I remember sitting in my kitchen at 2:14 AM on a Tuesday in 2019. I had about fourteen tabs open. One was a 5,000-word guide on ‘optimizing your morning routine,’ another was a Reddit thread about the best mechanical keyboards for ‘coding flow,’ and the rest were various long-form essays I’d promised myself I’d read to stay ‘informed.’ My coffee was stone cold, my eyes felt like they had sand in them, and I realized something pathetic: I had spent four hours learning how to be productive without actually producing a single thing. Not a word. Not a line of code. Nothing.
I felt like a god while I was reading, though. That’s the trap. You feel like you’re gaining ground because your brain is firing off dopamine every time you hit a new ‘insight.’ But it’s a total lie. It’s mental masturbation. I went to bed that night feeling exhausted but ‘educated,’ and woke up the next day and did exactly what I always did—which was basically nothing of substance. I was a high-information, zero-output machine.
The massive lie we tell ourselves about ‘research’
We’ve been conditioned to think that more information always leads to better results. It doesn’t. In fact, after a very low threshold, more information just creates friction. It creates that paralyzing feeling where you have so many ‘best practices’ floating in your head that you can’t even start because you’re afraid of doing it ‘wrong.’ I call this the Research Trap. It’s a socially acceptable way to procrastinate. If you tell your boss or your spouse you’re ‘researching,’ they leave you alone. But you’re really just hiding.
I used to think I needed to know everything before I could start. I was completely wrong. What I actually needed was to shut up and try something, fail, and then look for the specific piece of information that would fix that failure. That is ‘just-in-time’ learning. What most of us do is ‘just-in-case’ learning, and 90% of that ‘just-in-case’ info is forgotten before we ever need it. It’s like buying a specialized wrench for a car you don’t even own yet. It’s stupid.
The more you consume, the less room you have to create. Your brain is a processor, not a hard drive.
I’ll be honest: I think most ‘thought leaders’ on LinkedIn and Twitter are actively making you worse at your job. They thrive on making things seem more complex than they are so you keep clicking. They want you in a state of perpetual preparation. It’s a parasitic relationship. You give them your attention; they give you a sense of false progress. Nobody wins except the platform’s ad department.
What a 20% diet actually looks like in practice
About two years ago, I decided to cut my consumption by roughly 80%. I didn’t do it scientifically at first, I just got pissed off and started deleting things. I tracked my ‘learning’ time for a week and realized I was spending 22 hours a week on ‘educational’ content. Twenty-two hours! That’s a part-time job. I cut it down to about 4 hours. Here is exactly what I did, and I know people will disagree with some of this, but it worked for me:
- Unsubscribed from 42 newsletters. I kept two. One that is purely technical for my job, and one from a guy who makes me laugh. Everything else—the ‘daily digests,’ the ‘curated insights’—went into the trash.
- Deleted the YouTube app from my phone. If I want to watch something, I have to sit at a desk. No more ‘learning’ while I’m on the toilet or standing in line at the grocery store.
- The ‘One Book’ Rule. I stopped reading three books at once. I pick one. I read it until I’m bored or finished. If I’m bored, I drop it. I don’t feel guilty. Life is too short for boring books.
- No news before 4 PM. Most news is just noise wrapped in urgency. If something truly world-ending happens, someone will text me.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. It’s not that the info is bad, it’s that we are weak. We don’t have the discipline to filter it, so we have to just block the pipes. My output didn’t just go up a little bit; it exploded. I finished a project in three weeks that had been sitting on my ‘to-do’ list for eighteen months. Turns out, when you aren’t reading about how to do work, you actually have the energy to do the work.
I might be wrong about books, but I doubt it
I’m going to say something that will probably get me some hate mail: Most non-fiction books should have been a blog post. No, wait, most should have been a tweet. We have this weird reverence for books, like they’re all sacred vessels of wisdom. Most of them are just 300 pages of fluff built around one decent idea because the publisher needed a certain spine thickness to justify the $28 price tag. I’ve stopped finishing books. If I get the gist by page 50, I’m out. I’ve saved hundreds of hours this way. It’s the best productivity ‘hack’ I’ve ever found.
I also refuse to use Notion. I know, everyone loves it. They spend weeks building these elaborate ‘Second Brains’ with databases and linked properties. It’s a glorified sticker book for adults. I spent $299 on a course about ‘Knowledge Management’ once and the only thing I learned was how to spend more money on courses. Now I use a plain text file or a physical notebook. If a piece of information is so fragile that it needs a complex database to be useful, it probably wasn’t that important to begin with. Total waste of time.
The part where I get a bit irrational
Anyway, I digress. I was talking about the diet. One thing I’ve noticed is that my mood improved significantly. When you stop consuming the constant stream of ‘everyone is doing better than you’ content, you realize your own life is actually okay. There’s this specific kind of anxiety that comes from knowing too much about what everyone else is thinking. It’s like having a hundred people screaming in your ear while you’re trying to paint a picture. You can’t hear your own thoughts.
I have this friend, let’s call him Mark. Mark is the ‘most informed’ person I know. He can tell you about the latest geopolitical shift in Eastern Europe, the newest AI model from some obscure startup in Paris, and the three best ways to biohack your sleep. Mark hasn’t started a business, written a book, or even finished a side project in the ten years I’ve known him. He’s a library that’s on fire. Lots of info, but no one can use it for anything. I don’t want to be Mark. I’d rather be the guy who knows one thing really well and actually builds something with it.
I’ve bought the same $12 Moleskine notebook four times now. I don’t care if there’s a better digital tool. I don’t care if there’s a ‘smarter’ way to take notes. This works for me because it’s limited. It has a physical end. That’s what we’re missing in the digital age—an end. There is always more to read. There is always another ‘essential’ video.
How to actually start today
Don’t ‘plan’ a low-information diet. Just stop. Pick one thing you consume every day that makes you feel slightly anxious or ‘behind’ and delete it. Right now. Don’t announce it. Don’t write a blog post about it (the irony isn’t lost on me). Just kill it.
I tested this with my screen time. I went from 6 hours a day down to 2.5 hours. I tracked this over three months and my actual work output—measured in completed tasks and revenue—went up by 40%. That’s not a coincidence. That’s 3.5 hours of my life I got back every single day. That’s nearly 25 hours a week. That’s a whole second life.
It’s going to feel uncomfortable at first. You’ll feel ‘out of the loop.’ You’ll be at a dinner party and someone will mention a meme or a news story you haven’t heard of, and you’ll feel like an idiot for ten seconds. Embrace it. Being the ‘uninformed’ person in the room is a superpower because it means you spent your time doing something else. You were building your own world instead of just watching someone else’s. That’s the whole trick.
I still struggle with it. Last Thursday, I found myself deep in a Wikipedia rabbit hole about the history of salt. I don’t need to know about salt. I had a deadline. I caught myself after twenty minutes, closed the tab, and felt that familiar pang of guilt. It’s a constant battle. But I’m winning more than I’m losing now.
Do you actually need to read that next article? Probably not.