Rethinking Reading

As much as I talk about the need to reinvent yourself constantly, one area I've been religiously consistent about over the last 10+ years is how I consume information. I am a bit of a creature of habit when it comes to my workflow, and I'm often asked, "how do you read so many articles every week?" so I've tried to document the process as it evolves.

Heck, the folks a Feedly even did a quick interview with me a few years back on it:

He also subscribed to a number of Substack newsletters, which he's happy to aggregate with the rest of his content via Feedly, sparing his inbox further clutter. "I'm glad I don't have 83 things hit my inbox every day anymore," he laughs. Steve then uses Feedly to sort all these insights into topical feeds like 'Mind Changers' (for writers that often shift his perspective) and 'Workflow' (for time-saving tips).

"It's an incoming river of content", but Steve has designed a streamlined system for winnowing it down to just the ten or so links he includes in his weekly newsletter.

The whole process is documented here if you're interested in the actual bits and bolts of it all.

But I've been consuming RSS (really simple syndication) and various forms of web content the same way since the mid-2000s.

I would say, I'm definitely a creature of habit here.

So when the app Reeder, the cornerstone of my information processing system, made a seismic shift this week in its recent update - it freaked me out. Holy hell, my entire process flow was thrown upside-down.

I'm not going to spend too much time on the app-specific changes; plenty of that has already been written up online. Some love it. Some hate it.

It's different, and I'm not sold that the redesign is for me. For now, I'm going to stick with Reeder Classic and continue to use Feedly, but it did get me thinking that I've been a bit too locked into a long-time habit of collecting too many links.

Change is hard, and quantity is certainly not quality.

Behavioral scientist Aline Holzwarth talks a bit about this in a beautiful article, "The Three Laws of Human Behavior."

In this post, Holzwarth borrows from Newton's laws of motion and flips them to focus on core human behavior:

And just as Newton's Laws describe the motion of physical objects, these Laws of Human Behavior aim to provide a general model for how humans behave.

People tend to stick to the status quo unless the forces of friction or fuel push us off of our path; behavior is a function of the person and their environment; every decision includes tradeoffs and the potential for unintended consequences.

We all generally fall into a trap of consuming more and more bullshit daily; we are not interested in valid truth, but rather in information that is false, useless, and entertaining. Doomscrolling.

Useful truth is boring. Practicality is ponderous, subtlety is soporific, and depth is dull. The quest for knowledge, the search for wisdom—it's just a story we tell ourselves. We're mainly interested in bullshit. The more useless and outlandish the bullshit, the more we're fascinated by it.

Now, if you've read Makoism for any length of time, you know that veering from the status quo is something I love to do; I decided to lean into the notion that I have a 'status quo bias' on what (and who) I've been reading and following the last 15 years (400+ sources!).

It was time to blow it all up. Start over. Re-define what was interesting to me.

So, here's where I'm at this morning as I write this:

• Flattened all 400 sources in a single folder.
• Dumped a bunch of "junk" content. I'm sorry if you publish 30 links daily; it's not quality; it's noise.
• I got rid of duplicative sources. I never noticed how much content is just 'republished'.
• Started to re-work only a few topical sources, such as "tech," "health," or "media."
• I will guard the new "must read" folder. Authors who publish high-quality content make me think I'll move there.

This new structure got me down to around 190 sources. It's still not great, but I'm now seeing only 25-30 new posts a day that I really care about, and I've filtered away a lot of the noise.

Next, I'm going to experiment a bit with designing a feed summarizer, similar to what Rui Carmo designed in an attempt to bring some new feeds and insights to light.

Anyhoo, we'll see how this experiment goes. I'm already feeling better about how I am "ingesting" content.

But the real lesson is, let curiosity be your guide and don't be afraid to blow shit up.