I've been getting back in to studying for the CFA exam and one thing I noticed is how terrible my concentration was. Spending one's time reading online articles vs reading books is quite a different experience-- a large amount of information has been accumulated into a single place instead of scattered through a variety of webpages that one would have to usually have to search through. Having a good table of contents is also a boon to immediately pinpoint where in a document that you would need to go to get the information needed.
By having a large volume of high signal-to-noise information available, it significantly cuts down on the time required to search for information (which I think of as a distraction). The resulting effect is that having good books to do research from actually helps improves one's concentration instead of being distracted by looking for information (which may or may not be relevant).
One other interesting thing I've noticed about myself is that I tend to focus way better when I am working with other smart people. I believe that having the synergy of having a few smart people around to cover for information gaps or thought gaps cuts down distractions by the need to look for information. I believe that addictiveness of, say, video games in general can be attributed to having all of the information a player might need very accessible through a very intuitive interface or by having an environment where one can immediately figure things out with simple tests.
Right now, I think that the internet isn't an ideal place to learn in depth topics through websites as either the quality isn't there, finding good quality content is simply too much work or the information that you're looking for isn't covered in significant enough depth. I think that books and other resources fill those gaps.
One project that I would like to work on is to start creating a repository/network of high signal-to-noise sources and will be looking into a variety of tools to help me do that.
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