3. Routinized information input model
Now start sorting out how your time is passing, and evaluate and redesign it
First, organize your daily information acquisition platforms and the time you spend on each platform.
Second, think about what your motivation is behind these behaviors. For example, is it emotional motivation? Such as killing time, fear of missing something new, releasing stress, looking for curious info, looking for fun, etc. Or is it a use motivation category? For example, follow some opinion leaders who think they will bring valuable insights, subscribe to the news, and comment on the market to track the dynamics of the companies they invest in, etc.
Third, evaluate the time you spend as mentioned above and strictly control the proportion of information in the emotional value category. This is because the current business model of most platforms is passive recommend and push, and it is the nature of such a business model to occupy users’ attention.
From a statistical point of view, most users’ emotional value is excessive and easily manipulated by the producer and mechanism of platforms, resulting in time, attention, cognition, money, and decisions being seriously affected.
Therefore, thinking outside the box, redesigning your information intake, and avoiding the above effects is crucial. Now immediately evaluate the percentage of time you spend on information intake of emotional value. You may find it is surprisingly high. But what about the real emotional value it brings to you (e.g., releasing stress)? Research shows that different sources of stress require different types of release. When you’re swiping news and interesting short videos, time just passes and your attention is occupied too much, instead, you get more tired. Oh yeah, maybe you end up spending money because it’s really an ad or deliberate volume-generating content. Why else would the creator go to the trouble of making you watch this interesting video?
Fourth, recognized and categorized the users you follow. A user’s subscription mechanism will make that user’s content resident in your daily info stream. Therefore, please be careful with this type of behavior of following and subscribing. Learn to value your attention and don’t sell your precious attention and time cheaply (e.g., more and more business models are chasing active volume, making it now a very cheap behavior).
And then, once we have structured our information input model, how to routinize and operationalized it daily is an often ignored but important issue. Since we can’t live without information taking daily, if we only focus on what we should do and ignore the results, i.e., how to strategically design behavioral processes to better help us make them routine and sustainable, so that they eventually produce long-lasting benefits, it will result in unproductive results.
Therefore, we should focus on the behavior’s cost and payoff. Thinking about this in terms of human behavior design can help beyond expectations. Several areas can help you think about this.
-Massively streamline and categorize your following users. Define what value you’re getting from this person and what level of attention is appropriate. In short, treat your information flow like your project metrics.
-Streamline and categorized your daily information acquisition platforms. Filter your platforms carefully and be clear about the type of information you get on that platform. This need to be taken seriously because the amount of information that is duplicated and ported leads to a lot of abuse of our attention by different platforms. Take this seriously. For example, if the publishers of your professional type of information are active on platform A, it is not wise to expect to waste time daily on the referral stream on platform C.
-Use automated tools to centralize fragmented information and flexible adjust capture strategies to improve efficiency and quality. For example, I, including many of my friends, build automated tools to help filter and organize information. The benefits of doing this are huge, saving a lot of time while also being able to adjust strategies and algorithms at any time. This helps you to gain an information advantage from a large amount of fragmented information in the public channel. For example, in the emerging field of web3, which developed very fast, the source is very fragmented as well, and the quality varies. There are many automated information screening and integration tools. Partners with certain development skills can even achieve a certain degree of self-iteration. It’s very flexible.
There is very much to share about building automated information filtering tools, as it is about how to build a valuable information capture network. For example, the network is first composed of relevant information nodes, how to use some strategies to find these nodes, how to determine the quality of the information in nodes, and how to determine the quality of the information in one node over another, etc.)
Regarding such tools, they can be designed as strategic products. I have also made some considerations before. The main value of those products is to help people improve the quality and efficiency of information screening. Maybe later put into the project pool for further planning.
4. Capturing randomness
After taking the 80-90% share into daily use, a more advanced model needs to be actively designed with a certain percentage of randomness. On this point, it is a principle that I personally use in many cognitive models. The active inclusion of randomness is essential, just as an iterative recommendation system needs to include variables to infer and expand the boundaries of user preference, randomness is necessary for many simulations to grow and evolve.
In my worldview, consciously adding randomness is also my way of respecting the uncertainty of complex systems. After all, what we can determine and plan for will always be insignificant compared to the chaos beyond the set. So, be sure to design a certain amount of redundancy into your information capture model to leave it unknown, and perhaps, just in retrospect, these uncertainties are what drive many things forward.