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In your subscription to Kana & Katana, we strive to respect your time and populate your inbox with content worthy of your investment. Knowing this, organize our content into three tranches:

1)     Topical – these are current events of immediate importance; read the headlines and move on

2)     Timely – put in your Pocket to read at your next opportune time, whether this weekend or the next one

3)     Timeless – these are not affected by the passage of time and can be put in your Pocket to read this year or the next one

Use these temporal classifications as a lens to determine their relevance to your role and your goals. For example, a trader likely needs a consistent flow of high-quality, topical information. Think Bloomberg. If there’s a legitimate need for topical information, you have likely invested significant time and money into obtaining that flow.

Quality timely and timeless content should be accretive, adding more value to your life than they consume. This requires curation. Independent thought. Deliberate synthesis. In short, effort. Learning requires practice; reading is no different. Many of us need to learn how to read. If you never revisit what you’ve read or notes on what you’ve read, chances are you’re merely spending time. That information is lost, not to be leveraged to make better decisions in the future. Synthesis — and therefore compounding — is forfeited. This in itself provides a valuable lens: if it is not worthwhile to take notes on what you’re reading, why are you reading it?  

We are social, tribal animals. We want to belong and feel needed and appreciated. A significant part of that is adapting, fitting in, and following the behaviors, the social norms, the orders, the culture of the tribe.

This human condition drives the nature of news and information consumed today. We constantly consume to have a well-informed opinion of this week’s topical events to subsequently fit-in and participate in oft emotionally-charged conversations with friends and family. Unfortunately, a malalignment of incentives exists between you as a consumer and those creating the content. News is an attention economy and it is probable you should stop reading it.

Coincidentally, understanding and actualizing a substantive body of timeless content amplifies the clarity with which you see and understand timely and topical content. Accurately assigning significance (or lack thereof) and synthesizing relevance to timely through increasingly topical news may become increasingly intuitive. Timeless wisdom informs your reaction to topical noise. In this way, you develop philosophies to live by.

We hope our efforts bring more focus and thoughtfulness to your life, giving you comfort and confidence in spending less time on topical content and investing more on timely and timeless content.

After all today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s birdcage liner.