For years I collected information like it was going to save me. I saved articles I never reopened. Built an extensive and way too complicated Notion database in a weekend and abandoned by Tuesday. I had 40 browser tabs I kept alive for weeks because closing them felt like admitting I’d never read them. I told myself I was “staying sharp.” The truth is I was like a fucking hoarder, piling up newspapers in his living room. And the worst thing is that under all that saved brilliance, my decisions got worse, not better.
I thought that more information was more edge. Turns out that’s exactly backwards, and the last two years made it painfully obvious.
Those brilliant insights you were saving are now infinite
Information used to be scarce. That’s why we treated it like currency. If you knew the thing the other one didn’t, you had an advantage.
That world is gone. AI will hand you a decent answer to almost any question in four seconds, then write you a thousand words on it, then make you a slide deck about it before you’ve finished your coffee. Content isn’t scarce anymore. It’s the cheapest thing on earth.
And when something is everywhere and free, it stops being worth anything. Even the most valuable information you have is worthless within 24 hours, killed by a new study, a better take, or a world that moved while you were reading. Knowing things is no longer the job.
Your brain didn’t get the memo
Your brain is built to grab every scrap of information in sight, because for most of our human history missing a signal could get you eaten. That instinct doesn’t switch off because you work in an office now. So you feel the pull constantly, to check one more thing, read one more take, open one more tab. Those executive fuckers at social media platforms know this, so don’t blame yourself too hard for scrolling two hours
You can feel it right now, probably. Some part of you is already halfway to a different screen.
The result is that we treat information like an all-you-can-eat buffet and then wonder why we feel sick. There’s junk information and there’s healthy information, exactly like food, and most people are on a diet of crumbled up Doritos over a donut . Notifications, doomscroll, the rate of burnout and stress in knowledge work isn’t a mystery. We’re drowning a brain that was never built to swim in this.
Piling up more won’t fix a problem caused by too much going in. You can’t out-read the firehose.
The scarce thing now is a point of view
So the edge isn’t information anymore. It’s your personal point of view.
A lived through, structured way of looking at the world, so you can put information in context instead of just swallowing it. A clear signal on what matters and what doesn’t. Paul Saffo put it better, years ago: “In a world of hyper-abundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources.” He wrote that before AI could generate infinite content on demand.
Think about what AI actually does. It takes everything ever written and averages it into a competent, completely generic answer. It’s the best information-processor ever built, and it has no point of view at all. Yes you can go crazy with skills, tone of voice docs, etc. etc., but since I have done all of this stuff, I can tell you for sure it still asks me for lived experience as an example when I write articles like this.
The one thing AI structurally cannot do is the one thing that’s worth everything now. Have an experience-based point of view. The way you, specifically, see this problem after doing the work. The thing nobody can copy isn’t what you know, everyone can get that now. It’s how you see it.
Perspective first, apps later
Most people go wrong at exactly this point, and I went wrong here for years too. They decide they need a “system.” They open Notion, OneNote, or whatever tool got hyped that week, and they spend a month building an empty cathedral of folders they’ll never fill. The tool becomes the hobby. The thinking never happens. (Believe me I’ve been there and done that)
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is real and it’s worth building. It’s the set of habits and tools that turn information into actual outcomes instead of a bigger pile. But it starts with your perspective, not with software.
Before you touch an app, answer two questions on paper:
- What projects are you actually working on right now? Everything. The new website, the spare room you’re renovating, the bike trip you need to plan. Write them all down.
- What else in your life needs attention? Your health, your relationships, the interests you keep saying you’ll get to.
Only once that’s on the page do you build structure around it. PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) is a clean way to do that and worked for a while for me. But no matter what fancy system you use the order matters Reality first, the filing system second.
Once you have the lens, the firehose changes. Instead of weighing every piece of information for importance, which is impossible, you filter everything through one question:
Does this serve what I’m actually working on?
Most of it doesn’t, and now you can let it go without guilt. The rest you keep, not because it’s interesting, but because it’s useful to you, now.
Development isn’t a straight line
One more thing, because it’s the part people skip. Having a point of view doesn’t mean deciding once and defending it forever. That’s not perspective, that’s ego.
A point of view gets tested against reality. You put it into the world, watch what comes back, and adjust. You don’t find your angle in a seminar or a nice course, you find it by executing and seeing what survives. Growth doesn’t move in a straight line, it runs in loops, and the only way to run the loop is to actually do something with what you think.
Which, ironically enough, is the opposite of hoarding. Hoarding is safe cause it feels like progress and commits to nothing. Putting your point of view out there, where it can be wrong, is scary. But it’s the whole game.
Anyway. Go close some tabs.