I struggle with this tendency as well. Was reviewing links archived from my browser tabs one day and it hit me: I'm living in a just-in-case mode when I can afford to be more just-in-time.
The past two years I've started toying with that lens of "Just in Case" vs "Just in" Time". Found it to be super helpful to manage some sanity and a balance of doing intellectual masturbation - impactful output. Thought out loud here [1]
Info (or technically: data) hoarding is me trying to seek control and reduce uncertainty, I devour and gather just in case I need it. It's just a security blanket. I'm just armoring up and ammo-ing up. While I can actually afford to be more JIT in the state of the internet and all the infocomm technology now. As long as I know what is possible and a rough sense of where to find it, I'll be fine. But of course this goes against the way human is wired.
Now I try to train myself to do a quick mental check for random pieces of information I come across: Do I need this now? When do I need this? Why am I interested in knowing this? Do I not know it already?
I try to recognise when something is already giving me a diminishing returns. I think a good heuristic is: when you can give a 10 minute talk about a topic to a uninitiated person, then you’ll be fine not reading this article.
My current layperson’s take is that JIC largely plays in the acquisition of Explicit Knowledge: data and information. While JIT is the process where we (are forced to) transform these into Tacit Knowledge by applying the Explicit Knowledge we have acquired.
It led me to obsess over this question: how can we enable more tools and affordances to understand our contexts to surface the right information at the right time and free our cognition from having to carry and store less relevant details?
