I’m working through Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals. It’s a forty-day journey through how to embrace your finitude and find peace in the midst of a world inundated with information and ought-tos.
Chapter Five (or Day Five, as he delineates it), is titled “Too much information – On the art of reading and not reading. One of the overwhelming stats he brings into the chapter is that the entire Library of Alexandria is estimated to have 12Gigabytes of information and estimates of how much information is at our fingertips is over 100 Trillion Gigiabytes. Let me put that in numerical form to get the hit.
1 Gigabytes = ~1000 bytes
1 Terabyte = ~1000 Gigabytes = ~1,000,000 bytes
Library of Alexandria: 12,000,000,000 bytes
2024 Internet: 100,000,000,000,000 bytes
The question is not how you can consume all that information. It is, “How are you going to filter through all that information?” There is no possible way to go through all the podcasts, audiobooks on 2x 24 hours, 7 days/week. There is no way to scroll through that much information, even if you stayed up 24 hours, 7 days/week.
I am interested in giving you practical advice to help you in manageable ways. Of course, there’s another post that merits being written that helps you decide what is most valuable to you, but I wanted to give you, as I call it in the title, one efficiency hack.
I am grateful for social media. I, of course, know its dangers. But I have made friends across the world because of social media. I have found like-minded people because the algorithm decided to put them in my feed.
My hack for you today is to cleanse your social media usage to serve you and not to enslave you. How?
First you have to decide what your IG is for. Is it for you to stay connected with friends and family? Or, are you like me, and use it to learn from and interact and discover others and their ideas you don’t know? This hack will work for either purpose. The algorithm can be your friend. You just have to train it.
The algorithm is set up to get you to stay on the platform as long as possible. Therefore, it is going to show you content that you like. Therefore, once you decide how you are going to use it, you need to go on your Following list and begin to unfollow people who don’t fit the bill for how you’re going to use it.
[NOTE: You may want to put up a nice, clear post that says you are reconfiguring how you use social media so people aren’t offended when you unfollow them.]
It’s that simple…but you may have not considered that.
Inevitably, in my Discover tab, there are a host of things I don’t want to see. I use the handy “Not Interested” to make sure the algorithm stays trained to keep me out of the spots where I don’t want to be.
One step further, choose 5-10 Favorites and mark them as such. Begin to interact with them in the comments or by re-posting or saving their content.
In a matter of a week, your algorithm should be trained to send you stuff that is more relevant to you. And this will further help you sift through all the noise of social media. Instead of silly cat videos (no judgment if that’s your thing), I have used it to brush up on my skills and learn new skills in education and business.