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Read and review folders
=======================
I'm bombarded with things to read or watch. Friends and co-workers give
tips on interesting, funny, or useful things to read. Bosses point me
at other things to read. I'm further subscribed to a bunch of
RSS/Atom feeds, and I follow a few news sites, which often have stuff
I want to read. And so on. There's no end of things I could read.
The army of monkeys trying to randomly re-create Shakespeare are filling
the Internet with other stuff instead.
I cannot possibly read everything at once. I need a way to deal with
things I want or need to read, so that when I have time to read, I can
go through stuff that is waiting to be read.
It's important, at this point, to point out, pointedly, that there is
often no need to read everything. The most important way of dealing with
information overload is to be selective of what you spend brain cycles
on. However, however selective you are, there's always things to read.
The **read and review** pile, or folder, or list, is an important tool.
When you find, or are given, something to read, or watch, or listen to,
or otherwise process, and you put it on the pile. In old times,
our ancestors would print it on paper and put the paper on a pile.
These days, purely digital things are practical.
* **Web pages** can be bookmarked. You can keep a "read and review"
bookmark folder. When you've read the page, remove the bookmark.
* You can also save web pages on your local hard disk. This is useful
for reading offline, and also for archiving the page in your filing
system. The Firefox MAFF extension is excellent for this
(see <http://maf.mozdev.org/maff-file-format.html>).
* You can have a "read and review" folder for e-mail as well. Newsletters,
and any other e-mail that's long and takes a while to read, can be
put there.
* I read e-books either on my Kindle device, or on my laptop, depending
on the format. Unread e-books are on the home screen on my Kindle
(or if the list grows very long, in a folder for unread books). PDFs
and other big-page formats are in my laptop's "read and review" folder.
* I keep paper books, magazines, etc., in random piles around my home and
at the office. They're rare enough and few enough that I don't need
a dedicated place to keep track of them. Likewise for DVDs to watch.
For web pages: I used to do the bookmark thing, but it turned out to be
annoying, so I now use MAFF heavily.
I usually try to read things in a FIFO order. I've found that a document
that's boring or unpleasant or otherwise easy to push later, always gets
pushed later. Since there's always new material coming in, there's
never a time when the boring document is the only one to be read. Sticking
to FIFO, unless there's an urgent reason to avoid it, is a good way
of avoiding a pile of documents that never get read.
My threshold for putting something into "read and review" is low.
That means a lot of things go in there that I don't really need to
read. That is actually OK: at the time when I encounter a link on
IRC, for example, I may not have time to even evaluate the document
enough to decide whether it is worth my while to read it. So I just
stuff it into "r&r" and evaluate it when I have time for it.
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