I am trying to manage my information intake. The problem is that I spend way too much time reading meaningless or useless drivel on hacker news, lesswrong, reddit and finally my RSS feeds. So far I came up with two possible interventions:
Reduce the total amount of information to take in by removing meaningless content or comments
Increase speed of intake through automated summaries and/or speed reading
I am sure other people around here ran into a similar problem, so I post here. The latter point seems feasible, especially the speed reading part. Automated summaries for news stories seem to work reasonably well. The former point is somewhat more complicated. I could use the end of the week or month and some kind of social aggregation process to filter out the daily and weekly noise to get to the signal. Problem is that especially Reddit does not work very well for that.
The current idea is to have relevant reading material sent to my kindle with no possibility to get lost in related content, constant refreshing and ongoing discussions in the comments. Psychological factors influencing the process are fear of missing some information and stimulation of the seeking system because of the jagged rewards while browsing social media. A good technical filter would level the reward and thus supress the inner gambler.
Installed RescueTime to track where I spend time. I hardly never check the dashboard so I don’t think it’s very effective.
I avoid having too many tabs open. If I need to look something up, I open a new window, do a search and maybe open a few tabs, and then close the whole window, so I’ll rarely have lingering half-finished stuff to look at again.
On Reddit, my default settings only show posts for the latest months, so in the few subreddits I follow regularly, there’ll rarely be new things (and I avoid at looking at other kinds of feed like new or the front page), and I don’t worry about missing things. This doesn’t make visiting reddit very rewarding, but that’s a feature :)
I do regularly cull low quality stuff from my RSS feeds, so I rarely have that much
I never check RSS feeds at work (and rarely check personal mail or lesswrong)
I occasionally do pomodoros (not a fully ingrained habit yet), which works on getting myself to stay focused.
I have no fear of “missing some information”, that’s just silly, in ten years I don’t think my life will be changed because I didn’t read a blog post or some news. Most journalism is a waste of time anyway, reading wikipedia or textbooks is more effective.
Installed RescueTime to track where I spend time. I hardly never check the dashboard so I don’t think it’s very effective.
Did the same with the same result. It falls under the category of information that is easy to gather but I don’t base actions on, so it is useless in the literal sense.
On Reddit, my default settings only show posts for the latest months, so in the few subreddits I follow regularly, there’ll rarely be new things (and I avoid at looking at other kinds of feed like new or the front page), and I don’t worry about missing things. This doesn’t make visiting reddit very rewarding, but that’s a feature :)
I could block Reddit completely and send the top posts from the week to my kindle on a weekly basis. Though blocking websites usually doesn’t help me.
*I do regularly cull low quality stuff from my RSS feeds, so I rarely have that much
The problem here is that I don’t have low quality feeds, but that they are not high quality in regular fashion, meaning that I sometimes get good content. Though I imagine I could look for substitute streams that are more consistent in their quality and/or figure out a way to filter the noise.
I occasionally do pomodoros (not a fully ingrained habit yet), which works on getting myself to stay focused.
That I will have to try. But it does not seem like they solve a problem I have, namely wasting my time on consuming information I actually don’t care about.
I have no fear of “missing some information”, that’s just silly, in ten years I don’t think my life will be changed because I didn’t read a blog post or some news. Most journalism is a waste of time anyway, reading wikipedia or textbooks is more effective.
I regularly get great information from lesswrong, reddit, hacker news and my RSS feeds, which seems to be the exact problem. Cutting it all out completely and replacing it with textbooks and wikipedia seems too extreme.
Installed RescueTime to track where I spend time. I hardly never check the dashboard so I don’t think it’s very effective.
Did the same with the same result. It falls under the category of information that is easy to gather but I don’t base actions on, so it is useless in the literal sense.
I also had the same experience. I couldn’t have phrased the above better.
I am trying to manage my information intake. The problem is that I spend way too much time reading meaningless or useless drivel on hacker news, lesswrong, reddit and finally my RSS feeds. So far I came up with two possible interventions:
Reduce the total amount of information to take in by removing meaningless content or comments
Increase speed of intake through automated summaries and/or speed reading
I am sure other people around here ran into a similar problem, so I post here. The latter point seems feasible, especially the speed reading part. Automated summaries for news stories seem to work reasonably well. The former point is somewhat more complicated. I could use the end of the week or month and some kind of social aggregation process to filter out the daily and weekly noise to get to the signal. Problem is that especially Reddit does not work very well for that.
The current idea is to have relevant reading material sent to my kindle with no possibility to get lost in related content, constant refreshing and ongoing discussions in the comments. Psychological factors influencing the process are fear of missing some information and stimulation of the seeking system because of the jagged rewards while browsing social media. A good technical filter would level the reward and thus supress the inner gambler.
Some stuff I did in that direction:
Installed RescueTime to track where I spend time. I hardly never check the dashboard so I don’t think it’s very effective.
I avoid having too many tabs open. If I need to look something up, I open a new window, do a search and maybe open a few tabs, and then close the whole window, so I’ll rarely have lingering half-finished stuff to look at again.
On Reddit, my default settings only show posts for the latest months, so in the few subreddits I follow regularly, there’ll rarely be new things (and I avoid at looking at other kinds of feed like new or the front page), and I don’t worry about missing things. This doesn’t make visiting reddit very rewarding, but that’s a feature :)
I do regularly cull low quality stuff from my RSS feeds, so I rarely have that much
I never check RSS feeds at work (and rarely check personal mail or lesswrong)
I occasionally do pomodoros (not a fully ingrained habit yet), which works on getting myself to stay focused.
I have no fear of “missing some information”, that’s just silly, in ten years I don’t think my life will be changed because I didn’t read a blog post or some news. Most journalism is a waste of time anyway, reading wikipedia or textbooks is more effective.
Did the same with the same result. It falls under the category of information that is easy to gather but I don’t base actions on, so it is useless in the literal sense.
I could block Reddit completely and send the top posts from the week to my kindle on a weekly basis. Though blocking websites usually doesn’t help me.
The problem here is that I don’t have low quality feeds, but that they are not high quality in regular fashion, meaning that I sometimes get good content. Though I imagine I could look for substitute streams that are more consistent in their quality and/or figure out a way to filter the noise.
That I will have to try. But it does not seem like they solve a problem I have, namely wasting my time on consuming information I actually don’t care about.
I regularly get great information from lesswrong, reddit, hacker news and my RSS feeds, which seems to be the exact problem. Cutting it all out completely and replacing it with textbooks and wikipedia seems too extreme.
I also had the same experience. I couldn’t have phrased the above better.