Stop Fighting the Information Flood
There’s a familiar pattern playing out across creative circles.
Someone discovers digital minimalism, unsubscribes from half their newsletters, deletes their social apps, and vows to consume only “essential” information.
It feels lighter for a moment. Clearer. Finally, they think, I’ll stop drowning in content and actually make progress with my creative work.
Three weeks later, the flood returns.
The feeds refill. Subscriptions creep back. The tabs multiply. And now there’s a new layer of shame. Not just for being overwhelmed, but for failing at minimalism too.
What actually happened?
They assumed too much information was the issue, so they cut the flow. But the real issue wasn’t abundance. It was the absence of intentional filtering through genuine engagement.
Restriction treats abundance as the enemy. It tries to control inputs before they’re understood. It builds resistance instead of discernment. We end up fighting the current instead of learning how to move with it.
What if the answer isn’t less information, but deeper connection with what we already let in?
What if instead of attempting digital abstinence, we designed engagement-driven filtering through reflection and alignment?
This week, we’ll explore how to design filters that grow from engagement so that what you consume actually aligns with your intentions and energizes your work.
From Consumption to Engagement
Most filtering systems start with arbitrary prediction.
You hypothesize what’s worth your time and then consume or reject before you have any relevant information.
You scan headlines, skim intros, and make fast judgments based on surface signals such as the title, the author, or the number of likes.
Or worse, you just accept whatever an external algorithm predicts will keep you consuming, regardless of whether it’s valuable or useful information.
The problem is that the platforms whose algorithms you are relying on to filter for you have very different incentives and intentions than you do. Their goal is not your clarity, focus, or creative progress. It is your attention.
This creates a deeper problem. What they surface for you to consume often isn’t aligned with your intentions. In fact, it can actively pull you away from them, draining time and energy in service of someone else’s business model.
All that rage bait and "10 things you won't believe" have decades of psychological research and user design behind them to get you to behave in ways that benefit their platform often at the expense of your time and emotional well being.
One obvious solution might seem to be cutting those feeds off entirely. Limit access, install blocking apps, unplug your internet, or go back to reading physical magazines.
But abstinence alone does not solve the problem.
By turning everything off, you are still outsourcing your filtering, this time to avoidance rather than algorithms. You are cutting yourself off not only from distraction, but also from the practice of engaging with information intentionally.
That is where the opportunity lies.
Consumption and engagement are not opposites. They are parts of the same creative cycle. The goal is not to stop consuming, but to transform consumption into engagement, to move from passive intake to active exploration.
When you intentionally engage with what you consume, you begin to develop the context necessary to curate for yourself instead of being curated by others. You learn to recognize what connects to your projects, values, and intentions.
You can even turn each act of engagement into creative fuel by looking for calls to action. What idea can you apply? What next step does this spark?
Filtering through engagement transforms what you take in into something meaningful, useful, and alive within your own work.
Putting Engagement into Practice
Engagement-driven filtering is built through specific practices that help you separate noise from nourishment. Here’s how to start:
Take Notes
Taking notes is one of the simplest ways to engage and filter. If you just watched a twenty-minute video or read the latest productivity book and nothing was worth jotting down or nothing sparked a new question or idea, then that creator may not be offering value that aligns with your current focus.
Notes do not need to be detailed. Even a short list of takeaways or insights can reveal patterns over time.
Look for the Aligned Calls to Action
When something you read, watch, or listen to sparks an idea for a specific next step, capture it. This could be a small creative experiment, a refinement to your workflow, or an approach to test in your current project.
Integrate those behaviors directly into your action systems like your task manager or project management system. The key is to translate ideas into movement. This is not about responding to someone’s “subscribe” prompt, but about noticing where an idea intersects with your real intentions and projects.
Reflect on What Resonates
At the end of each day or week, look back at what you consumed and where it came from. Ask yourself what added clarity, inspiration, or momentum and what did not.
If you realize you spent an hour scrolling and gained nothing useful or meaningful, use that awareness to adjust your practice. The goal is not to block the platform, but to gradually fill that same time with channels that bring aligned value.
Be Unapologetic About Play
Not every piece of content needs to be productive. If an hour on Instagram brings genuine joy or a TV show sparks creative energy, that is valid. Play and curiosity are part of a healthy information ecosystem. The key is intention: choose it consciously rather than falling into it by default.
Leverage Communities and Shared Curation
Ask for recommendations from peers who share your values, projects, or learning goals. A trusted network can serve as an early-stage filter that helps you find higher-quality inputs faster. Over time, your community becomes a collective intelligence, with each person exploring different corners of the landscape and sharing what truly resonates.
Engagement becomes discernment through these practices. They give you feedback loops that clarify what matters most to you, while still keeping you open to discovery and creative play.
Turning Reflection into Shared Insight
Filtering through engagement starts as a personal experiment. You can absolutely do this work alone, building your own discernment through observation and adjustment, but it gets stronger and easier when we bring our reflections into conversation with others.
When we talk about what resonated and why, we expand our sensemaking capacity together. One person’s insight becomes another’s exploration.
This is where community becomes an amplifier for aligned curation.
You start to see how different minds engage with similar material. You notice how someone else draws out a connection you missed or applies an idea to a completely different context. Those exchanges sharpen awareness. They remind us that filtering is not about narrowing our world, but deepening our relationship with it.
Inside Antifragile Creative, this is how we learn: not by consuming more, but by engaging more deeply with what we already have.
Our reflections become frameworks. Our conversations become shared filters. Over time, the collective intelligence grows stronger.
As you experiment with your own engagement-driven filtering this week, notice what insights keep resurfacing.
Then bring one of them into conversation, whether with a peer, in your journal, or within the community.
Every reflection you share adds another layer of clarity for everyone.
From Flood to Flow
Every creative builds their own way of making sense of the world.
Some do it through structure, some through rhythm, and others through reflection. The goal is not to tightly control the flow of information, but to stay in conversation with it.
When you design filters that grow through engagement, information stops feeling like a flood and starts functioning like a current that carries you forward.
You begin to trust your attention again. You stop reacting to noise and start responding to what truly connects and moves your forward creatively.
So this week, keep noticing what holds your focus and what falls away. What did you actually engage with, and what was totally forgettable?
Use those observations as data for your next design decision, whether it is how you curate your feeds, choose your inputs, or shape your creative environment.
The more you engage with intention, the clearer your system becomes. And when we bring those discoveries back into shared reflection, we create something even more powerful: a collective filter that helps us all see with more clarity.
Until next week, may your attention lead you somewhere worth going.
Jeff
Share This With Someone Who Needs It
Know a creator drowning in information overload? Forward this to them. Sometimes the best thing we can share is permission to stop fighting the flood and start engaging with it intentionally.
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