Boil your ocean

Finding useful material is easy. Using it is the hard part. You spot a paragraph in a report or some figures in a filing, and then there’s a string of small jobs: save it, rename it, retype the table, fix the formatting. None of it is difficult, but it’s why most of what you find never gets used.

Get rid of as many of those steps as you can. A document should end up as text you can quote, a recording as a transcript you can search, and a screenshot of a table as rows you can sort. If a conversion has to be done by hand, you’ll skip it when you’re busy.

Let the tool do some of the looking too. Tell it what you’re trying to understand and have it come back with a short list of sources and a line on why each one is there. Nothing gets added to your notes until you say so.

If a competitor’s report has the numbers you need, you should be able to drop it next to your notes, keep writing, and have its text ready to quote by the time you look up.