Taming the content river: Use your filter

Finding yourself drowning in content?

A few weeks back I mentioned the idea of treating your content “flow” as a stream of water. Something that you want to dip into occasionally - not something you try and drink like a fire hose!

There’s a few practical ways you can go about this so I wanted to share what I do - regardless of what exact tools you can apply these ideas to your systems.

The Setup

I’m a daily user of Readwise Reader so that’s what I’m going to be talking about in terms of the tool I use. That said, you can take these ideas and put it to use with just about anything else that allows for any sort of filtering: Feedly, Omnivore, etc.

When I have some time to catch up and do some reading/reviewing, I generally open up to my homepage / inbox and triage from there.

• What catches my eye? (read it)

• What isn’t as interesting that I don’t need to read? (archive it)

• What doesn’t even make sense to keep in my index anymore (stuff that sites for nearly a week and I don’t want to read - delete it)

That works well for my day to day, but I’ve found that having a few filters in place can speed things up…that’s next 😀 

Recommended

Filtering My Stream

Taking the stream analogy just a little further…

There’s topics and areas that come up again and again in my reading, so it makes sense to set up some filters to save time and make it easy to find these areas quickly.

A few examples to set the stage:

• Heavily highlighted articles (for a quick review of things I’ve clearly found very interesting - high signal)

• Podcast notes from Podwise (for quickly reviewing only podcasts or to go find those “nuggets” from hours of audio)

• Video summaries from Summarily (for getting my videos into one area for a quick scan - can take squeeze tens of hours of video into a few minutes of review)

• Short Reads (this one comes “stock” in Reader and is great for finding quick reads to consume when you have a few minutes)

Creating Your Own Filters In Readwise

If you’re using Reader and want to create your own filters it’s pretty straight forward to set up. Here's how:

1. Go to "Manage Views" in Readwise Reader

2. Click "Add My Own Filter"

3. Use the "Launch Filtering Guide" for help

The filtering guide provides examples and explanations to help you create custom filters tailored to your needs and includes tons of examples which will help you copy/paste your way to what you need (I speak from experience…).

Remember, you can always edit or delete filters if they're not working for you, and you should update them from time to time when cleaning up your Mind Garden.

Extra Extra

• Managing how I respond to cravings, thought loops, and habits is important and takes continuing practice. I’ve found the RAIN method to work well and originally came across it via Dr. Jud Brewer.

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