Emergent scholarship

Course Lessons

Filtering information

13 min read

Lesson overview

Objective: Reduce the volume of information competing for your attention

Summary: Most academics are overwhelmed by turbulent information streams that fragment their attention and create cognitive overhead. By becoming more selective about which information sources you allow into your attention field, you can create the head space needed for deep, meaningful academic work. This lesson helps you establish clear criteria for filtering information, moving from reactive consumption to purposeful engagement with high-quality sources aligned with your current projects.

Key habits:

  • Review and unsubscribe from low-value email lists and notifications weekly
  • Unfollow social media accounts that don’t contribute to current project work
  • Remove social media apps from your phone to create helpful friction
  • Turn off non-essential notifications across all devices
  • Establish ‘do not disturb’ protocols during focused work sessions

Introduction

Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen. - Maurice Sendak (2001)

The volume of information available isn’t your problem—your criteria for deciding what deserves attention is. When you’re intentional about filtering information at the source, you reduce cognitive overhead and preserve mental energy for the work that genuinely matters.

A guiding metaphor for this course on information management is that of a stream moving across your field of attention. While we want deep, slow-moving streams that we can sit beside and listen to, the streams most academics encounter are fast-moving and relatively shallow. Sendak’s suggestion—that we sit quietly ‘near a little stream and listen’—offers a welcome contrast to the turbulent torrents making up so much of modern academic life.

When you’re overwhelmed with incoming information and have no system to manage it, it becomes nearly impossible to ‘sit quietly and listen’. Your brain naturally filters out most sensory information because paying attention to everything would be overwhelming. You’ve had the experience of driving home without remembering every detail, or not hearing your partner when you’re focused on a problem. Your brain filters what isn’t immediately meaningful, and you need to do the same for work-related information.

The challenge facing busy academics isn’t that you lack access to information—it’s that you’re drowning in it. Every morning brings dozens of emails, social media notifications, news alerts, journal table-of-contents updates, and messages from various platforms. This constant influx creates what researchers call ‘cognitive overhead’—the mental burden of managing too many inputs. Before you can think deeply about your research or teaching, you must first sort through this deluge to identify what actually matters.

Information quality varies dramatically across sources. Not all information deserves equal attention. Some sources consistently provide insights that advance your work, while others offer little beyond distraction dressed up as professional development. Yet many academics treat all incoming information as equally worthy of consideration, spending precious cognitive resources on sources that contribute nothing to their scholarly goals.

Understanding your information landscape

Different types of information move through different channels, each with different purposes and update frequencies. Understanding these differences helps you make better filtering decisions.

Information types and their purposes

Project-specific information relates directly to work you’re currently engaged in. This might include research articles for a literature review, curriculum resources for a module you’re redesigning, or methodological guidance for data analysis. This information has immediate utility and warrants active attention.

Professional development information helps you grow as an academic but isn’t tied to specific current projects. This category includes pedagogical insights, research methodology discussions, career advice, and broader disciplinary conversations. While valuable, this information should be consumed in measured amounts.

Ambient professional information keeps you loosely connected to your field and institution without requiring deep engagement. Department announcements, conference calls, and casual disciplinary updates fall into this category. Much of this can be skimmed or ignored entirely without consequence.

Noise masquerading as professional content fills social media feeds and inboxes but contributes nothing meaningful to your work. Hot takes, outrage cycles, and ‘academic Twitter’ drama fall squarely into this category. This is the information you should filter out aggressively.

The signal-to-noise problem

Think of your information landscape as having a signal-to-noise ratio. The ‘signal’ represents information that genuinely advances your understanding, informs your teaching, or contributes to your research. The ‘noise’ represents everything else—distractions, low-quality content, and information that’s merely ‘interesting’ without being useful.

Most academics operate with abysmal signal-to-noise ratios. They follow hundreds of people on social media, subscribe to dozens of mailing lists, and keep email notifications active throughout the day. This creates an environment where valuable insights are buried under an avalanche of noise, making it nearly impossible to identify what actually matters.

Improving your signal-to-noise ratio starts with ruthless filtering at the source. Rather than trying to sort through everything that arrives, reduce what arrives in the first place. This requires asking difficult questions: Why am I following this person? What value does this mailing list provide? Does this notification serve my work or simply interrupt it?

Filtering criteria and decision frameworks

The update frequency heuristic

A powerful filtering principle: when information changes rapidly, it’s unlikely to have lasting value. News cycles, social media controversies, and trending topics create a sense of urgency without providing genuine insight. Information that updates by the hour or day rarely contributes to academic work that unfolds over months and years.

Compare a daily news source with a quarterly academic journal. The news source demands constant attention and provides information with a shelf-life measured in hours. The journal publishes less frequently but offers ideas with relevance measured in years or decades. For most academic work, slower-updating sources provide better signal-to-noise ratios.

Practical application: Review your information sources and note their update frequency. Sources that update multiple times daily should face the highest filtering threshold. Those that update monthly or quarterly can be retained more liberally.

The project-alignment filter

Your reading and attention should connect to projects you’re actively working on. This doesn’t mean you can’t explore tangential interests, but your primary information diet should align with your current commitments—the article you’re writing, the module you’re teaching, the research you’re conducting.

Many academics fall into what’s been called ‘the collector’s fallacy’—saving interesting sources just in case they might be useful someday. This creates overwhelming personal libraries filled with unread articles, unprocessed bookmarks, and saved tweets that never get reviewed. The cure is simple: filter information through the lens of current project work.

Ask yourself: How does this source relate to a project I’m working on now? If the connection is unclear or distant, the source probably doesn’t warrant your attention in this moment.

The source quality framework

Not all sources are created equal. Consider both the provenance of information and the depth it offers.

Original sources (peer-reviewed research, institutional reports, primary data) typically offer higher quality than aggregators and commentators. If you’re interested in education policy, read the actual policy documents and research studies rather than news articles about them. If you’re following methodological debates, read the original methodological papers rather than Twitter threads summarising them.

Information depth matters as much as provenance. A thoughtful 2,000-word essay on a topic will almost always provide more value than ten 280-character tweets on the same subject. Long-form content forces authors to develop arguments and provide nuance that short-form content cannot accommodate.

Practical filtering strategies

Email management

Email represents one of the largest information streams for most academics. Without active filtering, your inbox becomes a dumping ground for other people’s priorities.

Unsubscribe aggressively. Review your email subscriptions and unsubscribe from anything you consistently delete without reading. The argument “I might find it useful someday” doesn’t justify the cognitive overhead of processing and deleting dozens of unwanted emails weekly. If you later realise you miss something, you can resubscribe—but you probably won’t even notice it’s gone.

Disable notifications. Turn off email notifications entirely. Email is not an instant messaging platform. Nothing requires such immediate attention that it warrants interrupting focused work. Check email during scheduled sessions (see the course on Email management for detailed guidance), not continuously throughout the day.

Create ruthless filters. Use email filters to automatically archive or delete messages that don’t require your attention. Many institutional emails can be archived automatically—you can search for them if needed, but they needn’t clutter your inbox.

Social media boundaries

Social media platforms are designed to maximise engagement, not to optimise your information consumption. Without deliberate boundaries, they become time sinks that fragment attention without providing commensurate value.

Unfollow liberally. Regularly review who you follow on Twitter, LinkedIn, or other platforms. Unfollow anyone who consistently posts content that’s merely ‘interesting’ rather than actively useful for your current work. This isn’t personal—it’s professional hygiene.

Remove apps from your phone. The extra friction of accessing social media through a mobile browser rather than a dedicated app creates a valuable pause. In that moment of friction, you can ask: “Is checking this really what I should be doing right now?” Often the answer is no, and the friction helps you return to more valuable work.

Log out of services. Taking the additional step of logging out after each session increases friction further. Having to enter credentials each time provides another opportunity to reconsider whether this is genuinely important.

Notification architecture

Modern devices assault us with notifications from dozens of apps, each demanding attention. This constant interruption makes sustained focus nearly impossible.

Default to ‘off’. Turn off notifications for all apps except those genuinely requiring immediate attention. For most academics, this means perhaps phone calls from close family or emergency contact numbers. Everything else can wait until you choose to check it.

Create graduated allowances. If certain notifications are necessary (perhaps calendar reminders or building security alerts), configure them to minimise disruption. Use ‘do not disturb’ modes during focused work sessions, allowing only critical contacts through.

Move email off your home screen. The simple act of removing the email app from your phone’s home screen reduces the temptation to check ‘just in case something urgent is waiting’. If it’s genuinely urgent, it will be a phone call. Everything else can wait for your scheduled email sessions.

Advanced filtering: deep work protocols

For academics serious about protecting focused attention, consider these additional strategies:

Airplane mode during deep work. When you need extended focus for writing, complex analysis, or difficult reading, put your phone in airplane mode and place it out of sight. Research suggests that merely having a phone visible on your desk pulls attention toward it, even when it’s silent.

Do not disturb scheduling. Set your phone to ‘do not disturb’ mode automatically during your peak focus hours. Configure exceptions only for genuine emergencies—a very small list of people whose calls you’d want to receive during a deep work session.

Physical workspace design. Remove visual cues that trigger checking behaviours. Close unnecessary browser tabs, quit unused applications, and work in full-screen mode when possible. Each visible element is a potential attention drain.

Pause and reflect

Pause and reflect

You may find yourself spending significant time refining your information filters, particularly on social media, seeking the ‘best’ possible information diet. While curation has value, don’t fall into the trap of perpetual optimisation. Consuming information on social media is not your work—even if that information is work-related.

Your filters should aim to surface high-quality information related to projects you’re actively working on. This represents purposeful engagement where you make deliberate choices about what to focus on, rather than your reading being guided by whatever appears in your stream.

The goal isn’t to disconnect completely from professional networks or miss important developments in your field. Rather, it’s to move from reactive to intentional consumption. You decide what information deserves your attention and when you’ll give it that attention, rather than allowing platforms and other people to decide for you.

Remember that effective filtering is necessarily imperfect. You will occasionally miss something interesting or useful. This is not only acceptable—it’s the entire point. The alternative—attempting to capture everything—guarantees you’ll be overwhelmed by noise and unable to focus on signal that matters.

Activity

Key takeaways

  • Cull inputs to maximise outputs. The relationship between information consumption and knowledge production isn’t linear. Consuming more information doesn’t automatically lead to better academic work. Often it produces the opposite—analysis paralysis and fragmented attention. By dramatically reducing information inputs, you create the cognitive space needed for the deep processing that generates valuable outputs.

  • Filter at the source, not at the point of consumption. The mistake most academics make is trying to manage information overload through better sorting and processing techniques. This is like trying to bail out a sinking boat rather than fixing the hole. Instead, prevent low-quality information from reaching you in the first place. Unsubscribe, unfollow, and disable notifications aggressively. The information you never see costs you nothing in terms of attention.

  • Purposeful information consumption beats serendipitous discovery. There’s a romantic notion that we need to constantly scan broad information streams to serendipitously discover unexpected insights. While serendipity has value, most academic progress comes from focused, purposeful engagement with high-quality sources directly related to current work. When you need to explore new territory, do so intentionally rather than through passive scrolling. The fear of missing something interesting is not a strong enough rationale for subjecting yourself to continuous information overload.

Resources

Do you have any experiences or insights that you’d like to share with others? What habits and routines have you implemented in your own practice that have helped in this area? Do you have any questions about your specific context that are not addressed in this lesson? Please leave a comment for other participants in the field below.

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