Media Diet: Awareness
Understand what a media diet is, what's possible, and where you stand. About 15 minutes.
The information you consume shapes how you understand the world, the decisions you make, and the quality of your thinking. Yet most people's information intake is determined largely by algorithms and habit rather than deliberate choice.
The average knowledge worker checks email every six minutes and spends a substantial portion of the day processing fragmented information. Research suggests that this reactive consumption pattern increases anxiety and reduces the capacity for sustained attention, without proportionally improving understanding.
People who intentionally curate their information sources tend to develop more accurate mental models, make better predictions, and experience less cognitive fatigue. Philip Tetlock's research on superforecasters found that the best predictors consume information from diverse, high-quality sources and actively seek out viewpoints that challenge their assumptions.
A well-constructed media diet also compounds over time. The sources you choose today shape the frameworks you use to interpret new information for years. Few other habits have such a broad and lasting influence on your intellectual development.
People curate their information consumption for different reasons. This site scores every media diet intervention across four core values. Later, you'll set your own weighting across these four values, and the site will rank interventions by how well they deliver on the things you actually care about.
Information Quality & Depth
The accuracy, nuance, and intellectual rigour of consumed information. Prioritising books over articles, primary sources over summaries, expert analysis over hot takes, and comprehensive coverage over fragmented updates. People who lean towards this value invest time in fewer, higher-quality sources that provide deep understanding.
Actionable Relevance
How directly the information supports decision-making and practical outcomes in your life. Career-relevant developments, investment insights, health discoveries, and information that changes behaviour or choices. Those who lean towards this value curate their consumption around information with clear utility for their specific circumstances and goals.
Breadth & Discovery
Exposure to diverse perspectives, unexpected insights, and information outside your existing knowledge areas. Following curiosity into unfamiliar domains, consuming content from different cultural perspectives, and maintaining intellectual openness to ideas that might reshape your thinking. People who lean towards this value deliberately seek out information that challenges assumptions and expands mental models.
Cognitive Efficiency
Optimising the retention-to-effort ratio and minimising cognitive overhead from information consumption. Choosing formats that match your processing style, avoiding redundant coverage, and consuming information at optimal timing and frequency. Those who lean towards this value focus on maximum informational value with minimal mental fatigue or wasted attention.
The Top 0.1% band represents roughly 1 in 1,000 people. To give you a sense of what that looks like for each media diet value:
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University who reads roughly 50 – 80 books per year across economics, history, fiction, science, and philosophy. He maintains Marginal Revolution, where he has published daily posts synthesising academic papers, policy documents, and primary sources for over twenty years. His reading method – skimming aggressively, abandoning books quickly, and focusing retention on what changes his thinking – reflects an unusually disciplined approach to information quality.
Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, maintains a public bookshelf and has spoken extensively about how his reading directly informs business and policy decisions. His information diet spans economic history, infrastructure development, and scientific progress, and he has described specific cases where insights from these domains shaped Stripe's strategy. His reading appears tightly integrated with his decision-making rather than pursued as a separate activity.
Maria Popova created The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), where she has published daily essays connecting ideas across philosophy, science, art, literature, and psychology for over fifteen years. Her work draws on sources spanning centuries and disciplines, and she reads in multiple languages. The site is a public record of an exceptionally broad and sustained information diet.
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown who has written extensively about attention management and deep work. He does not use social media, limits his news consumption to a small number of curated sources, and has described specific systems for batching information processing and protecting cognitive resources. His academic output – multiple books and a consistent research programme – suggests these practices translate into measurable productivity.
Awareness means knowing your starting point. Answer each question below – some you might know off the top of your head, others might take a few minutes to reflect on.
Information Quality & Depth
Actionable Relevance
Breadth & Discovery
Cognitive Efficiency
Your estimated position
Percentiles are estimates based on published population data on reading habits, source diversity, and media consumption among adults. Items without reliable population data are not scored.
You now understand why your media diet matters, what different people get out of it, what's achievable, and where you currently stand. The final step is to set your personal value weightings and see which interventions are the best fit for you.
On the interventions page, adjust the sliders to reflect how much you care about information quality, actionable relevance, breadth, and cognitive efficiency. The table will re-rank interventions to match your priorities.
Awareness assessment complete
You've built your foundation in Media Diet. Your self-assessment and value weightings are saved.
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