You don't need AI summaries, tldr or to be on top of things

Podcasts, Hacker News, Tech blogs, Youtube channels, you name it and I was consuming it. Consuming with targets in mind. 2 episodes of podcasts everyday. 20 pages of that book. But as life got busy, this became harder. So I tried to do what everyone else did. TLDRs;, summaries, increase the play speed to 1.75x for podcasts etc. The focus was always on quantity and not quality. I remember, there was even a trend and an cry for tldr; on blog posts. This was essentially handwritten AI summaries before LLMs. It would always make me uncomfortable. If you didn’t think it was worth your time to consume it properly, why bother consuming it at all? Even during conversations people wanted TLDR;. Why do you need a TLDR; ? I mean why are you in the conversation then? You don’t need to be if you are not taking value out of this conversation. Things have become worse now. You have AI to do summaries for you. And my thoughts on AI summaries are the same as TLDR;. Sure, there is always gonna be some odd things for which it’s perfect. But if your default consumption mode for things like blog posts, audio messages, podcasts, books and even conversations are gonna be summaries, you are consuming mediocre stuff. Just a washed off outline of something that resembles what you wanted to consume. I mean, book summaries blew my mind. If you think you can extract 100% of the books with a 5-15mins summary, you don’t understand reading at all. It’s a very bad way to reduce your attention span even further than it already is. All of these ai summary services convince you that you need to be on top of things. Consume it all. With a focus on quantity. And that is not good for you. Your focus should be on the quality of the consumption.

Quality, less consumption, re-consumption, mind wandering and focus

Have you ever wondered why shower thougths are called SHOWER thoughts? Because you are letting your brain wander only during showers these days. You are on your phone when you wake up. Then work. Comes back and then watch movies during dinner (or podcasts cos it’s “productive”). Your brain has zero time to process the things you consume. Consuming things all the time. So when you are in shower, your brain finally gets some free time to process the information you have on your mind right now. Then it sparks something else that is interesting. Something you had on your mind today morning. This is also why after going for a walk you get the solution for the things you were stuck with. Or when you go to sleep, Boom! Suddenly out of nowhere you have the solution you were looking for. Letting your mind wander helps with quality of data extraction from the things you are consuming.

Let your brain process the things you consumes. Don’t go on reading another book immediately after finishing one. Or another podcast episode for that matter. Think about what you have consumed. Try to write things down once you have finished consumption. Reduce the noise. When was the last time you had your lunch and you were not listening to a podcast or watching a movie etc without consuming things? If you are thinking, you need to change that habit. I am pretty sure the non-stop cosumption effects memory in a bad way. Probably why we don’t remember things very well these days even in our 30s. Makes logical sense. You are not focused on what you are doing with non-stop consumption and no time to process it. How do we remember things that the brain hasn’t processed? Are we at least sleeping properly to process it during night? How much of it is slipping away through the cracks?

Same way, re-consumption is very important as well. Rememeber that TV series or movie that you are watching for the 100th time? Yet, you learned something new from it still. A new angle, understood that joke you didn’t before or that reference. That’s cos you are not the same person who saw it last time. You grew up. You learned things. Your experince and wisdom has improved. This is exactly what happens when you re-read a book or re-listen to that interesting podcast. You discover so many new things. Looks at things from so many different angles. Understand things with a deeper understanding. Re-consumption is extracting maximum from the the things you consume. You will understand it if you had limited things growing up. The few books and movies I had growing up in my home? I have seen it so many times that I knew it inside out. We don’t reconsume things like that anymore. Because we have so many new things to consume. This is bad cos we are not consuming it fully. More over, it again comes back to the quantity vs quality part.

All in all, we don’t need to be on top of things. We need to focus on the quality of the consumption. Not quantity. This means, less consumption of things. Things that you actually need. Re-consuming it, be processed by our brain through mind wandering. Leading to better consumption and sparkling ideas. And no. You don’t need a TLDR;. You don’t need an AI summary service. And if you are looking for a summary, maybe you don’t need to consume that. Extract maximum information from your consumption. Just consume better.