When so much knowledge is produced every day, how do you keep up?

Between newsletters, podcasts, Youtube videos, (tech) news, articles, and (of course) books, how does one keep up with it?

I currently try to read long-form content that requires deep focus in the morning before work (30-45 mins depending on my day). Then during the day I have some breaks and read newsletters and other posts. Videos and podcasts are difficult for me to consume, as they are often a bit too padded with small talk and non-essential conversational information, but I sometimes listen to them when I work out or while I cook. I recently started taking notes when I read, I would like to extend this system into rewriting my synthesis in Obsidian or Notion.

However, despite all, I feel my reading list keeps growing and I'm always catching up with what happens in our field, but as if I'm always a few steps behind. There are many more articles and books that would make me better as a professional, but I simply don't have time to go through them. (Not to mention other topics I'd like to learn aside from my work, or simply read for pleasure.)

So my question is: how do you keep up? How do you stay up-to-date in your own profession?

And I mean it both in terms of your approach/methodology (e.g. when do you read and what, how do you retain information, what aids to reading/bookmarking do you use) but also in terms of the mental aspect/wellbeing (how much is "good enough" for you? How do you keep yourself from being overwhelmed? Do you feel energized by reading?).

Accept it. Let it go. The useful stuff will bubble up over time anyway. A useful concept will be useful months later too. Unless you're fighting for survival in the research around the latest tech (like actually ai research, not playing with APIs), you can likely ignore the day to day things. And I'm saying that as someone who enjoys learning the day to day things.

1. Treat it as a stream - you can't catch all of it as there is so much info, just catch something interesting, read it, and don't stress out if you didn't catch something else. There will always be something else to read.

2. Most of the sources you've mentioned are push-based - i.e. someone else is pushing this new info onto you (newsletters, youtube, podcasts, news). This increases FOMO. Instead, try to implement a pull-based approach and only seek and read info that is relevant to what you want to learn, read. It's a lot harder than it seems, but my guess it's harder due to default.

Last year, I re-tried[1] the experiment of not using the internet for entertainment for a few months, only for work and life admin. To catch up with news, I subscribed to a paper-based weekly newspaper. If there is something important in the world, you will find out about it, someone will tell you. But this will help a ton with anxiety and mental health.

The other thing I realised - when I listen to podcast and go into info overload, I get burned out a lot quicker. Listening to podcasts while working is the worst. I removed all podcast subscriptions and only started adding those that I want to listen + limit when I listen to these episodes.

[1] https://oleggera.com/blog/life-with-no-internet/

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Several level of reading and bookmarking. I don't need to consume everything. Sometimes I just store a reference to the content in case I need it. Sometimes, I do a quick overview. I only give my full attention to a few thing.

Another practical tip is strengthening up you foundations. If you're interested in programming languages, once you learned the theory behind them, you'll find it's faster to learn new ones. Textbooks are great for this. This day, I don't care about most content, as there are few that are more than a sliver of insight.