0x01 Preface
In this era of information overload, I am both a beneficiary of knowledge acquisition and an anxious sufferer of knowledge backlash. As an information security practitioner, you need to have a lot of reading and accumulation of fragmented knowledge to help you improve your knowledge system and improve your insights into security awareness. In the process of this growth, it will also be accompanied by backlash and anxiety. For example, my energy and will often have conflicts and fights with each other. The collection of papers and the ideas I want to do are accumulating more and more, and the time allocated for life and technology is lost. Balance and so on, resulting in a flood of information and knowledge anxiety, unable to extricate themselves.
A while ago, most of my sources of information, even entertainment-related apps, were almost overwhelmed by technology-related topics. I was trapped in the information cocoon I outlined by myself, and it seemed like a little white without technology. I’m confused, the only thing I can get in return is that my friends’ ridicule, as long as the paper sent to me, seems to have been seen by me in advance, and I get a little bit of “weird pride”.
Endless running, savage reading, just relying on willpower and the flood of information to be positive, it is true that quantitative changes will bring about qualitative changes and can bring a lot of help, and I have always considered this “savage” and “painful” process to be very helpful. What is necessary is that after the experience, you need to be able to pull yourself out, so as to learn and precipitate better and more efficiently. At the moment, I dare not say that I have gotten rid of the troubles of knowledge anxiety. I still have anxiety occasionally. I “locked up” and confronted myself for a day or two, but it is much better than before, and I also have some insights in the process , take it out to communicate with you, and jointly defend our information flow.
0x02 for endless running, press the pause button
Running endlessly will create a backlog of information, which will not only add anxiety to oneself, but also is not conducive to content absorption. Therefore, it is necessary to press the pause button periodically, review and sort out the precipitation, and reduce the anxiety of knowledge. How to reduce knowledge anxiety? I have the following little tips to share with you:
1. Reduce the Inbox collection entry, and no longer use the collection function at will
In the past, there was an obvious problem in the management of fragmented information, that is, there were too many entrances, multiple information channels were collected and forwarded, and sometimes it was convenient to take screenshots or paste memos directly, which made it very labor-intensive to review and organize. Therefore, it began to reduce the entry, reduce the use of the collection function on different channel platforms, and put the filtered information entry into the Cubox for review.
2. Reduce the acquisition of cross-information, do not worry about missing articles
In the past, some information content was missed due to the concern of “single node failure”, so the same information source was subscribed repeatedly on different information channels, resulting in a lot of repeated content when reading. But in fact, this does not make much sense. It only increases the energy of repeated filtering, and with this “redundancy mechanism”, it will also unconsciously produce a certain inertia and dependence when browsing, and reading is not enough. patience.
So there is not much need for repeated cross-subscription, just like the personal knowledge management system series – snake catcher said:
When you encounter an article for the first time, you don’t need to open it. When it appears in front of you for the second time, read it again. The really important things will appear a second time.
It sounds like chicken soup at first glance, but it makes sense when you think about it. Even if there is only one source of information, important content such as the outbreak of a certain vulnerability can naturally be obtained through Moments, work groups, etc. Timeliness is of course important. But the effort expended in repeated screening should also be taken care of. Therefore, I gradually cleaned up some unnecessary groups, public accounts, and other duplicate information sources, and only kept the information sources that are convenient for daily and more concerned for cross-subscription, so as to divide the sense of information boundaries between life and technology more clearly, without affecting the Information acquisition also releases a certain amount of energy to jump out and return to life.
3. Energy is limited, only focus is better than everything
Some time ago, I always wanted to check the backlog content one by one, but I kept getting caught in the vicious cycle of collection-digestion, collection-redigestion, in the final analysis, the source was still not focused enough, which led to the failure of information filtering and the processing too much. Too many “helpful but meaningless” streams of information, distracting. Therefore, you should be more cautious when filtering information, and evaluate whether you can read it later, so as to properly discard some information flow, focus on your own branch, and avoid being disturbed by a lot of useful information. For example, when collecting an article, you can ask yourself whether it is because you really need it or because of inertia? Have you had time to research recently? Can it solve a current problem? If you don’t like it, can you find it later? Wait for the question, then give yourself an answer that filters the information.
4. Calm down and accept anxiety
How to calm down and look at knowledge anxiety, my understanding is to treat it as a normal thing, because this kind of anxiety is not only generated by us, but also encountered by many other people, it is only in this information age It’s a phenomenon, not a problem, so as long as you calm down to accept this phenomenon and find a work flow that suits you, you should enter this framework when you are studying and work well, and jump out and enjoy life when you are not working. . Here are some excerpts from the big guys:
- Project Zero ( Google P0 Security Team – Blog )
- The More You Know, The More You Know You Don’t Know
- ringzero Pig Man ( ringzero’s personal homepage – Weibo )
- In such an Internet era of information explosion, the only thing that is not lacking is information and content, and what is extremely lacking is something that can filter out invalid information.
- The street point of acquiring knowledge and applying knowledge is thinking. Search engines provide a wealth of resources that make it easier than ever to acquire knowledge, but do little to help people actually learn how to think and apply that knowledge.
- The world I understand is a world maintained by “information”. People’s knowledge structure, world view, and experience are all composed of different information. The difference between people lies in grasping “the amount of information and the level of information quality”. When you have free and convenient access to information, you have more opportunities to change and grow quickly.
- Blue whale who doesn’t like fish
- Every morning, we encounter new messages from the future. Receive information from all over the world on your mobile phone, and collect all-encompassing new ideas in front of your computer. It could be an article, a news item, an email. These fragments swarm in waves of information, useful or useless, building fragments of our lives. Whether it is study or work, everything is advancing slowly, but not always uniformly. Life may be fragmented. Sometimes we should think differently and accept this fragmentation in order to better focus on the value of information.
- Order, in my opinion at the time, was the body of information. I only feel reassured that they appear neatly in my records.
It is not difficult to see from these quotations that everyone has faced similar troubles, and they are constantly exploring and finding a way to get along with information that suits them. Therefore, for knowledge anxiety, we must be able to accept this phenomenon calmly.
0x03 Optimize your workflow
In simple terms, knowledge management workflow is: from the process of information input to output, the selection of convenient tools is coherent to form a set of information management use processes. There are many tools such as knowledge management, such as Flomo, Zotero, Obsidian, Notion, etc. are all good tools. Whether they are suitable for you, you need to find problems and solve them in the process of trying. Here are some of the tools I’ve picked up along the way and formed an easy workflow that works for me. The selection of processes and tools varies from person to person and is for reference only:
1. Input articles
RSS information aggregation
I mainly use Inoreader as the RSS subscription tool, which can be faster when subscribing to some foreign feeds. However, because RSS will have a certain information delay, some feeds will add page monitoring reminders with Distill. I generally have the following little habits in the management of RSS content screening:
Regular integration of high-quality feeds in the industry
Pay attention to the updates of some comprehensive feeds in the industry, and regularly remove duplicates, merge, and screen for integration and supplementation. At present, I mainly focus on the repositories zhengjim/Chinese-Security-RSS , r0eXpeR/Security_RSS , Han0nly/SecurityRSS , zer0yu/CyberSecurityRSS . If you have similar needs, please pay attention to these tips when dealing with opml files: (1 ) Same feed, different protocols, such as http://www.example.com/rss.xml and https://www.example.com/rss.xml (2) Same feed, URL path format, such as http: //www.example.com/rss.xml and http://www.example.com/rss.xml/ (3) Same feed, multiple subscription addresses, such as http://www.example.com/rss. xml and http://api.example.com/rss.xml (4) The same feed, but different burning methods. For example, the same site may be burned with Feed43 or with RssHub.
Sort out high-quality feeds independently
More concerned, high-quality feeds are independent in a directory, which is convenient for priority browsing when busy.
Sort and separate out the more updated and aggregated feeds every day
Some sites that are updated frequently every day, such as HackerNews, Freebuf, or aggregated sites such as unsafe, doonsec, etc., are independent to avoid excessive backlog and affect the viewing of other source information.
Github open source project
Github is my high-frequency information acquisition channel. Because I have forked a lot of warehouses in the past, it is more troublesome to manage, and I basically never read it again afterward, and it is inconvenient to find it, so GitHub is more used for project browsing. And warehouse update reminders, do not do collections. When you encounter an item of interest, tag it and put it in Cubox or directly organize it into DEVONthink Awesome-Security, so that you can quickly find a certain item or a certain type of item collection when you need it.
Draft inspiration record
For flashes of inspiration, draft essays, etc., I mainly use memos and Procreate. The memo record will be more casual, write, write and draw freely, and then clean it up regularly.
Documentation Book Reading
In the document reading process, I mainly use the iCloud cloud disk + DEVONthink method. I need to see which files are synchronized through the iCloud cloud disk, and then archive them to the local directory after reading, and replace the new files to the cloud disk. On the one hand, alternate synchronization will not have too much reading pressure, and on the other hand, it will avoid the time-consuming and space-consuming synchronization of a large number of files.
On the document reading device, I am accustomed to using the iPad to read documents, playing dota on weekends, chewing crisp commanders, and then sipping Bing Kuo Le, and swiping PDFs when counting seconds. It is a great joy.
In the management of technical documents, it is customary to focus on labels and light classification , that is, all documents are placed in a directory, managed by naming method + labels, and at the same time, the color of the label is used to distinguish the major categories of attributes, such as red team, blue team .
2. Transit
Read Cubox later
After the information is filtered and filtered, it will be marked and classified by Cubox as a unified information transfer entrance, which carries the role of reading and sorting and filing later.
Content Editor Typora
Since the built-in editor of DEVONthink is not easy to use, Typora or Feishu online documentation is used for content editing.
3. Output articles
outputSecNavi
SecNavi is a secure site navigation that I am continuously updating. It is mainly to simplify some browser bookmarks and facilitate the usual data search. If you find a good website, you will add it to it.
outputDEVONthink
In general, DEVONthink is an ALL-IN-ONE information management tool, which can be used for RSS subscription, later reading, file management, full-text retrieval, etc. It also has a relatively convenient synchronization scheme, which basically runs through input to output. entire workflow.
From the bottom of my heart, I hope to have such a tool that comprehensively covers the workflow ALL-IN-ONE, but it is not suitable for me to use it in depth, and it is not smooth enough in terms of details, convenience, and functional coverage. However, DEVONthink is very convenient in file management, and its labels can be completely synchronized with the Finder system labels, so I use DEVONthink mainly for managing output notes, documents, etc., and synchronizing Finder & iCloud archive backups.
4. Extra Story
TODO Schedule Assistant
In addition to the input & output management of workflow, scheduling is also particularly important. Currently, I mainly use Things 3 to manage workflow tasks, life chores, important reminders, etc.
PDA digital assistant
In addition to software, hardware devices are also essential for workflow. My daily mainstay is MBP, and I go out to iPad in my spare time. With Feishu’s online documents + iCloud cloud disk, it is convenient and smooth for content editing and document reading.
0x04 Epilogue
Appropriate workflow and a good attitude can help us face the information flow that blows our face more calmly every day. In addition, it is necessary to continuously improve the ability of independent thinking and information retrieval, feed back the input and output of the workflow, and then improve the knowledge system, so that the cognitive understanding of things can be more accurate and comprehensive.
The above is my knowledge management method, I hope to bring you some help.
0x05 References
Personal Knowledge Management System Series – Snake Catcher Says
How to learn so many security articles (theoretical ones) – aerfa21
Useful and Useless – tombkeeper
My Three Principles of Efficiency System – Minority
Don’t be your perfect self – Minority
Comfortable Living with Information: My Information Minimalism Practices – Minority
Maybe Life Should Be Fragmented: How Flomo Changed My Life – Minority
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