“Although information overload is frequently discussed in the media—which help cause it—our dilemma is not that we receive too much information. We don’t receive anywhere near the quantity of data it takes to overload our neurons; our minds are capable of processing and analyzing many gigabits of data per second—a lot more data than any of today’s supercomputers can process and act on in real time. We feel flooded because we’re getting information UNFILTERED, unsorted, and unframed. We lack ways to select what’s important. The design task is to make information digestible, not to keep it out.”
John Thackara, In The Bubble
When you can filter and sort what your seeing and give it a larger contextual framework to sit within, suddenly everything comes into view.
So it’s not about not creating small, unfiltered daily notes, similar to what people use social media for. These are essential as a foundation, forming the base of your mountain.
But what is essential is to create other filtered perspectives that do give you a larger view of what you’re expressing and playfully working towards.
What is this filter, this lens, that you’re creating and constructing?
It’s your worldview.
BTW what’s also interesting is how Tim Denning has named his publication Unfiltered. In effect, if you want to step out of your current worldview, you have have to let go of the lens of it and its filters, stepping down into an unfiltered flow of information. Yet to make sense of a new worldview, a new perspective, an a newer way of being, you need to climb back out of the flow again and make some structured sense of it, creating a new filter in the process.
This mirrors what Dave Gray talks about in his book Liminal Thinking, when he says you need to step out of your bubble of belief, down the ladder of inference and then up the same ladder of inference to effective stand within a newer, larger worldview.
Once you’re high agency your mind becomes like a filter. You have one true purpose and everything that doesn’t align with it goes in the trash.
It means you live true to who you are and know what you stand for. You’re congruent with who you are, so you act authentically and people bizarrely praise you for this authenticity.
Tim Denning, The Secret Life of People with High Agency