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Few things are as important to geeks as how they stay informed. Knowledge is so key to us that the ability to pull it in, process it, and ensure that it’s recallable, is absolutely vital to being effective in our work.

One of the main problems we as information fetishists face is the lack of a solid, repeatable methodology for processing new input online. Too often we bounce back and forth between this site and that site, maybe check a blog or two, and then half-heartedly label the task of “reading news” as completed. This approach is not only a really poor way to stay on top of what’s new, but it’s also very anti-GTD.

The GTD Approach

For those not familiar with the GTD system, this essentially means that part of your mind will linger on activities that it doesn’t believe were performed adequately. This is actually a horrible way to go about your day; you want all your brain power focused on your current task, and being “sure” you’ve adequately absorbed today’s new information is crucial to this.

Below I touch on three main steps for accomplishing this goal. Following this simple methodology will ensure that you not only get the best information every time you start a news reading session, but it’ll also help you to actually trust that you’ve had a quality news gathering experience. This trust is what will allow you to move forward in a focused manner, with all your processor and RAM where it should be — on your current task.

Have Quality Sources

At the core of efficient news reading is having quality sources. The phrase, “garbage in – garbage out” comes to mind — meaning the better your sources are, and the tighter they’re tweaked towards the kind of news you are looking for, the more efficient your individual sessions will be.

Think aggregation. One of the coolest recent developments for people who value both time and information has been the emergence of meta-sources, or aggregated sources, of news. Two of these that I deem as absolutely crucial are listed below:

• Reddit
Reddit is an incredible collection of diverse content. The unique thing about this site is its focus on the more intellectual stories, i.e. subjects that branch into philosophy and politics as well as technology. I’ve seen many political sites that are heavier in this area, but none that ride the line between this space and technology so gracefully.
• Digg
Digg is an essential resource. Watching the front page for this site yields perhaps the hottest technology stories of the moment. It’s purely technical, so you’re not going to see it watered down with other types of content. If you’re a technical geek and this isn’t one of your sources you need to attack yourself.

Yes, most already know about Digg and Reddit, but they’re still worth mentioning. You have to learn to let go and limit your inputs; realize that the odds are good that anything you need to know will likely hit one of these two sites. Trust the system.

In addition to these meta-feeds you of course want to include a number of other specialized sources as well. These could range from personal blogs to industry-specific sites that keep you abreast of current events. For industry-oriented content you want to focus on the sources that bring the best content per unit of time. This seems fairly obvious, but being able to make the distinction between “cool”, “necessary”, and redundant is very important.

Not to pick on any particular site, but if you read a lot of different technical sources you may notice that content rarely shows up on Slashdot without first being hitting at least one other site. The question then becomes — do you need that site as well? Look for these types of sources within your list and see where you can trim them. I haven’t read Slashdot in over a year.

Choose What to Read Based on How Much Time You Have

So that brings us to the most important element of all this — deciding what to read at what time. I suggest that you organize your feeds into two to three groups based on priority. I call mine (creative, I know) primary, secondary, and tertiary.

The key here is to take a look at what you want to accomplish during your reading session, and then pick the feed group that corresponds to it. Here’s how my groups break down:

• Primary: My main aggregations + information security news (which comes from a Yahoo! Pipe I made). This is for getting up to speed quickly on the things that are necessary. Nothing extra goes in here.
• Secondary: This is where I put my main feeds that I care about but aren’t part of primary. If I have a bit more time I may look at these, but they are mostly after-hours reading.
• Tertiary: These are the feeds that I want to have the ability to monitor, but won’t check regularly. I never check these at work.

Here are my others in no particular order:

• blogs (personal and select professional blogs)
• security-blogs (information security blogs)
• security-news (additional infosec news)
• security-vulns (a myriad of vulnerability feeds)
• tracker-links (watches my friends’ linkrolls via del.icious and Google)
• tracker-books (watches my friends’ books)
• tracker-iphone (watches iPhone news via a custom Yahoo! Pipe)
• tracker-semantic (watches semantic web news via a custom Yahoo! Pipe)
• temporary (gathering bin for random feeds from people who contact me)

Basically, the names of my folders within Google Reader tell me exactly when they should be read. I can easily tell — based on what I’m doing and how much time I have — which areas to read and which to ignore. This type of input control is critical for reading news efficiently.

Have a Process

The second piece of the evolved news reading puzzle is being able to quickly rip through the sources that you’ve decided on. Too many people suffer on this step and end up mangled in a car wreck of bookmarks and open browser windows.

My technique is to use one application — Firefox. I use Google Reader for my RSS Reader, and the trick is to operate using the these three steps:

1. Open Google Reader within Firefox (it’s one of my homepage tabs) and select the items you want to read. When you’re done going through your feeds, close your Google Reader tab.
2. Starting on the leftmost tab, read each one until you’re done.
3. Consider your news session finished and return to your current task.

The beauty is in the first one — select your items and close your reader. The reason we get so discombobulated is that we’re constantly going down various tangents. We open a site, read for a bit, maybe follow a link, and before we know it three hours have passed. It’s bad form, and it leads to 1) feelings of never getting enough news, and 2) wasting time. This method solves that by subconsciously saying to yourself:

Once you’ve opened all the stories that interest you and closed Google Reader, everything you need to see today is now waiting for you in separate tabs.

It sounds simple enough, but this is precisely what your mind needs to hear in order to be able to proceed. Without hearing this you’re left with a quiet nagging in the back of the mind. “Did I see everything?” “What did I miss?” These sorts of thoughts keep you from functioning optimally. But now that you can dismiss this sort of tugging at your attention, you are free to fully immerse yourself in the current task.

Archive

The final piece of this whole absorption process is archiving what you find interesting. You do this not only so that you can maybe go back and brush up on it later, but so you can refer others to it easily when it comes up in conversation.

My solution for this is a combination of Del.icio.us – a free service that allows you to keep and share your bookmarks online — and the sharing option within Google Reader. The key thing about del.icio.us is its use of tags. When combined with Firefox Quicksearches, you can do instant URL bar searches of everything you’ve archived in the past (which for me is currently 1400+ sites). For me it’s as simple as this:

d linux firewall

This simple query put into my URL bar will search every bookmark I’ve ever put on the site that have those two tags assigned to them. Very powerful stuff.

Putting It All Together

Ok, so now that we’ve got all those steps, let’s see how it plays out:

1. Open Firefox and a Google Reader tab.
2. Go through your feeds and either read each item right in the reader or open it separately (in a browser tab).
3. When you’ve gone through all your feeds, close your Google Reader tab; you’re done with it.
4. Start from the left-most tab. Read each item, focusing on the core content and not the fluff. Remember, most items are 80% fluff.
5. If the item is a good reference or you may want to read it again or show it to others, archive it using a service like Del.icio.us.
6. When you’re done processing all the open tabs, you’re done reading news.

That’s it. It’s a process with a beginning and an end, which is a critical part of being able to break the cycle of inefficient news reading. You don’t want to drift around hoping that you read your news for the day — you want to know that you did.

The cool thing about this system is that you not only cover all your news in a repeatable, dependable way, but you also do so very quickly. This gives more time to do what’s important, namely putting all that newfound information to use.:

We of the tech-culture elite tend to obsess about efficiency. Those with the worst form of the disease can experience genuine anxiety when a task isn’t performed in the most efficient way possible. Unfortunately, this obsession can lead to a deep feeling of dissatisfaction. Sharpening tools can only only grant so much happiness; eventually you’ll have to build something.

The problem is one of perspective. We’ve lost sight of the actual purpose of efficiency. That purpose is to make things — to improve things — to create.

That output can be most anything — writing, programming, teaching — whatever it is that benefits from your internal improvements. The key is that you have to do something with that knowledge.

Seeking Balance

A single balance should be kept in mind here: optimization vs. creation. We should spend x amount of time improving ourselves, and then spend y amount of time actually making something. What that ratio is for each of us will obviously vary, but we can never forget how important that second step actually is.

Those who do forget this are stuck in perpetual optimization mode, and they feel lost. They read hundreds of books on how to write, but never get started on their own stuff. They watch a million cooking shows and never make any food. Remember that the point of efficiency and self-improvement is to raise the quality of your output — which requires that you actually create output.

They key to breaking the obsession and becoming more happy is to stop practicing for some big project in the future. Just find a project and dive in.:

I’m really starting to dislike how WordPress handles things. It’s like a giant bloody mess. I hope someone develops a blogging system based on Rails with a brutally clean plugin interface (and a simple migration path from WordPress). I’d be all over that.

It’s not that I don’t like WordPress’s functionality. I fully appreciate what the creator has done for the blogging community. I think the issue is with the haphazzard nature of PHP development more than anything.

Anyway, I was saying something about a link. Here it is.

[ Link: Web Page Analyzer ]