🧠 Reduce the noise, make space for progress

How successful people manage information

Nov 19, 2023

You are on-call and your pager is ringing every 5 minutes. There are dashboards with graphs everywhere. Every metric has a different color.

Not ideal, huh? I just described what you find on social media.

I’m not perfect and I don’t have the truth. But in this post, I’ll show you how I try to act like successful people I admire.

I am not proud of the fact that some of my e-mail goes unanswered. (…)
I am faced with a stark choice between being a bad correspondent and being a good novelist. I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent. — Neal Stephenson

Your brain stores and processes information. It’s a computer with its CPU, RAM, and hard drive.

Sadly, it’s single-threaded. You can only focus on one thing at a time.

But luckily, it’s asynchronous! Something you have thought before stays in the background and when an idea emerges, it comes to your mind

You have a limited amount of RAM available. It’s volatile, and transferring to hard drive is costly. If you are constantly exchanging new information in and out, you don’t allow your CPU to store it in permanent storage. There’s data loss.

When moving information in and out, some leftovers reduce your real storage capacity.

And to complete the inefficiencies, your brain can’t store a reminder for later and get that info pushed to it. Instead, it’s polling it constantly until the cognitive loop is resolved. This takes resources that could be used for something better.

Your brain hardware may not be optimal. I encourage you to listen to Dr. Daniel Amen about it. But it’s usually at a decent level, the problem is how you use it. That’s why you feel cognitive fatigue

Your undivided attention is the most precious currency in the universe. - A life engineered

🚴 Change your actions

To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time… it needs a lot of concentration… if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everyone I don’t do anything. If anyone asks me to be on a committee for admissions, “no,” I tell them: I’m irresponsible. - Richard Feynman

1️⃣ Become hard to reach

Remove 24/7 availability expectations. Even when on-call, if someone needs you in a minute they can page you.

Your email and Slack are a message queue. Messages arrive and get stored outside of your brain.

When you decide to dedicate computing power to them, you start consuming from the queue. You want to process them, not to waste CPU power to end up putting them back to the queue.

You don’t have to consume them all. You don’t have to consume them constantly.

Find what works for you. You can mute notifications. Instead of answering a great answer in Slack, post it in some public forum if nobody has done it before for future reference.

2️⃣ Low-information diet

I bet you wouldn’t want a Bitcoin miner to get compute capacity from you for free. You don’t want your resources to be used for other people’s benefit.

Don’t round-robin your time between email, Slack, small talk with people in the coffee machine, and meetings.

Let’s be honest, most information you can live without.

I saw yesterday a bunch of people going with flags to a protest march. Only then I decided to check what the hell were they protesting against. Probably the news on TV are opening with it each day. I decided to not join that game.

I even missed that in Spain we changed the hour to winter time in October. All my devices change it for me, I don’t have to dedicate computing capacity to it. Luckily this change gave me an extra hour of sleep, no wonder I felt so good that day. To combat against the FOMO, practice the JOMO (the Joy of Missing Out)

”People commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues” - Parkinson

3️⃣ Content that makes you focus

Action movies apply fast scene transitions to keep you hooked on the action moments. Have you noticed how 10-minute YouTube videos change and make a cut every 3 to 5 seconds? Same on shorts, reels, and TikTok.

You already know that multitasking is bad. Yet you never thought that scrolling your social media feed is making your brain switch between contexts, people, and topics. Yes, scrolling a social media feed is multi-tasking.

I’m not going to say tech is bad. I benefited from it to start this newsletter. Usage without control is the bad part

Books and podcasts are great ways to train your brain to stay focused. I also liked newsletters it’s certainly a longer time commitment per piece of content than scrolling a social media feed, with less context switching. I feel better after reading Substack newsletters for 15 minutes than after reading LinkedIn for 15 minutes.

4️⃣ Process-centric communication

There’s a concept of asking questions the Amazon way: You lay out your problem, everything you already tried, your findings, and your next steps.

This is quite a lot of work upfront, but you reduce ping-pong messaging. Your brain doesn’t have to keep the open loop of this conversation.

In your communication, be process-centric. Focus on providing clear actions instead of just answering your opinion. If you don’t have authority, frame it as your proposal.

Like in code reviews, don’t end your communication with a question mark. That means you are pushing responsibility to the other person instead of proposing something.

👉 Share these actions with that person you were thinking about while reading

🥊 My personal fight

I got my LinkedIn account blocked for a day because of using a 3rd party extension that hides notifications.

Let me tell you something from working at a big company: If a small issue happens with a ridiculously small impact, nobody prioritizes it.

So imagine how big it is for a company like LinkedIn to keep you hooked.

It’s crazy how often they refresh the red dot of the notifications. I could cycle between reading a couple of posts and checking that notification forever. I feel like I’m making progress, but the end is nowhere near.

My dopamine is going crazy because I want to achieve inbox zero and be caught up with everything.

But I can’t, I give up on that fight. There are fights not worth having. I acknowledge I am not in control when I log in to LinkedIn.

I can control my time outside of their platform. Having a website blocker, doing my time-block planning so I schedule my time online

But once you are inside, you have no control. That’s why your mom didn’t want you to go with the guys that drank and smoked at age 14. Sure, she believes in you not wanting to do those things and just be around. But once you are with them, you are subject to their influence.

Find a hook to get you out, like having a hard stop for a meeting or to go to work. I put an alarm in my phone out of arm’s reach. If I don’t want the alarm ringing, I’ll have to break my focus from the screen, stand up, and stop the alarm. That unhooks me.

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👔 How successful people apply this

Bill Gates does “Think Weeks”. He disappears for a week a few times a year, with his pile of books. He reads, thinks, and reflects.

J.K. Rowling went to hotels to finish her book, isolated from any media

Neal Stephenson doesn’t have an email on his website. Cal Newport has some emails for people to send articles and he opens that once in a while.

I bet you know about these people. Controlling your use of tech is not about becoming a dinosaur. There’s a sense of pride in craftsmanship. Becoming an artisan proud of your work. Be it code, writing, or art, be proud of what you produce.

Craftsmanship is the state of knowing how to do something well and is the outcome of good tutelage and lots of experience. Until recently, the software industry had far too little of either. Programmers tended not to remain programmers for long, because they viewed programming as a stepping stone into management. … The result has been that most programmers never learn the disciplines, standards, and ethics that could define their craft. - Robert C Martin in “Clean Craftsmanship”

🎯 Conclusion

How you do anything is how you do everything.

I found it impossible to become better at managing Slack and email at work if I couldn’t manage my social media in my personal life.

I don’t care if you are wearing the work hat or the personal life hat. You are the same person, with the same brain patterns. There’s no real separation between work and life because you are in both.

Improve yourself and improve everything around you