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.

Aggregation Is Key

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. Three 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.
• Populicious
Populicious is one of the most interesting sources out there. As the name betrays, it’s based on Del.icio.us, which is perhaps one of the most incredible projects ever. Essentially, Del.icio.us is a massive, social, database of peoples’ bookmarks. The key there is the social part; it means that people can not only watch what others are bookmarking, but they can also see what categories they are assigning to those bookmarks. Then, and here’s the rub, you can search based on all this stuff. You can say, “Show me everything my friend bookmarks as Linux related.”, or “Show me everything that everyone bookmarks as Security related.” Well, Populicious shows you the most popular bookmarks from all Del.icio.us users worldwide. It’s most excellent.

In addition to these meta-feeds you of course want to include a number of of other information 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.

So that brings us to the most important element of all this — have a list. Having a single list of sources that you invariably use is the centerpiece of efficient news reading. Checking different sources at different times — and sometimes missing a few of the key ones — is not a way to develop trust in your news gathering method. So first and foremost, get your sources together. Tweak them. Hone them. That’s where we start.

Here’s a sample list of sources that’s part of what I read daily. Save that as an OPML file and import it into your favorite reader to get started with a decent set of general and InfoSec related feeds.

Read Efficiently

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 two applications — a standalone RSS news reader and Firefox. I use NewNewsWire for my RSS Reader. The trick here is to operate in two steps:

1. Open your news reader and select the items you want to read, which then open in Firefox as new tabs. When you’re done going through your feeds, close your news reader.
2. Go into Firefox, and starting on the leftmost tab, read each one until you’re finished.

The magic is all in the first step. The reason we as information fiends get so discombobulated when we read is that we often forget where we were as we travel down various tangents. We open a site, read for a bit, maybe follow a link, and then hopefully make it back to the main thread we were on. It’s bad form, and it leads to copious feelings of inadequate newsage. This method solves that by subconsciously saying to yourself:

Once you’ve opened all the stories that interest you and closed your reader, everything you need to see today is now waiting for you in Firefox.

It sounds weird, 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 absorbtion 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 Del.icio.us – a free service that allows you to keep and share your bookmarks online. The key thing about the system is its use of tags. One of the coolest things about Del.icio.us is that, 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 743 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 your RSS reader.
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 reader; you’re done with it.
4. Go to your browser and start from the left-most tab. Read each item, focusing on the core content and not the fluff. Remember, most items are like 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.:

Well, I splurged ($9) on enough materials to make like 314 Hipster PDAs. I’m enthused about it. I’ve only been using it for a few hours now, but I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

I love my Blackberry but I hate its organizer. For that role I much prefer a Palm device. Anyway, without a good PDA lately I’ve been running around with a ton of open loops, which is bad.

That’s when I decided I should just get a small notepad and use one page per inbox item (GTD). Then I realized that there’s a system that uses a similar concept — the hipster PDA.

Anyone have any comments on this solution?

The way most of us take in daily news is horribly inefficient. The problem isn’t how fast we read, or even what sites we go to — it’s the process of finding news, taking it in, and returning to work. Our current habits are based in the need for distraction and the fear that we’re missing something. We wander back and forth between our main sites — refreshing each one multiple times per day, or even per hour. This approach is guaranteed to leave you 1) feeling frustrated, and 2) far less productive. There’s a better way.

Enter GTD

Most of us are familiar by now with David Allen‘s groundbreaking productivity system called GTD. The fundamental concept in his system is that anything you have floating around in your head that you haven’t actively addressed and written down can and will destroy your ability to function efficiently.

In other words, the conscious and subconcious constantly fight for your brain’s limited processing power, and if you have 8 things floating around in your head while you’re trying to get work done, you could only be using 40% of your potential on your current task. The GTD approach is simple — you let your subconscious relax — thereby getting all that brainpower back that your “background processes” were hogging. Tasks become easier, you’re able to stay focused, etc, etc.

Interestingly enough, this very same concept applies to reading your daily news.

Fighting The Urges

Like many others, the urge to check the latest goings on in the blogsphere and/or news is overpowering. We simply can’t help but be distracted by the thought of something new and exciting hitting the Internet without us knowing. Much productivity is lost during the day specifically because of this phenomenon; but there’s hope. The answer lies in a two-step process — 1) using a dependable system, and 2) learning to trust that system. Sound Familiar?

The System

The system I use is based on two products — NetNewsWire, an OS X based RSS Aggregator, and Firefox (thanks to Ken for showing me the power of the combo). The way it works is actually quite simple: I first go through my feeds one by one, from top to bottom. When I hit a story I enjoy, I either double-click it or press enter. This creates a new tab in Firefox (which remains in the background) for each story I want to read more about. So if there isn’t enough in the RSS feed, or I have some other reason to check the actual site out, I have that content waiting for me in Firefox.

Next, in phase two, I close my RSS reader and head to Firefox. Waiting for me is every single site that I found interesting for that session. This includes personal blogs, security news, world events, etc. I then move from right to left skimming the content of each tab. Once I’m through with each, I cmd/ctrl-w out of the tab which automatically selects the next one on the left. I move through each tab in this fashion until I have read all my content. After I’m done, I minimize my browser and get to work.

The key here (just like in GTD) is trusting your system. When you’re 1) confident about the feeds you have in your aggregator, and 2) you know you went through them methodically, you then know that you’ve seen the vast majority of what there is to see. That’s the whole point of this — getting your mind to relax.

When you’re opening a myriad of websites and checking each at different times, there’s never an end to it. With this system there is. You check your reliable feeds, open anything of interest, read them all in turn, then you’re done.

Getting Started

Ok, so what do you need to get started? As I said, I use NetNewsWire for my aggregator, but it’s an OS X app that not everyone can use. A friend of mine uses the same system but using Bloglines instead of NetNewsWire. Bloglines is a web-based aggregator that can perform pretty much the same role as a local app. My buddy runs it from Firefox (naturally), which lets one simply wheel-click links to get them to open in a new tab, just like I do within NetNewsWire by pressing enter or double-clicking a story.

Here’s what you need to do to get started:

1. Find yourself an RSS Aggregator. (Here’s a decent place to start looking for one.)
2. Find RSS feeds for your favorite sites.

Then, once you’re all set up, here’s your system for checking news:

1. Open your RSS reader.
2. Move through the new stories, opening the ones you want to read more about in new tabs within Firefox.
3. Close your RSS reader and move to Firefox.
4. Skim/read each story you’ve opened, closing each tab as you finish.
5. When you’re done with the last tab, close Firefox. You’re done.

Learning To Let Go

The last step of the system is learning to trust that you’re getting enough news from it. One could make the argument that you could just do that with your current habits and be done with it, but it’s not nearly as easy as with a system that has a start and finish.

What this process does is make a strong argument to your subconscious that nothing else is needed for the moment. It’s much harder to make that argument when you’re not sure if you checked all your sites, or if all your sites are still open there to look at. The key is to close the RSS reader and keep it closed until it’s time to read news again. Once you close your RSS reader, all you need to do to catch up is read the open tabs in Firefox — that’s the key. I do this roughly 3 times a day now — once in the morning, once after lunch, and maybe one additional time before going home.

Ultimately, this is really about being able to get back to work with a calm, efficient mind. Conquering the obsession over news intake is a major step in that process, and I hope this GTD approach helps you as much as it’s helped me.: