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by welanes 3712 days ago
On the problem of wasting time browsing - I stick to a rough Pomodoro style principle. Coffee in the morning while I spend 20 minutes gorging on the sweet sweet stream of fresh info from HN/Reddit/Feedly/Twitter that surfaced while I slept.

Anything that looks interesting but requires more than a few minutes to chew on (like this, today: FBI Paid More Than $1M to Hack San Bernardino iPhone) I bookmark.

Throughout the day I take 10mins break for each 50mins of work, I don't go to these sites again, I just work through what I picked out in that first 20 minutes.

Gets the thirst for news out of the way and allows you to procrastinate, in a sense, "productively".
2 comments
rollinDyno 3711 days ago
That 'sweet sweet stream' actually contains not what surfaced while you slept but during the whole day except your allotted 20 minutes.

How do you consume 4 streams (HN, Reddit, Feedly and Twitter) each containing roughly 24 hours of activity, in 20 minutes?

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giancarlostoro 3711 days ago
I'm pretty sure he means he looks at all the headlines, and then picks whatever is the most relevant / interesting to read throughout the day.
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gedrap 3711 days ago
HN Algolia is neat for this kind of workflow https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page... just check it once a day, pick up what to read for the rest of the day.
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welanes 3711 days ago
Not too hard. As giancarlostoro said, I simply skim in the mornings - open my favorite sites, find posts I think are worth reading and middle click a lot. Go through the resulting new tabs and bookmark what seems interesting for later.

The goal isn't to read every single new thing on the Internet, but between my pre-filtered sites and the morning skim I get a nice slice of interesting content to read throughout the day.

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basch 3711 days ago
Ive been finding this more satisfying and easier to do lately. http://redef.com/channel/media/feed

Keep it open, read an article when I have a free moment. Next free moment scroll to next interesting article. Dont get sucked too far elsewhere into the internet. Not always easy to do. Look where I am now.

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