Caffeinated Coder

I recently read an thought provoking article by Nicholas Carr, entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In the article, Nicholas describes a phenomenon that I have observed happening in myself over the last few years.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The article attributes this general scattering of our attention and weakening of our concentration to our ever increasing usage of Google and the internet, which is structured in a way that promotes skimming and quickly jumping from one source of information to the next rather than focused reading. The author presents a wide variety of historical corollaries, research studies, and anecdotal evidence to suggest that the internet is fundamentally rewiring the ways in which our brain processes information. The overall effect is that we are becoming more like “pancake people”, stretched thin over vast amounts of information which we only interact with on an increasingly superficial level.

Although I admire minimalism and conciseness in writing and find my well-honed Google-Fu to be an essential skill in today’s landscape of information overload, I have to agree with with the author that it is a shame that all the benefits of Google and the Interent seems to be coming at the expense of our more traditional, focused reading skills.

It is just plain embarrassing to run out of steam 1/4 of the way through a Steve Yegge blog post even though I find the article interesting. It makes me feel like an out-of-shape, intellectual couch potato.

But what can be done to counter-act this GIADD (Google Inspired Attention Deficit Disorder)?

I decided to start by overhauling the way I read my RSS Feeds.

In the GTD (Getting Things Done) arena, there is a concept of separating ‘Processing’ from ‘Doing’. Processing just entails making important decisions about whether or not something is worth doing in the first place, what context it best completed in, and where it belongs in your overall organizational scheme. Since processing and doing are two very different activities that require different frames of mind (sort of like the difference between skimming and focused reading), you are supposed to finish all your processing before you move on to the doing or ‘Next Action’ part of the equation. This way you can get into and stay into a flow during each activity.

Since this concept has worked really well for me while processing email, snail mail, and various other inbox items, I decided to apply the same principal to reading blogs.

Here’s my new RSS workflow

1. Establish Zero Bounce Zone: First I organized my feeds into 4 simple groups as a way of prioritizing which ones I wanted to keep up with the most. I used Favorites, SunnyDay, CloudyDay, and RainyDay since they forced me to think of them in terms of how much time and motivation I had to read. Then I decided which folders I was willing to make a zero bounce commitment to, which means that I make sure I have processed every single post in those groups by the end of each day. I currently have about 30-35 blogs in my ‘No Bounce Zone’. I only process posts in the other 2 folders if I have time, which means I can still keep tabs on good potential sources of information without feeling guilty for having too many unread items in my RSS Reader.
2. Process All Zero Bounce Feeds Daily: All I am doing here is trying to decide how interested I am in reading the post. Sometimes I can tell just by the title, but sometimes I have to skim it to find out. If it is a very short post that doesn’t take much concentration to read, then I go ahead and just read it. Otherwise, I put a Read++, Read, or Maybe tag on the ones that I am interested in reading. If they aren’t interesting to me, then I just mark them as Read and forget about them (life is too short to read everything). Since all I have to do is make a quick decision about every item in this group, I force myself to take these in order and resist the urge to just process the obviously interesting ones first. This is a bad habit that leads to procrastination and ultimately unprocessed items at the end of the day.
3. Process Some Optional Feeds If Time: I tend to do this if I am all caught up on my ‘Zero Bounce’ feeds, but still have spare, otherwise unproductive minutes throughout the day that aren’t appropriate for more focused reading.
4. Read Some Tagged Items: I usually wait until I have at least 20 minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time before doing this. For me, this usually tends to be at night when my kids (and often my wife) are in bed. Having this quiet time along with a large group of quality, pre-selected posts that I know I am interested in reading thoroughly helps me me disengage from my normal internet skimming mindset and get into a more focused reading mode instead. When selecting items to read from this group, I skip around and choose what I am most interested in first. After I finish reading them, I remove the Read tag so it will disappear from my reading queue and replace it with some recommended or technology specific reference tags to make it easy to track down later if needed. I expect this queue to always have a large number of items in it, so I don’t worry about its size as long as I know I am churning through tagged posts at a respectable rate each week.
5. Periodically Recategorize Feeds and Tagged Posts: Between my interests being in a constant state of flux and the relative quality and content of blogs going in random cycles, I like to recategorize blogs and posts on a regular basis to keep things from going stale.

I’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks now and have already noticed a big difference in being able to focus more on reading. Surprisingly, I’m also getting much faster at skimming and processing since I’ve released myself from the need to comprehend anything beyond what will help me make a decision about whether it is worth reading.

Best of all, I finally feel in control of my RSS Feeds in a way that I never have before. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by thousands of unread items, I feel like it is a manageable workload so I am actually more motivated to keep up with the reading than I as before.

What are some of the things that you are doing to fight GIADD (Google Inspired Attention Deficit Disorder)?

Popularity: 8% [?]

 Subscribe in a reader