Open the firehose, don’t drown in the shallows

(I’m trying to write book notes compilations one section at a time. One excerpt per day with the goal of filling one iA Writer screen up. About 350 words.)

This week, I’m focusing on Apprenticeship Patterns, by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. Dave and Adewale talk about software as a craft and give guidance on how you can improve as a craftsman. It’s targeted toward developers, but a bunch of it applies to designers. (And even beyond that.)

One of the patterns is called “Expand your bandwidth”:

Expanding your ability to take in new information is a critical, though sometimes overwhelming, step for apprentices. You must develop the discipline and techniques necessary to efficiently absorb new information, as well as to understand it, retain it, and apply it.

They discuss setting up Google Reader to consume RSS feeds. They discuss one of the pitfalls that seems all too common today:

It’s possible to become obsessed with gathering and consuming new information, particularly as it becomes easier and easier to get at up-to-the-second thoughts on the most prolific thinkers in our industry. Some people could become lost in the sea of interesting information, and never come back to actually crafting software.

The book is from 2009 and there’s no mention of Twitter for keeping up with the latest information. That said, I was a pretty heavy Reader user and was just as addicted or even more so I ever was of Twitter. Reader made a lot of full content readily available.

One day, I remember stepping back and thinking, “Do I really need to see basically the exact same news from Engadget and Gizmodo?” That started the culling and then I was able to really cut things down and then eventually accept that I don’t need to read every. single. thing.

Because there’s value in all the available information out there, it might seem like a good idea to seek out as much of it as possible. Cal Newport discusses this in his book Deep Work:

This argument, however, misses the key point that all activities, regardless of their importance, consume your same limited store of time and attention. If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit.

It’s important to remember that time taken by shallow activities could be applied to more important activities. Having taken extended breaks from different social media, there’s major FOMO. It goes away once you realize enough times that you never really miss much.