[amcintyre]

I power through as quickly as possible using keyboard shortcuts, making quick decisions about whether each item is important enough to devote some small fraction of my life to. Will it help me work faster, understand something I've been wrestling with, solve a difficult problem?

This kind of approach reminds me of Richard Hamming's "You and your research" talk: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dahlin/bookshelf/hamming.html

"Under these circumstances it seems better to live a life in which you do important things (important in your eyes, of course) than to merely live out your life. No sense frittering away your life on things that will not even appear in the footnotes."