I am trying to do this as well, but being surrounded by news/social/stream outlets that just push unnecessary hype its hard to achieve this. Any recommendation on how to filter out the junk?
The entire online news chain is polluted it seems to me.
If you have access to a decent Library, I believe the benefits to the individual by using it are:
1) economic, save you money
2) social, you interact with people
3) physical, you are moving around
4) mental health, you are using a different part of your brain and being proactive by planning to engage in new knowledge
Then hopefully you can feel positive, optimistic, and look forward to reading the books you just borrowed!
I have a gigantic Dropbox folder with hundreds of PDF tech books that I am slowly working through. The focus is on the canonical and classic over the hippest or latest new thing. There have been a number of books that I read when they were fairly new that are classics now, like some of the Wiley titles on networking. It's one of the best things you can do for your career. Whenever you have some extended downtime, instead of hopping on social media and doomscrolling, open up this folder and keep working through books you need to read and understand.
I did the complete opposite: I threw away almost all my books, digital or physical. I now restrict myself to having two books I’m actively reading at a time, one fiction and one non-fiction. If I reach the final 15% of either one I allow myself to buy a new book, not before. This has massively increased the number of finished books.
I found having a Dropbox folder with hundreds of books to be both completely useless and paralyzing. I kept switching books, or i was unable to pick one due to too much choice and ended up just scrolling instagram or Reddit.
It is true that for it to work you need to have enough discipline to not get distracted by the other books, sticking to one title until you finish it or at least extract the optimal value out of it.
Read the Mythical Man Month. If you have ever managed a software project, it will ring true and right like really good mythology. Write down pithy parts to steal for future slides in presentations to management.
- If material is a few years old yet still very highly regarded, it's probably worthy.
- Prepare yourself some content in advance that's both interesting and useful so it's low-effort to switch if you find yourself reading or scrolling out of boredom. I have rails guides bookmarked for this purpose - 5 minutes waiting for an uber gains me some useful knowledge while alleviating boredom.
- Search wide, be selective. A few good reads is better than a lot of average/bad ones. Be prepared to skip chapters if it isn't delivering value after 2-3 chapters, and quit entirely if you can't find worthy content after reading a few chapters + table of contents and skimming a few more chapters. Give it a little longer if you're unfamiliar with the topic or style.
- A lot of 200+ page books could have instead been 10 page essays. Quickly move over unimportant sections if you get the impression they're filler. Same (or, more so) for other mediums too.
My approach is mostly to curate your news/social/stream feed to individual people that post the sort of things you like, and to slower-moving publications. Limit your follows on social media. Prefer blogs and RSS over Twitter-style social. And/or read journals/magazines/books and reviews of them instead.
E.g. the old "The Morning Paper" blog by Adrian Colyer (https://blog.acolyer.org/) seems maybe up your alley? It's over now; dunno if what the new online versions of that are. For substantive programming stuff, these days I mostly read magazines and books, like CODE, Logic, and 2600. (IEEE Computer Society and ACMD have journals, but they're prety theoretical and academic; guessing that's not what you want here. I haven't found them very useful in my own programming work.) Sad to say, the current scene for this doesn't seem great. Old school Dr. Dobb's sounds like maybe what you want, but AFAICT there isn't really much like that any more? LWN and OSNews seem like modern online versions of stuff in that area, for system programmers at least. MIT Technology Review is also decent, but less about programming per se.
RSS and a designated slot to consume your feeds in a reasonably systematic manner.
Letting algorithms figure out the presentation of information just doesn't work well for people. Even FT which I read is always putting random crap on the front page and pushing important bits down to the second or third page-down.
The entire online news chain is polluted it seems to me.
If you have access to a decent Library, I believe the benefits to the individual by using it are:
1) economic, save you money 2) social, you interact with people 3) physical, you are moving around 4) mental health, you are using a different part of your brain and being proactive by planning to engage in new knowledge
Then hopefully you can feel positive, optimistic, and look forward to reading the books you just borrowed!
Then you reappear the cycle when you return them!