Attention bargain

@Dino, I definitely suffer from information overload. I go back and forth with feeds, maybe one day I'll find an effective way of dealing with them—or stay away permanently. Thanks for sharing the article. The issue around “neomania” stands out. For the last year, I've been reading books that are more than 50 years old by now, it surprises both the quality of the ideas and the skilful use of words to express them.

@Jake I find reading printed material surprisingly pleasant. It is favourable for a more distraction-less reading experience in my opinion.

I'd like to echo what @rgruen has said.

I've recently added another layer to my online reading. I use my RSS reader for curating. As I'm sifting through the posts, I send anything I'm interested in to Pocket.

I appreciate that Pocket calculates the time required to read an article. Some of the articles I save in Pocket are work-related, and I may end up sharing them on my company's LinkedIn page. When my brain is fried but I feel a need to be productive, it's nice to see a relevant article has only a 2-minute read time.

And if the article has a 30-minute read time, maybe I'm better off printing it and reading it in chunks.

@John it sounds like you might be suffering from information overload. You say you already have a well curated feed, but it sounds like there's still too much coming at you that you need to make decisions on.

Maybe you need to implement a cut-off on items on your feed. Like say, if they are more than 1-week old, mark them all as read and move on. I do something similar with the software newsletters I follow in my feed. If I don't get to them within the week, I mark them off as read and move on. There' no way we can ever consume all the information in our feed, so I have just accepted that fact.

Also, if you haven't read it yet, this article helped me a lot with information overload:
https://www.nateliason.com/blog/infomania

Thanks @Dino and @rgruen for commenting.

I can see how this, as many other tools/features for consuming information, are useful in certain contexts for many people.

Take, for instance, the feeds. Those don't work well for me either. Even when I have a carefully curated feed with few but high-quality content, I always end up feeling somehow “obliged” to consume everything that comes out of it, and at some point I just can't keep up. Even checking my feed and deciding to ignore or skip-for-later some items, it is an energy-consuming process. That's not to say feeds are useless, of course not.

Maybe it is that my work, at the most fundamental level, is about consuming information and taking decisions. Read something, understand, write some code, a bit of testing, update some design or procedure, talk with a colleague, etc. It is a constant effort estimation where the goal is to maximize the added value during my working hours. Emails, instant messages, tasks on the scrum board are all feeds that need to be processed. And don't get me wrong, I really like what I do. However, I try to avoid the same time-management-optimization mindset during my leisure time (but I somehow always end up doing it if I don't make a conscious effort).

I think I started the post using the time hint feature only as an excuse to try to articulate something else, which I still can't quite figure out.

It is mainly used to help a reader decide if they can read it now, or postpone the reading for later. Exactly as rgruen says.

I find this little time hints helpful, because sometimes I have to decide, if there is enough time to read. And if I know, there are 7 minutes to read, but I only have, I know, that I have to save it for later.