I can certainly relate to sifting through a variety of articles every day. With Gestalt IT, I’m always looking through my Feedly list (RIP Google Reader). It’s part of my job to staying up on great enterprise IT coverage, and more importantly understanding why its important.
Image Credit: Rob McDonald
I also volunteer to write headlines for the Daily Tech Headlines podcast. This is much more news focused, and uses source that surprisingly don’t often overlap with Gestalt IT. Both of these require you to wade through the PR cruft.
Ethan Banks makes some great points here to keep you sane while trying to do this. It’s not always easy. But if you can dispense with the idea that you have to “catch up”, it helps. The biggest thing I would emphasize is his point to read an article in the moment, don’t wait. I would expand on this, don’t be afraid to get into a dense article. A lot of times this can be off-putting, as the time required naturally means you can’t read as many articles. But these are often the most valuable sources. I’d rather dig into a 12,000 word piece on the history of software defined networking than hit two dozen listicles or press releases.
The other thing is to not be afraid to aggressively curate your sources. I try to go through my list of feeds every other month, and have to justify why I’m leaving every one in. This helps to avoid a little bit of noise. It’s surprising how quickly some feeds and publications can change in quality.
For anyone looking to make sense of a crowded RSS feed, Ethan spells it all out.
Ethan Banks comments:
The writing masses in addition to professional media generate tons of articles each week. What’s the best way to keep up? My strategy is multi-pronged.
TL;DR.
Filter quickly and mercilessly. Read only the most interesting articles.
- Know why you read. Ignore content that doesn’t align with your personal consumption goals.
- Ignore content with clickbait titles. These articles are purposely designed to drive traffic, generating salable ad impressions. Most of the time, they are content-free and safely ignored.
- Have no fear of declaring amnesty. Missing out doesn’t matter.
- Read it now; you probably won’t read it later. Don’t let articles pile up for when you have a better time.
- Use tools effectively. You can get through content more quickly and share or save the best stuff easily.
Read more at: How To Wade Through 100s Of Articles Weekly
