3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

By Daniel Miessler on March 14th, 2006: Tagged as Delicious | GTD | Geek | Productivity | RSS

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.

NetNewsWire
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.:





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51 Comments »

  1. Any suggestions for staying on top of comment threads? I currently use RSS to do all my news reading but monitoring comment threads is still really inefficient. like this thread, for example - I’ll drag it to my dock and check it manually from time to time. surely there’s a better way?

    Comment by William — 3/14/2006 @ 3:02 pm

  2. Might I humbly suggest Pukka for your tool of choice for archiving to del.icio.us? I’m trying to get some feedback about it in the early stages and since my goal for it was speed and staying out of the way, I’m curious what your thoughts are on it from a productivity point of view.

    Comment by Justin — 3/14/2006 @ 3:58 pm

  3. 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading…

    Daniel Miessler has written a step-by-step approach to dealing with RSS effectively without letting it take over your time. The gist of it is: pick your sources well (use collaborative sites like digg and del.icio.us popular), read efficiently by openi…

    Trackback by Lifehacker — 3/14/2006 @ 4:05 pm

  4. I’m sure something already exists out there but what tools are available to “splice” feeds into one? If I could custom combine a bunch of my normal feeds into one I think that would save a lot of time as well. Any ideas?

    Comment by Jon — 3/14/2006 @ 4:52 pm

  5. I’m going to say go with an RSS client. Checkout NetNewsWire Lite or bloglines.com if you want a web interface.

    Comment by William — 3/14/2006 @ 5:01 pm

  6. Jon: If you have access to a webserver with PHP and MySQL, you might try ReBlog to collect and republish all your news feeds.

    Comment by Zombie — 3/14/2006 @ 5:03 pm

  7. William: I use co.mments.com to keep track of pages with comments I want to read. There is also cocomment.com, but that only tracks conversations that you commented in yourself.

    Comment by Helena — 3/14/2006 @ 5:13 pm

  8. Try Diggdot.us. Aggregates digg/slashdot/del.icio.us and now Reddit!

    How about that! :-)

    Comment by John — 3/14/2006 @ 5:39 pm

  9. http://www.blogline.com is the best online RSS reader that I have used. very simple. check it out!

    Comment by stebbix — 3/14/2006 @ 6:05 pm

  10. Helana: got a co.mments account - very nice. Does comments just fine, but doesn’t seem to track message board threads at all. Any ideas about how to track these?

    Comment by William — 3/14/2006 @ 6:28 pm

  11. Thanks Zombie, I’ll give that a try. I tried a bunch of different web services that offer splicing functionality but each one seems to choke on one or more of the feeds I add to it.

    feedjumbler.com seems like the easiest to use service I came across so far.

    magpieRSS is another great tool if someone wants to roll your own but will require a little more coding knowledge.

    Comment by Jon — 3/14/2006 @ 6:40 pm

  12. William: No, I am sorry. I would definitely like that as well. And Google/Yahoo groups. And preferably all in a single trusted system. I wish one of those new portal homepages (live.com, netvibes etc.) would address this.

    Comment by Helena — 3/14/2006 @ 7:52 pm

  13. I use Feed Digest to splice feeds. Has a lot of other nice features as well, including publishing the feed to a blog, javascript, or html (I use it to automatically publish some of my del.icio.us links on my blog as well)

    Comment by steve — 3/14/2006 @ 8:11 pm

  14. [...] dmiessler.com | blog 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.   [link] [...]

    Pingback by lightkeeper54.com » Blog Archive » 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading — 3/14/2006 @ 8:33 pm

  15. Some other things to do for you Netnewswire users (not having used too many other readers, I’m not sure that you can do these things elsewhere, though it seems like it ought to be a standard feature in any respectable aggregator):

    1. Use groups! There are a lot of quality news sources out there and once you start to amass more than 20 or so (I am currently subscribed to a little over 300 feeds) then it can absolutely become cumbersome to trudge through them all at any given time. So, categorize! Then collapse the folders so you’re not looking at all the different sources.

    2. Prioritize! Netnewswire has a cool feature that allows you to set the refresh time on individual feeds. If you’re subscribing to a feed that is of interest to you, but that you don’t need to keep up on every day, then don’t. Change the refresh parameters to only check for new content every 72 hours.

    3. “Mark All As Read” is your friend. Learn to use it wisely. If you have a “Fun” group with 20 feeds set to refresh every two days, and all of a sudden you have a group with 120 new items in it, don’t be afraid to skim the headlines and then “Command + K” it. It can almost seem like a waste to aggregate a bunch of information that you don’t even read, but sometimes you just have to hit reset rather than get bogged down.

    4. Dinosaurs. Though it is somewhat hidden, and doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut :’(, the dinosaurs feature of Netnewswire lets you see feeds that haven’t refreshed recently, possibly indicating that the source has been abandoned. Use it. Use it well. Nuke feeds that you don’t need.

    Any other tricks?

    Comment by Allan — 3/14/2006 @ 9:06 pm

  16. Here’s a good trick: set your “Post to Weblog” app to cocoalicious, Pukka, or some other similar app, and you can post a link directly to del.icio.us right from NetNewsWire

    Comment by William — 3/14/2006 @ 10:47 pm

  17. http://www.popurls.com …. kicks ass

    Comment by Frodo — 3/15/2006 @ 3:31 am

  18. Nice, but why “read” when you can “listen”?? I use iSpeak It from ZappTek on OS X to convert all of the RSS feeds I used to read into text-to-speech audio files, which then automatically load into iTunes and my iPod. The same can be done with any clipboard text, Word doc, PDF, etc. (This is not an endorsement for iSpeak It. I’m sure other applications exist for Mac or PC, or you could creatively combine several apps to accomplish the same thing.) What I find especially powerful about the audio approach is that I can continue to listen to my feeds while at the grocery store, running errands, folding laundry, etc. I can easily fast forward or jump to the next track (blog) at any point. If a post is especially interesting, I will go online to read it or bookmark it with Del.icio.us.

    Funny, I commented on this information overload problem on my own blog today. Anyhow, I plan to write a post that talks about how I use text-to-speech for keeping up on tech news and just about everything I do. My computer is almost always reading something while I simultaneously read or work on something else. At this point, I’m not sure I could live without text-to-speech. :)

    Comment by Brian McNitt — 3/15/2006 @ 3:58 am

  19. I use exactly the same method, but I perform another step that might be very useful. When I’m done reading the interesting news from my browser, then I’m going to popurls wich is an amazing website that is feeded with the most popular news from digg,del.icio.us,reddit,googlenews,youtube,flickr…

    Hope you’ll find it useful!

    Comment by savior1980 — 3/15/2006 @ 7:41 am

  20. Why would you want to close your newsreader? It will not do regular updates when you close it. Much better to minimize it.

    Comment by Brian Carnell — 3/15/2006 @ 8:06 am

  21. [...] 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading Be more efficient in filtering and absorbing news. Thanks Lifehacker   [...]

    Pingback by Weblog Tools Collection » 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading — 3/15/2006 @ 12:47 pm

  22. Yes, that’s what I am doing. I even use the same softwares (Firefox and NetNewsWire)! Except that I do not use del.icio.us. :)

    Comment by LcF — 3/15/2006 @ 1:33 pm

  23. Awesome comments and suggestions, guys. Thanks much!

    Comment by Daniel — 3/15/2006 @ 10:29 pm

  24. For Archive I use Firefox ScrapBook (http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/)Extension.

    Comment by shmozumder — 3/16/2006 @ 5:14 am

  25. [...] 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading Great… just three steps to speed up my RSS reading addiction. Keywords: aggregator, gtd, productivity, rss [...]

    Pingback by theory.isthereason » Today’s Links: Overheard Conversations in New York — 3/16/2006 @ 12:28 pm

  26. [...] Yes, I have a sad life - I need to keep reading blogs/news daily. I can easily have 600 unread articles every day. This means I also need a fast and effective way to read them so that I don’t spend hours doing it. Here’s how to do it fast, GTD style even. I have my own system, though this one looks much more comprehensive. After reading, I’ve decided to implement a recommendation - bookmarking via del.icio.us. A recommended read. [...]

    Pingback by Bernie’s ramblings… » Efficient blog/new sreading — 3/16/2006 @ 2:52 pm

  27. Could you share the URL of your del.icio.us shortcut — when I search for two tags in my del.icio.us links, it is not showing me only the items that I have tagged with both tags. In fact, some don’t have either of the tags I requested (perhaps other people had tagged — but it’s unclear).

    thanks.

    Comment by Doug — 3/16/2006 @ 4:21 pm

  28. [...] 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading Good general guidlines on getting the most out of your newsfeeds without spending too much time in the process. (tags: RSS gtd) [...]

    Pingback by Nate’s Blog » links for 2006-03-15 — 3/16/2006 @ 7:25 pm

  29. [...] 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading by Daniel Miessler has an interesting method to filter and process news using the Internet. Basically the process is: cut unnessessary news, open only the interesting stuff and archive for easy access. I may try it out to see if it helps speed things up. =) [...]

    Pingback by michael fulk’s blog » Blog Archive » 3 Steps to More Efficient News Reading — 3/17/2006 @ 2:58 pm

  30. [...] Just now I read an article over Internet dealing with reading online news effetively. It is really helpful. Following the steps the author suggested, I could finish browsing all the feeds in my RSS reader on a daily basis, which is undoubtedly to Get Things Done (I guess an appropriate translation for this buzzword could be 今日事今日毕).  [...]

    Pingback by A Pad 4 Ever » Blog Archive » Effective reading of RSS feeds — 3/17/2006 @ 6:15 pm

  31. [...] 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading Tagged as: aggregation news performance productivity rss tips work [...]

    Pingback by Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov » Daily del.icio.us bookmarks — 3/18/2006 @ 9:19 am

  32. [...] The irony of using supposedly time-saving aggregators and services like Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Populicious, RSS readers, etc. is that they don’t save you any time at all if you’re not disciplined in your application of them — otherwise you quickly lose any time advantage by filling the void with more and more feeds. Daniel Miessler: 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. [...]

    Pingback by scot hacker’s foobar blog » 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading — 3/19/2006 @ 10:08 pm

  33. [...] Many of the law bloggers have posted recently on the best way to keep control over the “river of news” that RSS provides — a river that frequently threatens to overflow its banks. Steve Nipper suggested putting your feeds on double secret probation. Dennis posted on Trimming Your News Aggregator Subscriptions. And Fred discusses Trimming Down the News Aggregator Fat. Lots of “trimming” going on there. Even if you are able to keep your feeds pruned to a respectable number, sometimes it’s just to hard to keep up with the amount of news you receive each day. That’s where this post from Daniel Miessler comes in — in 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading, Daniel sets forth a simple, Getting Things Done approach to getting through your feeds each day. Posted by: Tom Mighell at 6:45 am  |  Link | [0] Trackbacks | [0] Pingbacks | Email This Article [...]

    Pingback by Inter Alia — 3/28/2006 @ 7:53 am

  34. [...] Diese sogenannte News-Aggregatoren oder Memetracker spriessen momentan wie Pilze aus dem Cyberboden, Social Bookmarking-Services verfolgen den neuesten Web-Buzz. Die frischesten Online-News werden zudem in Bild und Ton untermalt, teilweise von Usern empfohlen und bewertet. Und alles gibt’s überall als RSS-Feed, die man in seinem RSS-Client oder online lesen kann. Daniel Miessler gibt ein paar Tipps zum effizienten, zeitsparenden Umgang mit der Flut an Neuigkeiten. Auch die vielen comments auf seinen Artikel geben viele Ideen. Ich kämpfe täglich mit mir und den vielen kleinen Links, die gelesen, einsortiert, empfohlen oder gelöscht werden wollen. Popurls ist alleine aus Zeitersparnisgründen einen Versuch wert. [...]

    Pingback by Eierlegende Wollmilchsäue für News-Junkies 2.0?at @cb’s ßetabloggerei — 4/4/2006 @ 12:42 pm

  35. I follow a similar approach, but just using Bloglines. You can set Bloglines to open all links in one window. So I go through all of the feeds, and anything I want to read in more detail I click on. Then close Bloglines, go to that other window, and then just read, hit back, repeat.

    Comment by Jon — 4/6/2006 @ 12:25 pm

  36. any suggestions on what to do if you want to archive a webpage to a local drive? doing this takes care of webpages that may be time-limited, or which are important enough to warrant local archival.

    i currently use scrapbook, a firefox ext, for local archival, but i’m having trouble organising all theinformation. i probbaly have hundreds of webpages saved. i’m looking for a tag/del.ico.us-like system to keep things on track. perhaps a delicious-scrapbook mashup? any suggestions welcome!

    Comment by Joon — 4/8/2006 @ 5:51 am

  37. Really interesting article. Im a News-Junkie too, maybe with this tips I can optimize my Feeds…

    Comment by laender — 6/6/2006 @ 12:04 pm

  38. All the lyrics you want at http://www.lyricshunt.com

    Comment by Hunt — 6/23/2006 @ 2:55 am

  39. [...] Daniel Miessler wrote a great post the other day on the topic of efficient blog reading. I really enjoyed it probably because I think I’m already doing many of the things he suggested and because it is so simple. 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. 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. [...]

    Pingback by Mattbob -- Blog Archive » Efficient Blog Reading — 9/9/2006 @ 3:05 pm

  40. Buon luogo, congratulazioni, il mio amico!

    Comment by Azzurra — 11/4/2006 @ 5:46 pm

  41. Your article is very informative and helped me further.

    Thanks, David

    Comment by davidvogt — 2/3/2007 @ 10:57 am

  42. Three Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading…

    Daniel Miessler explains how to efficiently read multiple RSS feeds using the Getting Things Done approach.

    ……

    Trackback by geekman.com — 3/5/2007 @ 11:19 am

  43. This is my Digital Camera And Cell Phones Blog. Full reviews of digital cameras and cellphones reviews… enjoy

    Comment by digitalon — 3/11/2007 @ 11:39 pm

  44. Use RSS Already…

    If you are reading this sentence on the website, let me put this lightly:You are soooo Web 1.0 - do try to keep up.
    Seriously effiecient developers do not go hunting for new information, they use RSS to have it delivered. Here are some videos and…

    Trackback by {codesqueeze} — 8/23/2007 @ 6:15 am

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    Comment by AllForYou123 — 8/30/2007 @ 12:27 am

  46. [...] 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading [...]

    Pingback by » What is RSS? — 10/2/2007 @ 7:08 am

  47. [...] 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading [...]

    Pingback by » Qu’est-ce que le RSS ? — 10/2/2007 @ 7:15 am

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    But. I forgot link to it :(

    Can you give me URL to the XRumer description? screenshots, etc.

    Thank you

    Comment by XRumakTheBest — 11/6/2007 @ 11:14 pm

  49. very interesting, but I don’t agree with you Idetrorce

    Comment by Idetrorce — 12/15/2007 @ 11:07 am

  50. XRumor, of course, is a spammy peace of software - so forget it :)

    Comment by André — 2/10/2008 @ 11:19 am

  51. My favourite pharma supermarket world-pharma.pillsfm.com WBR, Alex

    Comment by luckylucker — 3/17/2008 @ 12:54 pm

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