Focus on Producing Information, Not Consuming

The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption.

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But there's something else that being a producer does: it gives you more clarity about what it is that you think. Having gone through a gauntlet of about 50 press interviews now for The Information Diet — after talking about it and writing about it so much, I'd actually write a much better book. It's because that production has helped me discover even more nuance to my own thought. It makes sense: who knows more about the way government works: the consumer of information about it, the watchers of MSNBC and Fox — or the producers, the people in the trenches: lobbyists, activists, and campaign staffers. Who knows more about football: the armchair quarterbacks or the players?