Ask HN: How Do You Optimize Your Intake of Information?

But, yeah, you can't keep up with it all. Worse, with varied interests, you have more than one "all" to try to keep up with. You can't. You just can't. There's too much. It's not humanly possible to keep up with it all.

So you have to cheat. The way I cheat may not work for anyone else, but here's what I do: For general news, I look at Google News and Reuters. I look at headlines, and only read the article if I am interested in knowing more. (Often the headline tells me all I need to know.) For technical stuff, I look at HN. I just look at headlines unless I find the topic interesting. For hobbies, I have similar sites where I can just scan the new topics. This keeps me "up to date" while taking very little time.

For something like a book or a movie, I can read Wikipedia's summary if I want to know what it was about. A couple minutes vs two hours for the movie? (If I actually want to watch a movie, I'll watch it. If I just want to find out what it was about because I'm curious? Wikipedia.)

as for the original question: a) as far as optimizing, I think that approaching the optimal state is less important than making improvements to a consistent performance ethic. Better to do something a little better every day than to miss days trying to do it better than everybody else. b) with information, I tend to focus on information that relates to a particular goal relevant to job performance or general wellbeing and then take notes on any new information and review prior notes relevant to the newest information in order to build an intuitive mental logical structure of the problem/goal and all of its moving parts. But since so few things are scientifically provable, I try to "bet" on certain things based on how more or less likely they are and an informal cost-benefit analysis