Every day that passes I feel just a little more stressed out. There’s so much to read in the world and not enough time to read.
I keep dumping things into Instapaper and never catching up to reading them.
I read every night, but each day the number of books added to my wishlist grows longer.
There are countless tweets and facebook posts and RSS articles being slurped down by my stream navigators that I ignore in spite, shuddering at the thought of the sheer volume of it all.
There are only a few things I can do in response.
1. I can ignore the stream, and let it pass me by. I can’t pretend like this isn’t a large part of my strategy daily already. There’s a curation that goes into who I talk to, listen to, and allow myself to be exposed to to any extent.
2. I can build tools that help me filter the stream so that I’m only ever exposed to things with a high likelihood of relevancy. So many people (myself included) say a lot, but relatively little of it is pertinent daily.
3. I can [re-]learn to speed-read. Much of what is written has very low entropic value. In any given sentence, save for the most concise, most of the word tokens used are of little informational value. Abstracting in layers, it seems clear that most sentences are of little informational value, and even most ideas. This is something that requires more study.
I am, of course, doing all three.
I have to go now. It’s time to read.
does the reading support one’s goals?
more content exists than we can consume, so we categorize and prioritize. however, the heuristics behind these may feel suboptimal for a lot of reasons…
do they actually score lower? how do we even measure this stuff?
The reading is a mix. Some of it is pure entertainment — a lot of it has been recently. Just received my copy of “four steps to the epiphany” so I’ll be using that to start slotting in dedicated time each week to reading on-path non-fiction.
I’m not really sure about the heuristics and metrics yet, I just know that every day when I open up my greader, that’s about 90% of what I do when I scan 200-300 feeds. I sense some sort of pack-rat behavior in my choice of feeds — so I’m trying to figure out which feeds I don’t spend much time on usually.
Since attending Maker Faire, for example, I started following several blogs just to keep a pulse on maker community happenings. But I suspect, because i generally parse that bundle of feeds every day, that I’ve given it too much attention, considering I just want a general idea of things that are happening. Same goes for design blogs and the like.
At some point I realized that I was reading too many op-ed pieces in general without first questioning why I was reading them: did I value their opinion?
I think old models of publication caused there to be some kind of implicit trust because of the name of the publication. If someone’s a pundit on some major broadcast channel (book, magazine, etc) then I perceived that they were notable in some way, to have been sourced for their opinion.
As I grew older, I realized that there’s a notable segment of the population who doesn’t often opine on matters. I don’t necessarily value these opinions more, just that it made me question who I was reading and why — both at the levels of authorship and publication. I realized that I continued to read Wired with the same reverence I gave it during the late 90’s (whether that was misplaced I leave for another day) but that the brand of Wired published content had devalued in terms of what I personally got out of it. Or at least I wanted something different. Old Wired had a great roundup of random news, but what was so fulfilling, at least as a high school student in Canada, far away from California, was their long-form meaty pieces into some interesting bit somewhere or something. Maybe this weekend I’ll try to parse through their archives and piece together when that transition happened.
Huh. Guess I should clean this up and post it as a main post.