Web reading – 3 simple tricks that actually work

October 31, 2010 Evgeny Goldin GTD, Web, 4

I was looking for a good way to organize my Web reading for years.

The problem with the Web, as we all know, it’s just too big. Everything is there and it constantly throws new links on me in masses, never stops, even on the weekends! You get to Twitter for a second and whoops, you have 10 more tabs opened, don’t even mention checking Google Reader. For a long time I was hopeless. I had no idea when and how I can cope with online materials that become available daily and hourly.

But within time I developed a simple system that allows me to stay organized (and sane!) in my Web reading. Here it goes:

1. Stop tabs clutter.

This was the biggest problem and it was the first to solve. Tabs clutter had to go.

I believe that having 30 tabs opened for extended period of time says something about one’s lack of focus. Come on, you want to tell me you need all of them right now? You can’t deal with so many materials simultaneously. Or can you?

I was distracted by tabs that I didn’t need at the moment, even though I could always organize them nicely. But I didn’t open them for no reason, either, I just had to find a place where I’ll throw them away “for later”. Even though lot’s of capable extensions are available for that I used something simpler: Chrome bookmarks and Delicious.

Now, when I open a tab and review its content for the first time I make a quick decision a) if I really want to read it or b) it only provides a useful info I might need one day. If I want to read it, it goes to Chrome bookmarks, otherwise it is added to Delicious. But the point is – in both cases the tab is closed.

In my Chrome bookmarks bar I have two special folders: Q1 and Q2, Q is for “queue”.

Q1 is for “must read” links while Q2 is for “could read” ones. If Q1 is empty, I turn to Q2 but it may never happen. Since Chrome bookmarks are synced between all my computers, I get to read them wherever I go, which is my home netbook most of the time.

And that’s how beautifully simple it works: each new tab is quickly moved away from my radar to Q1, Q2 or Delicious. No tabs clutter anymore, no distractions.

Speacking of distractions, I could easily be carried away with new links as I browsed. Think of DFS vs. BFS. If I browsed in a DFS way, opening new links and going there as I saw them, it was much harder to keep reading focused and strucutred: web graphs have no “leafs” where one has to go back. Eventually I stopped DFS-ing, so to speak: all new links are in “store away” queues now and are mostly visited in a FIFO order (forgive me this computer science jargon), so it is a lined up and more disciplined BFS browsing.

2. Review “for later” links at least one day a week.

After answering the how question, my second biggest one was when. I couldn’t pick a right time for the act of reading.

In the morning when I come to the office? But I’m usually in a moоd to clean up my Inbox and start working.
During the day? I’m occupied with current tasks and find it hard to concentrate on reading.
Evening? Oh well, I’m just tired and may have other issues to take care of.

So I decided to dedicate one day a week for that purpose: Friday, a reading day. It is a weekend day when I do absolutely nothing except reading books and Q1 links. During the week I try to spend my free time doing things, like writing new blog posts, updating wiki or working on my own projects. But everything is dropped on Fridays, except emergencies.

And then I get it all – I’m not busy, not tired, with plenty of free time to enjoy the process. I also try to make my Fridays “themed” on a single subject, like WordPress optimizations, Groovy presentations or writing skills. This way I have less context switches along the day.

3. Know when to give up.

Obviously, I can’t read everything, neither can I ever know everything. But I don’t have to. My last trick is to know when to give up. Q1 links pile up? I just move most of them to Q2 which means I’ll probably won’t get there any time soon. So what?

3.5 Summarize.

This is something personal that I felt is really needed: summarizing. I saw that reading a book makes very little sence if I forget most of what’s written there after a month or two. So I started summarizing everything in my Wiki. If I see some cool Groovy or Git example, or a way to organize better Lucene indexes, I post it there right away. Finding later that particular piece of code becomes a matter of seconds instead of googling for it again. If I read a book, I do it twice: first time is a usual reading, like other people do, second time is when I read each chapter again and put a digested abstract of it in the Wiki. That’s how a summary of “Getting to Yes” was born and I plan to do the same for other books, worth remembering.

What are your reading practices? What works for you? Why?

books, gtd, reading

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