What is the best way to find and process information?

Alex Davidson

• 8 min read
What is the best way to find and process information?

It can make your head spin, all the books, articles, podcasts and YouTube videos that you could possibly process, more than you could cover in 1000 lifetimes. How do you find the best stuff? How do you process it? and how do you act on it?

There are a lot of sources that provide exceptionally insightful information. I divide the content I process into a few main categories:

1. Books

2. Articles: Including Newspapers and Blogs

3. Podcasts

4. YouTube

5. Academic publications

Many others have spent a lot, lot more time thinking and talking about this, notably Tiago Forte, Ali Abdaal and David Allen in Getting things done. I’ll be describing the system that I use. Having a good system for finding and using the best information out there can improve our lives significantly.

There are 3 main steps to this process:

1. Finding information

2. Processing information

3. Actioning information

Finding information

If you can’t find information, the most useful and insightful content may as well not exist for you. I’ll go through my funnel for each of the main sources.

Books

As written in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: “The genuine love for reading itself , when cultivated , is a superpower . We live in the age of Alexandria , when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away . The means of learning are abundant — it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.”

What are the most efficient ways to build new mental models? Read a lot—just read. Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

I divide the books I read into a few main categories: fiction classics, non-fiction classics, productivity, general interest non-fiction, fun fiction. The sources that I have for these are pretty varied. Because classics have been around for a while and have very strong cultural integration, it's not too difficult to come up with a list that should go into this. Books like this include The Republic, The Odyssey, War & Peace and Beyond Good and Evil. I also have a good book called The Penguin Classics Book which I skim for inspiration. Naval Ravikant also wrote how how classics are insightful and advocates for them very well:

“There is ancient wisdom in books. When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution. If you’re trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane, you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created in the modern age and the solution is great in the modern age. If you’re talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better. Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct.”

I sometimes use a few reading lists from the websites of those that I admire. Including James Clear, Derek Sivers, Tim Ferris, Ryan Holiday, Naval Ravikant, Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, Ray Kurzweil, Max Tegmark, Elon Musk and Yuval Noah Harari.

Lastly I get a lot of good book recommendations through Goodreads (essentially Facebook for books), seeing what my friends are reading on there and what they think of them is a fantastic source of inspiration. It also offers pretty good recommendations based on what you have read already.

My method for consolidating all the books I plan on reading includes a reading list on my phone in Apple Notes with the next 100 or so books I plan on reading and my Goodreads account that has all books I ever want to read saved.

Articles

The sources for finding articles mostly include Twitter and Newsletters. Good Twitter accounts I follow are Stefan Schubert and Noah Smith for Economics and Geopolitics, Science is Strategic for Science and Business, Paul Graham for Startups. Mustafa Sultan, Chris Lovejoy, Eric Topol and Pranav Rajupur for MedTech and AI in Medicine.

Good Email Newsletters include Dr Penguin for AI in Medicine, TLDR for business and science and The Daily Stoic for daily reminders of stoic philosophy. Any time I see an articles that looks interesting, I save them to a fantastic app called Instapaper, which syncs across all your devices and lets you save any online article for reading at a later date and even lets you download them for use offline, you can even put them into folders by category and arrange them in the order that you want to read them.

Wait but Why is another fantastic blog, covering lots of topics around history and science. The author, Tim Urban was specifically asked by Elon Musk to write about each of his companies, best posts are: AI: The road to superintelligence, Neuralink and the brain’s magical future, How Tesla will change the world, How SpaceX will colonise Mars.

Podcasts

The quantity and quality of podcasts have exploded over the last few years, a wide range of people from David Tennent to Sam Harris host podcasts. I mostly find these through word of mouth and Twitter. I listen to them with Spotify because it allows you to listen to them at x2.5 speed and lets you have playlists for your podcasts. I've got my favourite podcasts below:

AI in Medicine

MedTech and Medicine in general

  • Big Picture Medicine - interviews with business leaders in the healthcare start-up space.
  • Huberman Lab - Andrew Huberman (Stanford School of Medicine Professor of Neurobiology) interviews world class experts on all aspects of health.

General Interest

YouTube

Similar to podcasts, there has been an explosion in what is out there. YouTube gives you the option to have a load of different folders, usually what I do here is when I see a video that I like the look of I save it to one of the various folders I have.

AI in Medicine

General Interest

Academic papers

My main sources for finding good academic publications that focus on AI in Medicine are Twitter, word of mouth and email newsletters.

Good Twitter accounts include Eric Topol, Pranav Rajupur, Chris NEJM, James Zou, Musty and Chris Lovejoy. Good email newsletters include The Batch, Doctor Penguin and GroundTruths.

Processing Information

This is where my system becomes a lot less systematic, I usually end up processing whatever information appears most interesting to me at any point that I have a free moment.

The most useful tools I have in this are my Kindle and Apple AirPods Pro. Anytime that I have a free moment to myself, I put the AirPods in and will either listen to an audiobook, podcast or an article (Instapaper now has an option to read out articles to your headphones). I don’t get too many opportunities to just sit and read something other than just before bed, which I try to do every day with the Kindle. However, I get a lot of times where I am doing an activity that can have information playing in the background. After reading a Newsletter from Ali Abdaal in May 2020, I listen to all my audiobooks and podcasts at double speed. It sounds a bit odd initially but I mostly listen to information now at x2.5 to x2.8 speed and slow it down when I get to a really good bit in a book or podcast. Frequent use of the back 15 seconds button is also essential to make this work.

When reading any of the information that really resonates with me I’ll try and capture that information for later use. For books, the kindle app has a fantastic feature where you can highlight sections and export them as a text file.

Podcasts unfortunately don’t have an easy way of effortlessly recording the information within them, it would be great to have an app for podcasts that allows you to open up to the transcript of where you are in it and highlight the part that you find interesting. Currently, if there is a part of a podcast that I find reality interesting or insightful. I paraphrase what is being said and put that note into my document that I have on that podcast.

Articles, YouTube videos and academic papers have a similar process. If I find any information that seems particularly interesting or useful, I’ll highlight it or write a quick summary of it and put it into my “In-tray” in Apple notes. Later, I’ll go through that information and add it to Obsidian, a note taking system that allows linking between notes. You can create a page for a topic and one for the information source and link between the notes to cross pollinate ideas between topic and information sources. A good illustration of this is written on this blog here. The main benefit is that it will future proof your writing because it saves all of the information locally as a plain text file making it significantly easier to export to other digital formats in the future.

Tiago Forte, calls collecting this information “Building a second brain". It allows you to externalise your memory, freeing up mental space. As David Allen wrote in getting things done “your mind is for having ideas, not holding them”. With improved organisation and retrieval, you can quickly access stored information allowing you to integrate various sources of information. You can capture insights and bring them together in one place. This integration helps cross-referencing, connecting ideas between topics, and synthesising new knowledge, leading to more comprehensive understanding and creative thinking. These two videos show how having a second brain can be useful for whatever you are working on.

The key here though is that your information is actionable, you want to collect information that is relevant to your projects and store it somewhere that you can find it easily.

Actioning Information

You don’t have to be a blogger or a podcaster to action content, most developed economies are becoming increasingly focused on providing services and most workers within those economies are knowledge workers, where your thinking is your main economic output. Storing your information based on projects means that you will have a direct link between the information and where it could be used. It’s great to collect interesting information but unless it’s used on a project, it isn’t serving us much purpose. Building up a second brain over time will allow you to have top quality information easy to hand for a project you are working on. This process can be useful whenever you are working on any kind of work that requires creativity. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Economics Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman argues that creativity is simply the ability to draw connections between seemingly unrelated areas.

An additional type of information storage that I get particular value from is having notes on topics I really want to give a lot of thought to. These include considerations such as how to be happy, how to have great relationships with my friends and family, what my core values are and what my attitude towards money should be. Adding insights to these notes over time can help me think about these with greater depth and help me figure out where my own beliefs sit on these topics.

By building up a second brain you can enhance your creativity by increasing the depth and breadth of the connections you can draw between topics, allowing you to have insights that might not have been found before.

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