Stop sending me this shit

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Some people feel anxiety or stress when many other professionals share a lot of content. Hours and hours of books, posts, videos, courses, and a lot of stuff that you can simply no digest. I would like to share some tips about my “method” about this topic and interesting things that I had found.

My main premise is that we all have different technical paths, and value is relative, but in my case, get the right content at the right moment is the most important.

Timing

I just consider 3 moments: past (T-1), now (T0), and future(T+1).

  • Rule 1: Te only window of time that your path can consume resources is the now (T0). So you only should ingest the resources that are aligned with your window of time interests.

Note: If you do not have defined anything, maybe you should start by asking yourself that. Maybe you are stressed because you do not have a definition of what do you really want first.

  • Rule 2: If you read T-1 content, you will read content that is not really relevant to you. Sometimes you need to refresh concepts, but in general, I try to discard everything that I already know.

  • Rule 3: If you read T+1 content, you will read content that you are not ready for. This is dangerous and can cause you anxiety.

Do not trust anyone

If you are a person that likes to read good content, and you appreciate your time, every time a person sending you a resource is putting a rock in your back bag.

  • Rule 4: Do not make other’s work. Do not ingest recommended resources that had not consumed yet by the person that recommends them first. You can simply disarm this by asking, what is it about? If the answer is, “I had not finished it yet” or something like that, just discard it. Obviously, apply this to yourself.

  • Rule 5: Avoid sources that do not take it seriously or just spam marketing stuff. Avoid twitter recommendations, normally people retweet posts/ videos only to support followers’ threads, not becouse they worth.

  • Rule 6: Exam your sources. One good resource does not guaranty another good resource.

  • Rule 7: Read bad reviews first, this can save you a lot of time.

  • Rule 8: Difference between being in touch with content, and read the content. In my experience, 90% of RSS traffic is just shit content, but it does not mean that I’m not subscribed to it.

The good shit always returns

Sometimes this is true. If you have a lot of doubts about an specific recomendation you can apply this rule:

  • Rule 9: Discard everything by default. at least that it is repeated by two different persons.

Get the real thing

The best content is got by asking directly to the people for content. This means proactively acting, not reacting.

  • Rule 10: Ask people about the books or the things that changed their career, for example, what are the most 1/3 relevant books of your career?. Maybe, some of this can fit in your T0, someday.

Prioritize

Depending on your weekly ingest, you could still have a lot of resources even before applying some of these rules. The next steps should be to prioritize and discard. For this, I take in to account:

  1. Validate long and middle therm impact. Example: an 8 hours course.
  2. I’m discovering or I’m refreshing content?
  3. Is it aligned with my current interests/goals?
  4. If it’s a very new topic or discipline, is there a path I’m going to follow? or I’m just satisfying my curiosity? Example: a resource about UX while I’m a backend engineer.
  5. This resource will help me become more expert?
  6. This resource will help me become more polyvalent?

Be extremely careful about which content you invest your time in, and which content you let be in your cognitive load. The lighter baggage you carry the faster you travel.