The often-quoted Pareto principle states that 80% of value is derived from 20% of input.
And whilst used in a variety of different contexts, reading information is no different.
Often we begin scrolling through a webpage, article or PDF with the hope of learning or finding out about a specific subject or thing.
But in order to find that valuable information we are forced to wade through a lot of useless information.
Information that could be removed without diminishing any core understanding.
In many ways, digital information is currently like a book without chapters, or even page numbers.
Whilst we can pick up a book and know roughly what it's about, there may just be a specific chapter or page that is perfectly relevant to what we're searching for.
In the same way, reading articles online is like working through a very big book one page at a time.
Each individual page may be interesting but it will take us a very long time to find exactly what we're looking for...
And we'll end up spending the majority of our time and energy looking for the right pages.
When really we should be spending the majority of our time focusing on the specific pages that matter.
Just like the Pareto principle explains...
80% of the value, from just 20% of the input...
So, what's the solution?
The answer is pretty simple when you think about it.
We need to find faster ways to assess whether a specific piece of digital information is relevant to what we're actually looking for.
Just like how a chapter or an index reference tells you which part of a book is worth reading.
Some articles already do this
They have abstracts, introductions, thematic breakdowns, and citations for related reading
And all of this is intended to help you understand what the article is about without having to dedicate lots of your precious time going through it word for word.
But only a very small percentage of online resources actually have this useful contextual information.
And abstracts tend to only appear in super specific academic contexts.
Whether you've noticed or not, in the last few years Google have actually tried to implement a similar solution to the first page of their search results.
When you make a search, you get an overview, a list of suggested questions, some images and related news stories.
and in doing this, Google are attempting to provide you understanding of a topic or search term without ever having to visit a specific webpage at all.
(There's a reason Google once called themselves the 'index of the internet', to return again to the book analogy...)
Now, without even noticing it, this is a pretty handy way of overviewing a topic without having to spend time trawling through various different pages trying to scrape the information you need.
But what if you want something more specific, like a quick overview of a specific webpage or article?
At the moment when you click on a specific page to read, you don't get any sort of overview at all. Just a large chunk of text with little to no context or overview.
And here's where genei.io comes in...
It's a platform which uses AI to provide a summary of the contents of any uploaded article.
And also provides an overview of keywords, themes, arguments and other related reading.
The summarised overview is broken down by section and into specific bullet points
And each of the bullet points are hyperlinked to where the information is derived from in the article
meaning you can jump straight to the parts that matter
Or just skip past the document if it's not relevant at all
And repeat the process until you find a relevant resource
Without having to spend hours reading through each of them... one page at a time.
So far, we've found that this process can help improve reading and research speeds by up to 70%.
And 94% of users on the platform currently agree, saying genei saves them time on their work.
Because, by avoiding reading what is irrelevant or unrelated to our work, using genei means we have more time and energy to focus on the information that really matters.
And so, we're able, in fact, to learn and understand more, by reading less of the waffle, and more of the important insights.
We could pull out a tonne of different reviews and testimonials, but this one on our slack channel summed genei up best.
If this sounds like it might be of interest, you can try genei for free for 14 days using the link below.
We've already got thousands of happy users worldwide, and we'd love if you were to join them.