and not by judging myself in the process.
I would also say I'm impatient, but I think that's the same thing as saying I'm judgmental.
This book is like written Adderall in that it causes the same calming effect. It teaches you that it's okay to slow down and just do, and not worry about anything else in the present moment. I know that sounds kind of cheesy and "Zen" like, but I definitely have (self diagnosed) ADHD and I operate on two modes: one where I'm being productive and doing, and one where I'm learning. It's really hard to context switch between the two. So it helps to know that when I'm learning, or doing certain types of activities that I'm not used to doing, it's okay to go slower and not stress out about my perceived lack of progress. The net result: my work IMO actually ends up being better, and interestingly I learn faster because I'm not trying to do that so much.
Hope this helps. Your experience may be different.