Maybe this sounds like you. I read a ton. More than I ever have in my entire life. I reader hundreds of articles a day out of my Google Reader, I read (or skim) thousands of tweets, I read a shade more than a hundred emails each day, I’m reading more books thanks to my Kindle and lets not forget to toss in instant messages, text messages and the occasional (gasp!) magazine.

It’s a lot of information. It’s a lot of consumption. And it doesn’t leave a lot of time for synthesis.

And that’s where I think we’ve got the ratio wrong.

Because synthesis is really the important part of all of this knowledge exchange.  Taking an idea, an argument, and thinking about it, challenging it and putting it up against what you believe and seeing what comes of that process and then contributing that output back is the ultimate goal of this conversation.

And it’s hard.

And that’s why I believe we (I) have the ratio wrong.  Right now I am guilty of a consumption rate and time commitment far in excess of any time committed to synthesis.  It may be 90% consumption 10% synthesis.  And that seems like a giant missed opportunity.

Maybe I need to give us a bit more credit, we all parse things quickly, doing a Malcolm Gladwell-esque Blink exercise as we triage the content we consume; but do we really sit and think of the implications of what we just read? I know I don’t do enough of it.

So I say, let’s get the ratio right. Let’s do more synthesis and less consumption.  Let’s do the hard, rewarding work of taking what we’re hearing and adding our own critical analysis to it and then contribute that back to the conversation instead of simply vacuuming up what’s out there.

I believe we’ll all be better off for it, now that I think about it.