Today we consume five times more information every day than we did in 1986, an incredible amount that’s equivalent to a 174 newspapers…a day. That probably includes a lot of Instagram posts, but it’s not only social media. The corporate e-learning space has grown by nine times over the last 16 years, such that almost 80% of U.S. companies offer online training for their employees, making more information accessible to them than ever before.

One would think that this would translate into increased knowledge. Yet, unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case. Scores of average American adults on tests of general civic knowledge — the type of information you’d assume people would pick up from scanning through all this information — has remained almost constant for the last 80 years. On the corporate side, working professionals apply only about 15% of what they learn in many corporate training and development programs in many cases.

We’re consuming more information but not learning more. In short, we have become less productive learners.

But by applying an intentional approach to consuming information and best practices of how we learn, we can reverse this trend toward unproductive learning. Here are four ways to become a more productive learner.

Focus the majority of your information consumption on a single topic for several months. Rather than letting the headline tides pull you along, pick a topic and focus your reading and viewing on that topic. In addition to the obvious benefit of making it possible for new information to build on previously consumed information, there is another important benefit, which is anchored in how our brains work. In a recent interview neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley shared from his book, The Distracted Mind, that “the highest level of performance in this domain of working memory is dictated more so by how well you filter all the irrelevant information. If you process information around you that is irrelevant to your goals, it will create interference…. Our success at filtering that] is critical for our ability to perceive information, to remember it and then to make decisions about it.” Spreading your consumption habits too thin has real consequences.

Put what you’re learning into frameworks. Frameworks act as the internal architecture for our brains, creating “rooms” for the information we receive. The value of frameworks to learning date back to psychologist Jean Piaget, who first used the term schemas in the 1920s to describe the process of categorizing information into consistent patterns. Schemas — or frameworks — help us retain new information by associating it in a structured, repeatable way with what we already know. We know this intuitively. It’s easier to find your computer if you put it in your home office than if you put it in a roomless warehouse. 

To make this concrete, after reading this article, you could start building a framework of how to become a more productive learner. You might start with these four strategies. As you read more about the topic, you would then