Something I've noticed myself doing a lot is getting into article wormholes - where, similar to people getting in wormholes on Youtube, I would just read endless articles from an author, until suddenly it's 2 AM and my eyes refuse to open. While it's a fun experience, more often than not I ended up forgetting everything the next day and learnt nothing from it all despite feeling like I'm productive (i.e. productivity porn). Here's what I'm doing to make the experience a bit more useful:

1. Take notes as I read. Suddenly reading articles become just a tad more painful, which is great because I become more selective with what I read, and also have a vessel for insights.
2. Take time to paraphrase and link up with topics of interests. This is the foundation of Personal knowledge management for those familiar, but I'm just getting started and exploring how it works for me. So if I read a Paul Graham's article for instance, I would tag it with #startups in Obsidian, and link it to another blog I've read in Nancy Hua's blog. This means later on, I can access these bits of knowledge more easily.
3. Repeat the process. Overtime I have my own repertoire of knowledge on topics I'm interested in, that will come useful when I need them.

I'm fully aware that it's entirely possible my notes will just be another version of the productivity porn, this time with bi-directional linksTM! But if we think of knowledge as a cycle of discovering => consuming => storing =>repackaging & innovating => sharing and repeat, before I was consuming the content and was fully dependent on my brain to store the process and repackage it. But the brain is horrible at remembering! So when I'm externalizing my storage space, I'm also allowing for the later process, the repackaging and innovating part, to happen easier. The discovery part as well, since technically it's entirely possible for us to "rediscover" knowledge at the exact time when we need them.¹

This also works with Youtube, which I've started for some topics (eg. web development). I still use Youtube mainly as my entertainment source though, so I obviously don't take a lot of notes there. While it's tempting to obsess over every minute of my life trying to make it as productive as possible, (at least at the moment) that's not what I'm trying to do.

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