If you don’t know, I am an absolute knowledge junkie. I scour the internet daily for all the information I can possibly digest. Going from website from website takes eons though, and as an engineer, I would never let myself be that inefficient. In this post I’ll be discussing my first and most important tip for digesting information quickly.
Naturally, I receive lots of questions on how I read my news. For example:
“How do I replicate your amazing news reading abilities Jono?”
“How did you become a Level 100 Knowledge Digester Jono?”
“Why do you have no hair on your arms Jono?”
All good questions I assure you. The first thing I tell everyone is that I don’t shave, it’s all natural. The second thing I tell them is that the most important tactic is to take advantage of RSS feeds.
Have no idea what RSS is? (don’t worry, most people don’t) watch this quick video:
RSS feeds were a complete godsend for me when I discovered them a few years ago. By using an aggregator, such as Google Reader (what I use; tutorial here), everything I’d want to read everyday was conveniently located in one place.
However, it’s important to note that you can’t just subscribe to ANY RSS feed. You have to be selective. The biggest problem I see when people subscribe to feeds is that they subscribe to big names such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. No. This is wrong. These sources post tons of items a day, and it will take forever to sift through these and get the information that you are looking for.
For example, one topic I enjoy reading about are developments in open source web frameworks. I’m not going to subscribe to the technology section of a dozen major newspapers to read about this. That would just be a waste of time. Instead, I subscribe to a few focused blogs such as webmonkey and Think Vitamin.
By subscribing to major news sources, you’d be wasting precious time just skipping and throwing out unwanted news items. This might seem obvious, but it really isn’t, as I have seen these wrongdoings firsthand and cringed. As they say… “Common sense really isn’t all that common.”
To discover niche sites that write specifically about what interests you, I suggest using sites like alltop, delicious, and stumbleupon. Happy knowledge seeking!
Knowledge Digestion Tip #1: The Right Way To Use RSS Feeds
Who knows what's inside that booklet... *snicker
If you don’t know, I am an absolute knowledge junkie. I scour the internet daily for all the information I can possibly digest. Going from website from website takes eons though, and as an engineer, I would never let myself be that inefficient. In this post I’ll be discussing my first and most important tip for digesting information quickly.
Naturally, I receive lots of questions on how I read my news. For example:
All good questions I assure you. The first thing I tell everyone is that I don’t shave, it’s all natural. The second thing I tell them is that the most important tactic is to take advantage of RSS feeds.
Have no idea what RSS is? (don’t worry, most people don’t) watch this quick video:
RSS feeds were a complete godsend for me when I discovered them a few years ago. By using an aggregator, such as Google Reader (what I use; tutorial here), everything I’d want to read everyday was conveniently located in one place.
However, it’s important to note that you can’t just subscribe to ANY RSS feed. You have to be selective. The biggest problem I see when people subscribe to feeds is that they subscribe to big names such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. No. This is wrong. These sources post tons of items a day, and it will take forever to sift through these and get the information that you are looking for.
For example, one topic I enjoy reading about are developments in open source web frameworks. I’m not going to subscribe to the technology section of a dozen major newspapers to read about this. That would just be a waste of time. Instead, I subscribe to a few focused blogs such as webmonkey and Think Vitamin.
By subscribing to major news sources, you’d be wasting precious time just skipping and throwing out unwanted news items. This might seem obvious, but it really isn’t, as I have seen these wrongdoings firsthand and cringed. As they say… “Common sense really isn’t all that common.”
To discover niche sites that write specifically about what interests you, I suggest using sites like alltop, delicious, and stumbleupon. Happy knowledge seeking!