Avoid interruptions by time-shifting them
A lot of times you may come upon a juicy-smelling “information scent”. Now you have a decision of whether to extend your lunch break and cut into work by following the scent (bad) or abandoning it (painful, and possibly bad).
One thing that has worked for me is using either delicious or more recently instapaper app to save the link (instapaper will actually sync the entire article back your iphone/pad/android). Pang of pain is largely avoided, and I can decide later whether this bit of info was worth reading, by comparing it to my other saved articles in the app at the appropriate time.
Let me guess, you’re discussing that article 90 seconds in the future with Rorschach.
I discussed it 35 minutes ago.
Actually I spawn a copy of myself for every hyperlink and just keep reading. Merge on weekends.
It’s the merge that can get tricky.
This sounds exactly like Read It Later. I don’t know what the differences are between the two, but it’s an alternative if you’re looking for something like this. Anyway, my experience with this sort of thing is that I never feel like reading all the momentarily-interesting things I discover when I come back to them later. I think that by putting it off, you place reading about an interesting idea into the “this is something you want to put off for later” mind category and it never gets read, or at least that’s what it felt like in my experience.
Read It Later used to (further) ruin my attention span until I uninstalled it. I would only read blog snippets and forum posts which were too short to bother delaying, whereas substantial articles and papers all ended up RIL’d into oblivion.
Do you like that it’s this way, or would you rather that you got around to reading the stuff?
I can’t speak for jferguson, but I use Read It Later, and have had the same experience—and prefer it. Being able to decide whether or not I want to read something after I’ve put it off once is much less stressful, and I read less of the things that I don’t really care about.
Agreed; it contextualizes the saved bits of information, a lot of times the outcome is not reading them—which is a WIN!
There was a fair amount of stuff in there that I “knew” I wanted to read (some LW sequences stuff among them). I’ve found a bit more success by putting things I actually want to read in my top-level bookmarks, right at the front, because then it causes clutter which I want to reduce (by reading and removing them). The difference may just be in that I’m less likely to bookmark something with this system in the first place, but it feels like it works.
Ah yes, that’s an excellent idea (and an excellent way to phrase it—“time-shifting”).
Occasionally though, you might miss something if you time-shift it. Sometimes, I don’t time-shift my reading for fear that I might miss something (oftentimes it’s an opportunity to comment on the article while people are still reading it, in hopes that someone else will comment on it). I sometimes reassure myself that email notifications will take care of that, but some services (reddit in particular) don’t give email notifications to people (they have another button of showing who replied to your post, but not everyone reads that)