So much of our time online is spent filtering the noise. We sift through mountains of crap to find a few gems worth reading.
What an incredible waste of time.
There are too many wonderful things to do (including doing nothing) to waste hours reading crap. If time was infinite, perhaps it wouldn’t matter. But time is finite… extremely finite. There’s simply no time to waste doing things that we don’t like.
Look at your processes.
Easily 95% of the new information that I read comes from Google Reader or Twitter. Sure, I use Instapaper extensively, but in conjunction with Twitter, not as a separate source of information.
When i stumble upon a new site that catches my interest, I’ll usually subscribe to it. Over time, RSS feed collection gets pretty big, and I end up with more articles than I can realistically read. I end up skimming headlines, skipping over many many articles, to get to the good stuff.
That’s not the right way.
If you catch yourself skimming tons of articles and reading just a few, it means you have too many subscriptions. You have too much noise that you’re trying to filter. That’s time and effort wasted, and it needs to stop.
Unsubscribe from feeds that you can live without. Stop following people on Twitter that you don’t genuinely want to follow. Whether a person is interesting, inspiring, funny, or just plain good to talk to… it doesn’t matter the reason. But anytime you’re sifting through hundreds of articles or thousands of tweets to find a few gems, it’s time for some to go.
Get rid of the noise, so you don’t have to filter it anymore.