Seeing Your Information Ecosystem Clearly
You know the pattern.
A new article catches your eye. You save it for later.
A podcast episode sounds amazing so you add it to your app.
A YouTube video promises that it will provide information that you absolutely must learn so you save it to “Watch Later”.
The collecting feels productive, like you’re building something with huge potential.
But weeks later you still haven’t touched any of it, let alone used it to move your projects forward. To make matters worse, the information keeps flowing in, but you’re drowning instead of building.
And this is where it gets worse. You start blaming yourself.
“I just need more discipline.”
“I should set aside time each week to process this.”
“Maybe I need a better app or to learn how to “Build a Second Brain.”
It’s not a personal failure. It’s a system design problem.
You’ve built an information ecosystem shaped by other people’s incentives. Algorithms decide what you see. Social feeds determine what feels urgent. The sheer volume of “good content” tricks you into thinking consumption equals progress.
Your information system isn’t serving your intentions. It’s serving someone else’s business model.
What if the first step to correct for this wasn’t total abstinence, adding another productivity hack or switching to a new tool? What if it started with simply recognizing what’s actually happening?
You can’t design an intentional system until you understand the one you’ve built by default.
This week, we’re practicing clarity first. Not optimization. Not overhaul. Just understanding your current information ecosystem clearly enough to start making intentional adjustments instead of fighting the chaos.
Understanding the Collector’s Fallacy
Before we get into the practical steps, we need to name something that affects almost every creator I work with (myself included).
Within the Personal Knowledge Management space it is often called the "Collectors Fallacy".
The Collector’s Fallacy is the belief that saving information is the same as learning it or using it.
You bookmark an article and feel productive.
You save a video to watch later and feel like you’re making progress.
You clip highlights from a book into your notes and feel like you’re building something valuable.
Saving feels like progress. Collecting feels like growth. But neither actually moves your work forward.
I discovered this the hard way.
Several years ago, I opened my note taking system within Evernote to find over ten thousand notes staring back at me. Ten thousand. And I couldn’t tell you what most of them contained.
I was spending hours organizing tags, adjusting folder structures, tweaking my system. I felt busy. I felt productive. But I wasn’t actually using any of it for my work.
The collection had become the work. And it was keeping me from doing the things that would actually move me forward creatively.
Collecting feels safe. It lets us stay in motion without moving forward. And the apps we use reward this behavior. Every save, every bookmark, every clip gives us a little dopamine hit of accomplishment.
But your creative work doesn’t need more inputs. It needs you to leverage what you already have with intention and action.
The first step out of the Collector’s Fallacy isn’t deleting everything or adopting a new system. It’s seeing clearly what’s actually happening in your information ecosystem right now and evaluating how it aligns with your intentions.
Awareness is the antidote to arbitrary accumulation. Once you can see your patterns clearly, you can start to design them intentionally.
Getting Started: Observe Your Information Ecosystem
You don’t need to fix everything this week. You just need to see what’s actually happening. Think of this as observation before optimization. You’re gathering data about your current reality so you can make intentional choices instead of reacting to overwhelm.
Here’s how to start building that clarity.
Choose one information channel to observe
Pick a single channel where information flows into your life. Your email inbox. Your social media feeds. Your browser bookmarks. Your note-taking app. Just one.
Spend this week noticing what actually happens there. What comes in? What do you do with it? What accumulates?
Don’t worry about changing or fixing anything yet. Just watch the pattern play out. It might feel strange to simply observe, but clarity begins with honest observation.
At the end of the day, take five minutes to write down what you notice.
Keep it simple. A note on your phone works. A page in your notebook works. The format doesn’t matter. The consistency does. By day seven, you’ll have a clear picture of the flow, the friction points, and where information goes to die.
Observe whether what you engaged with aligned with a specific intention
At the end of the week look at your notes and what you actually collected (the articles, videos, podcasts, PDFs) and try to connect them to a specific intention.
Are you trying to learn a specific topic? Find inspiration for creative projects? Explore a question that’s been on your mind?
Name the intention as specifically as possible. “Stay informed” is too vague. “Learn how to improve the SEO on my website” is clear.
This practice reveals where your information ecosystem has drifted from your intentions.
You’ll start to see what external forces have shaped your consumption habits. And from that clarity, you can start making intentional adjustments in your system and behavior that align with what you’re truly trying to build.
Clarity Comes Before Control
Your information ecosystem didn’t become overwhelming overnight. It built up through a thousand small decisions, most of them made on autopilot or guided by algorithms designed to keep you consuming.
The good news is that you don’t need to fix it all at once. You just need to see it clearly first.
Observation is the creative act that precedes iteration. Once you see your information ecosystem more clearly, you can start shaping it into something that fuels your work instead of distracting from it.
What information channel are you going to observe this week? Hit reply and let me know what you’re noticing about your information ecosystem.
Until next week, may your systems serve your intentions.
Jeff
P.S. This week’s practice connects directly to our November theme in the Antifragile Creative community: Sensemaking within the Chaos. We’re exploring how to transform information overwhelm into clarity and coherence through intentional design. If you’d like to explore this practice with others navigating the same terrain, join us here.
Share This With Someone Who Needs It
Know a creator drowning in saved articles and unwatched videos? Forward this to them. Sometimes the best thing we can share is permission to see clearly before trying to fix everything.
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