Reading less, understanding more
- The cost of following a topic is switching between sources, not reading them.
- Most monitoring windows contain nothing material — saying so is useful information.
- Ask what changed, not what happened.
Most people do not have an information problem. They have a filtering problem. The sources worth reading are already public, already free, and already more than anyone can get through in a working day.
What actually costs you
The cost is not the reading. It is the switching: opening twelve tabs to find out that eleven of them had nothing new. Attention gets spent on checking, not on understanding.
A different default
The useful shift is to stop asking what happened and start asking what changed. Most windows contain nothing material, and a system that can say so plainly gives you back the hour you would have spent confirming it.
Frequently asked questions
Does this mean reading fewer sources?
No — the opposite. It means covering more sources while reading less of them, because something else does the filtering and tells you when a window was genuinely empty.