Single-stream Reading App

Most of us are bombarded every day with all sorts of media “content.” Social media, video shares, ebooks, interesting articles, clickbait articles, new movies, chats, advertisements, etc… it’s all vying for our attention RIGHT NOW. We have a limited amount of bandwidth and attention for consuming content.

Ideally, we should be single-streaming our content. Imagine reading two paragraphs of an article, then watching half an episode of a Netflix series, then reading half a chapter each of two ebooks. You would end up confused and probably wouldn’t have gotten anything useful out of all that random content consumption. Don’t divide your attention like that. Instead, you would get the most benefit out of carefully reading the article, then binge watching the entire Netflix series, then once that’s done, reading one of your ebooks to completion, then moving on to the second ebook. Sure, that would take a lot of time, but you would enjoy it more and get a lot out of it the experience.

We should selectively focus on one thing at a time, and ignore the rest. Go deep with your content, not wide. If you go wide with content, you only see the superficial layer of knowledge that doesn’t have much use beyond what you already know. It’s like repeating 1st grade over and over again, never advancing to 2nd, 3rd, or 4th grades because it would take too long.

I propose a single-stream reading app that would allow you to consume many types of content like ebooks, web articles, PDFs, and maybe even videos and podcasts. But the catch is that you must focus on each piece of content one at a time, in chronological order. Whenever you finish reading one piece of content, you will be presented with the next piece of content. At that time, you have to decide to 1) consume it now, 2) trash it and never consume it, or 3) kick it to the back of the list.

You cannot skip ahead. You cannot look at other content and come back to what you were looking at before. You cannot consume multiple pieces of content at once. You either give it your full attention, or no attention at all.