Reading Flows

All information has a speed: fast or slow. It’s grounded in the present, past, or not at all and subject to revision, analysis, or testing because of it. [1]. Which you pick depends on the perception of time you need to be effective in the situation you face [2].

Fast information — articles, interviews, posts, and messages — makes time feel like it’s slipping by, with an imminent future nearing by the second. It produces a strong sense of urgency. That doesn’t just make impulsive decisions and general overconfidence more likely: it makes the past seem irrelevant and the present seem more unique and worthy of attention than it is [3]. But it’s a great way to practice sense-making and generally get out of your own head [4]. And, sometimes, you actually have to solve a problem right now.

Slow information — histories, studies, and models or practices that endure or increase in value over time — makes time feel like it’s moving at a more languid pace, creating space for more deliberate thought and learning. But it runs the risk for a different kind of overconfidence: false certainty. If you aren't careful, you'll believe that the future will look like the past, a certain vision of the future is inevitable, and that there’s nothing left to learn. It also tends to impede action when consumed too much, leading to analysis paralysis over time.

How do you strike a balance?

I look for three types of resources, each of which either:

1. Offers relevant and immediately actionable solutions that increase both urgency and impulse-control (timely information)
2. Introduces multiple models or perspectives on the problem, in a way that lifts me out of it (timeless information)
3. Provides a deep understanding of how the problem has evolved over time, in a way that makes time feel slower or longer and the past feel present (timeful information) 

I pick the resource (time perception) the problem of the day demands. If I’m getting anxious or sloppy, I go for timeless or timeful information. If I'm getting depressed or unproductive, timely information. 

NOTES

[1] Computer scientist Alan Kay describes this as the difference between “the news” and “the new”: the news is another instance of something you already know about; and the new is something you need to learn.

[2] To my knowledge, no one has studied how the information we consume affects our perception of time, as that would be hard to measure and prove. It's an inference I made from 2012-2022 while reading books on cognitive biases and heuristics (Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, David McRainey's You Are No So Smart), time perception (Claudia Hammond's Time Warped, Dean Buonomano's Your Brain Is A Time Machine), and information architecture (Richard Saul Wurman's Information Anxiety and Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast's Figure It Out: Getting From Information To Understanding).

[3] The technical term for this phenomena is presentism bias, which I learned from Maria Popova's 2014 interview with Copyblogger:

"We’ve created a culture that fetishizes the new(s), and we forget the wealth of human knowledge, wisdom, and transcendence that lives in the annals of what we call “history” – art, literature, philosophy, and so many things that are both timeless and incredibly timely. Our presentism bias – anchored in the belief that if it isn’t at the top of Google, it doesn’t matter, and if it isn’t Googleable at all, it doesn’t exist – perpetuates our arrogance that no one has ever grappled with the issues we’re grappling with. Which of course is tragically untrue."

[4] Scott Adams has a good line about this in his autobiography, How To Fail At Almost Anything — And Still Win Big: “I don’t read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time. I read the news to broaden my exposure to new topics and patterns that make my brain more efficient in general — and to enjoy myself.”

Information has a relative position and length. It’s here or there — close to your experience or far from it — and short or long — meeting your short-term or long-term needs. Either way, you have a choice: act or reflect [1].

Despite what many will tell you, each is a valid starting point. If you’ve suffered a trauma, lack self-confidence, or find yourself in an environment that devalues your way of thinking and being, you shouldn’t challenge your biases: you should hone them. Likewise, if you’re out of money or time, you can’t afford to think long-term: the time is now [2]. 

Ultimately, there are clear, if fine, lines between affirmation and confirmation, direction and tunnel-vision, perspective and gaslighting, and distance and escapism.

Affirmation v. Confirmation

Seeking affirmation isn’t (necessarily) the same as seeking confirmation. It’s getting the best possible articulation of what you think and why, so you can relax into receiving other perspectives. If you’re feeling reflective and focused on your own education, you’re seeking affirmation. If you’re feeling righteous and compelled to lecture, you’re seeking confirmation.

Direction v. Tunnel-Vision

Choosing a direction isn’t (necessarily) being reactive or narrow: it’s using your knowledge and skills to make a necessary decision. If you’re feeling calm and in control of your decisions, you’re being decisive. If you’re depending on tools to stay on the rails, you’re being reactive. 

Virtues v. Vices

On the flip-side, we tend to think of perspective and distance as virtues. But both can veer into gaslighting or escapism that threatens your survival, if you aren’t careful.

From Reflection To Action

In concert, these four options can be used to move from reflection to action — or between them. For instance, affirmation and perspective can help you understand your context, distance can prime you for action, and direction can help you take it. And that's only one option.

A Concrete Example

When I decided to relearn math after a lifetime of struggling with it, I searched for books that:

1. Were designed around my interests and education, namely the social sciences and humanities, design, and art. 
2. Shared my biases toward discovery, invention, and action. 
3. Changed my view of the subject within the first chapter
4. Emphasized abstraction more than problem-solving (so I could escape my everyday reality)
5. Provided a clear path to mastering a given subject, with extensive practice

Eugenia Cheng’s The Joy of Abstraction and Paul Lockhart’s Arithmetic, Measurement, and A Mathematician's Lament managed to do all of the above in one go. But many of the resources I cherish just as much—Marcus Du Sautoy's The Art of the Shortcut, Jordan Ellenberg's Shape, Brian Arthur's “Economics As Nouns And Verbs”, and William George Spencer's Inventional Geometry—simply provided a new way of seeing and a path back to childish wonder.

NOTES

[1] Emily P. Freeman has a nice term for this distinction in How To Walk Into A Room — readiness or timeliness — although I found it years after developing this flow. Thank you, Emily, for the affirmation! 

[2] As Teddy Roosevelt may have said “Do what you can can, with what you’ve got, where you are”Depending on your current level of ego and spiciness, you may prefer the Thucydides ("The strong will do what the can and the weak will do what they must”) or Cole Arthur Riley (“You will do what you can until you can’t, and then you’ll fall asleep on the chests of those who love you.”)

Information has a dimension: high or low. It pushes you to act on your knowledge or transcend it [1]. 

• Should you do “the next right thing” — or something else? [2] 
• Use what you know — or throw it out? [3]
• Stick to the status quo — or disrupt it? [4]

NOTES
[1] The name and definition of this flow were inspired by Edwin Abbott Abbott’s geometry-novella Flatland, in which a two-dimensional square uses the phrase “upward, not northward” to imagine a cube and enter the third-dimension. I prefer it to standard ways of considering this otherwise hard-to-name trade-off because it's domain-independent and relatable. Related concepts include invention v. innovation, disruption v. incrementalism, reductionism v. complexity, abstraction v. details. 

[2] I learned the mantra “do the next right thing” twice, first from Laurence Gonzales (“The Art & Science of Resilience In The Wake of Trauma”) and then from Emily P. Freeman (How To Walk Into A Room). But the idea was planted in mind several years before by James Clear, who introduced “The 1% Effect" in Atomic Habits. The gist is that habits are like compound interest, allowing you to move 1% closer or further away from your goals each day. 

[3] Eugenia Cheng’s The Joy of Abstraction and Marcus du Sautoy’s The Art of the Shortcut are excellent guides to answering this question. 

[4] Integrative thinking and re-framing are two methods for making this choice. See Roger L. Martin and Jennifer Riel’s Creating Great Choices and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg’s What’s Your Problem?

Information has depth and density. It’s shallow or deep and thin or thick. Do you need a quick, rough answer or actual understanding? 

Thanks to falling into various black holes of women's health for a decade, I think of this difference primarily in terms of gender (masculine or feminine, hard or soft, kiki or bouba). But I got the idea from George Box's aphorism “All models are wrong, but some are useful" [1]

These are my favorite pairings so far:

• Antifragile by Nassim Taleb and The Complete Guide to POI and Early Menopause by Mandy Leonhardt and Hannah Short
• Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths and How Life Works by Phillip Ball

NOTES

[1] Discovered via Scott E. Page’s course Model Thinking and re-discovered via Geoff Mulgan’s blog post “Uselessly Right or Usefully Wrong". There's a 13-year gap between the publication of the two. It’s amazing how long it can take for an idea to sink in and get a name!

Information has a scale: big or small. It relates to you, your environment, the world, or the cosmos. Mental health is often a matter of knowing which to pick. For instance, when facing a crisis, many people feel comforted by contemplating the cosmos, but I tend to be the opposite: I want to zoom in, not out, delving into some unseen aspect of the environment, with go-tos being biology (Raif Sagarin's Learning From The Octopus, Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters, Susan Casey's The Underworld) and infrastructure (Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works). 

All information has a shade and weight. It inspires varying degrees of optimism and pessimism — and different senses of humor. Do you need room for play or grief? Slapstick comedy, sarcasm, or dark humor? The sun or moon?

Find a title that sparks immediate anger, wonder, or energy for action [1]. The response should be visceral — a pop, blanket, or wave of emotion that’s beyond language. Your job is to discover why, write about it, and let it simmer into something more interesting over time. 

In the first case (anger), the goal is to create an alternative. You’ve found the right resource when the title triggers rage, the opening paragraph softens it, and the table of contents gets you thinking in a different way. 

In the second (wonder), the goal is to organize your reading or learning around a common theme and find direction for the next one. You’re on the right track when you experience an a-ha moment — “That’s the one!” — and start filtering titles based on it. 

In the third (action), the goal is to get moving. You’ve succeeded when you immediately respond with “yes” or “no” and launch into action, often before you even read it. 

In almost every case, you’ll end up discovering or producing something you didn’t expect. 

Here’s some further guidance, if you need it: 

Anger

Just about everything that sparks outrage in me is unjust, dismissive, vague, or unactionable — lazy. Thankfully, life offers an abundance of examples, which I use as prompts for developing more comprehensive answers or alternatives.

Advice 

• “Figure it out” ➡️ Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast
• "Just do it" ➡️ The Art of Taking Action by Gregg Krech
• "Start from where you are" ➡️ Finish: Give Yourself The Gift of Done by Jon Acuff
• "Don't take it personally" ➡️ Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen
• "Forgive and forget" ➡️ How To Hold A Grudge by Sophie Hannah

Opinions

• "Life is unfair" ➡️ Who Gets What And Why by Alvin E. Roth
• “Life is a game” ➡️ Play Anything by Ian Bogost
• "That's how the world works" ➡️ How Life Works by Phillip Ball

Questions

• "What's your problem?" ➡️ What’s Your Problem? by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
• "What's the solution?" ➡️ How To Solve It by George Polya
• "Why didn't you ask?" ➡️ All You Have To Do Is Ask by Wayne Baker

Criticism

• "Angry" ➡️ The Surprising Purpose of Anger by Marshall Rosenberg
• "Negative" ➡️ The Power of Negative Thinking by Oliver Burkeman
• "Bitter" ➡️ Bitter: A Taste of the World’s Most Dangerous Flavor with Recipes by Jennifer McLagan

Wonder

Find 2-3 titles that share the same wonderful word — literally.

Time 

• Time Warped by Claudia Hammond
• Your Brain Is A Time Machine by Dean Buonomano
• The Grammar of Time by Marcus Kreuzer 

Light 

• The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger
• The Light Ages by Seb Falk
• The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Nature

• Nature: An Economic History by Geerat Vermeij
• The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman
• The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

Art

• The Art of Failure by Jesper Juul
• The Art of Taking Action by Gregg Krech
• The Art of Logic by Eugenia Cheng

If saying the word feels like a warm blanket on a winter’s morning, discovering lost treasure on a summer’s day, or sharing a secret at some hole-in-the-wall at 2 AM, you're on the right track. Your task is to find out why you love it, reduce what you discover to another word, and produce artifacts such as notes, visualizations, essays, and stories as you get to the real point or goal.

This flow is useful for recovering from burnout or moving through uncertainty.

Action

Some titles are so impactful you only need to scan their contents — if you read them at all. They’re catalysts for action. 

For instance, I've started Stefan Bucher’s 344 Questions three times since 2011 without ever finishing it — because I found a question or flow that created instant clarity, leading to months or years of action before any further questions, details, or theory were needed [3]. Likewise, I barely scanned Andrew Ibrahim and Justin Dimick’s article “Writing for Impact”and Bret Victor’s talk “Inventing On Principle” before adopting them as values. Meanwhile, I’ve never read Tim Ferris' Tribe of Mentors or Robin Hogarth's Educating Intuition yet they influenced the direction of my learning system. In such cases, the title is enough.

NOTES

[1] I learned the delightful phrase “energy for action” from Patricia Lustig’s Strategic Foresight. 

[2] Special thanks to the Summer of Protocols for helping me understand what I was doing between 2018-2023 but couldn’t externalize or explain to anyone until finding their program.

[3] I wrote about this in an article called “Review and Re-Design: 344 Questions”, which was published in the Data Visualization Society’s journal Nightingale in February 2024.

Find authors who are tackling a similar experience or question but have different values, personalities, or backgrounds — people you can relate to enough to hear, but not enough to fully believe or trust. If you find yourself saying “Yeah, but”, or even better, “Yeah, no, wait”, you’re on the right track. Their answer will be a useful prompt for your own.

Go outside, take a walk, and find a book in a Little Free Library. If there aren’t any around, go to an actual library or bookstore, walk into a section you wouldn't usually visit, and pick the first book that catches your eye. The goal here is to use your own environment and movement to surface information you're not seeking to answer a question you didn't even know you had. 

I’ve found several, game-changers this way, including:

• Into The Depths, which exposed me to a new way to do history—marine archeology—at a time when I was stuck on equating it with data
• American Fuji, which brought my past and present together in ways that helped me heal from both.
• Kitchen Confidential, which reminded me of what voice sounded like before social media

Find a book that settles, cleanses, unsettles, or numbs your mind and use it to refine your own work. 

Mind-settling books get you out of bed in the morning and keep you going. They’re gentle, easy reads that fit within 20-30-minute intervals and offer one or two takeaways. They’re clear, light, memorable, and actionable —and almost always better as audiobooks. They’re what you turn to when there’s no one to turn to. 

Mind-cleansing books clear the mental clutter and and re-focus your attention. They lift you out of the problem and reveal what matters. They’re meant to be read over long intervals and require distance from other people to be effective. 

Mind-blowing (unsettling) ones are more aggressive: they change your mind immediately and completely. 

And then there’s the mind-numbing reads — the ones that give reason to write an alternative. One minute you’re rolling your eyes; and the next you’re writing a better version. Before you know it, that essay or story you’ve been putting off starting or finishing — or didn’t even realize was inside your head — is on the page. 

Find someone who’s better than you. Decide whether you should become like them, collaborate with them, or become the opposite. You’ll either improve, develop a lifelong friendship, or discover you’re trying to do something else.

This is the only flow that's more suited to conversations or workshops than books. It's a different kind of reading.