There are a few tricks:

Todo/Note dichotomy:

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Doing away with "todo" and "note" dichotomy can be useful. I use TaskWarrior[0] to add "tasks", but also "notes". I have them organized in projects, tags such as +musing, +engineering, +read, +watch, etc.

I'm watching an interview of someone relevant and they mention a book?

task add +read "X book mentioned by Y in interview with Z: youtube.com/..."

The dump of these notes formed the seed of our company's knowledge base and it continues to feed it and refine it.

The tasks are in a `.task` directory that is a repo. I have an alias to push them:

function tupd() {
git -C ~/.task commit -a -m "Update tasks $(whoami)@$(hostname)"
git -C ~/.task push
}

I can pull in my tasks and notes from my devices. I can search them by tag, by project, by word or regular expression. You can set due dates, start dates, etc. So you set three or four important tasks for the next day. It will sort them by an urgency score. It is one of those tool you could get started with using one command, but you can do a lot of things.

If you're working on a project, you have a nice knowledge base consisting of book titles, articles, interviews, talks, remarks, ideas, etc.

I have a script that exports work related notes into Markdown and pushes to a temporary repository for all my colleagues to see. Then we transfer that into proper issues, or our knowledge base.

Curate:

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Relevant entities often link to relevant entities. Entities being a person, book, video, movie, etc. When I discover a person who's good at something, I assign a higher weight to the entities they mention. For example, I watch an interview of someone who's good at something and they casually mention a book. I'll add that to my tasks and the book's author as an entity with a relevance score higher they would have been assigned without the recommendation. If the book author or book mention or cite an entity, I do the same.

Consume quality content. Find the relatively few N most relevant sources, human or otherwise, and then expand the graph from there.

Increases signal to noise ratio by increasing the signal.

Eliminate:

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I block sites from my search results with "Personal Blocklist" extension. For example, the dominant blog/outlet in data science churns out content written by data virgins; that is, people who have never touched data. Whenever you search for something, this website dominates search results. Therefore I have blocked it so I don't see it.

If you use Twitter, a similar thing works. There are profiles that are too noisy [enthusiasting/audience building/influencing] and I am better informed when I do not meet that content.

Increases signal to noise ratio by reducing noise. It's easier in a field where the overwhelming majority of content is garbage and it's trivial to tell garbage from good. Fast triage.

Reading web pages:

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The "Just Read" extension[1] is a great extension. I have to read a lot, especially when diving into a domain for a client. This extension enables me to hit Ctrl + Shift + L and it changes the page's layout to a standardized sub 80 characters with a big font where I can just read the main content. The effect is amazing and appeasing. The first time I did that I sighed of relief.

Video:

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Here are tips for watching videos[2].

TL;DR: "Video Speed Controller" extension[3] to watch at 16x speed videos where slides are on the screen. This makes it possible to know in 4 minutes if a one hour video is worth watching based on the "slides" on the screen. If it's good, you can then invest one hour watching it. If not, eliminate it. You can therefore go through a backlog of videos you added in your task with a +watch tag very quickly.

"YouTube Captions Search"[4]: when you're on a YouTube video, click on the extension and search for a keyword or a sentence. It'll display all the timestamps where that word is said and you can estimate the density, or go directly to the segment of interest.

Doing this drastically reduces your non-productive-watch-time and increases the signal to noise ratio. You'll eliminate irrelevant videos really fast.

So, when you're on something and you think a video is relevant but you don't have time, add it to the tasks (backlog). When you have time, go over the videos. Discard what's irrelevant. Invest in what is relevant.

Block and batch:

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Blocking time is useful to get things done. For example, if you want to read something or go over a guide/tutorial, block one hour hour and commit not to do anything except that for that hour. You do things by not doing things.

There are things that have a due date, whether you like it or not. They must happen by a certain date or time. These are okay.

Focus:

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Something has got to give. Items have different priorities, importance, potential, urgency, etc. Items that are similar in nature ought to be batched. For example, in most cases, you're better off lining up calls/meetings in contiguous time blocks instead of sprinkling them (week or day).

If you're having too many of those, improve writing, documentation, and information dissemination. There are many meetings we're not having simply because we put a lot of effort into making information flows to everyone [meeting minutes from last year with clients and potential investors in another continent are in Markdown in a repo management, and everyone can see them in a familiar template we use for everything].

Our video calls are recorded and disseminated so people can refer back to them without the need for another call to remember. We collaboratively edit the file during the call. We prototype, fix bugs, add features during the call sometimes. We make sure to make them count.

Generally speaking: not reading/watching bad books/papers/movies makes time for better ones.

Money is also an effective instrument to make time.

- [0]: https://taskwarrior.org/

- [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-read/dgmanlpm...

- [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25301518

- [3]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

- [4]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-captions-s...