“… forgetting is a filter. When something you read resonates with you sufficiently for you to recall it without effort, that means something; it means it connects with your ideas and experiences in some relevant way. Replace that natural process with a more conscious, willpower-based system for retaining information, and you risk losing the benefits of that filter. (I know there are a few professional and educational contexts where you really do have to memorise a whole body of words – but it isn’t the norm.) “Your natural salience filter is a great determinant of what’s most alive to you,” as Sasha Chapin puts it, in an edition of his excellent newsletter. “If you begin to rely on any other filter, you will increasingly record what seems like it should be interesting according to some pre-existing criteria rather than what organically sticks to your mind.”
Oliver Burkeman, The Imperfectionist (How to forget what you read)
Category: Reading
Forgetting is a Filter
What I’m Reading: “Make Time”
The Kindle Store had a sale a few days ago and, among other things, I bought Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day for £1.99. The market for productivity and time-management books is crowded but what makes these guys different is, instead of a rigid and complex productivity system, they offer a simple 4 part time-management framework: Highlight, Laser, Energise, Reflect.
It’s easy to assume we manage our time only to be more productive (because that’s what everybody else is doing!) but, like so many others, Jake and John remind us that the highlight of our day doesn’t always have to be work:
“Make Time is not about productivity. It’s not about getting more done, finishing your to-dos faster, or outsourcing your life. Instead, it’s a framework designed to help you actually create more time in your day for the things you care about, whether that’s spending time with your family, learning a language, starting a side business, volunteering, writing a novel, or mastering Mario Kart.”
Knapp, Jake; Zeratsky, John. Make Time (p. 3). Transworld. Kindle Edition.