

Ask HN: Information overload - navs

I try to keep up-to-date with as much tech news as possible. I follow a fair share of blogs and news sites on google reader but there's just too many. Between google reader, twitter and HN, there's simply too much to go through in one day.<p>I'm open to any suggestions on how to handle this information overload.
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rjd
Heres a tip : "things don't actually move that fast"

It may seem like the industry is screaming along but its mainly media hype.
The important things will take a few years to get where they need to be, I
dare you to pick any ground breaking technology and I'd bet if you missed 6
months it wouldn't hurt you one bit. You'd see a few flash in the pan success
stories, but mainly things just chug along.

And thats the key to information overload, understanding you can just stop for
a few days, a week, what ever, it won't matter. Remove the addictive nature of
it. Make sure its a pleasure and not a chore.

For myself I've moved from blogs to aggregators now to get the best articles.
I don't need all the articles, just the best. I could go several places for
that (reddit, digg, slashdot). But I come to hacker news most, primarily
because the conversation threads are of a higher standard. I can learn x10
more from a thread than I can an article.

I've also found curated aggregators on my iPad extremely useful, I'm talking
to Zite, Flip Board, Feedly etc... theres something casual and relaxing about
them. I recommend getting a tablet, I've never used an android one but I
assume its just as good as my iPad.

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karterk
I used to feel the same way a few months back. However, due to some personal
reasons, I had to be more or less completely offline for two weeks. When I
came back, guess what, I realized I hadn't really missed anything major.

There is an insane amount of news getting generated - but most of it is just
noise. The trick that I follow is to pick a few areas that I am really
interested in and find good sources/websites where the signal to noise ratio
is low. Even good blogs don't produce useful articles all the time.

Another thing that I do is - every morning I quickly scan and stash off
articles I want to read, and then I read them up properly later in the day.
Trying to read everything will just not allow you to get any productive work
done!

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Sato
Let me take an example, the recent fund money dry-up talks ignited by WSJ.

Even if you spend a week at Tahoe lake. You can follow up here(check RSS
feeds). <http://cuotcher.com/topic/Venture_capital>

Information source is an aggregation of our private alpha testers' twitter
streams, and only filtered interesting articles are notified. Let me know if
you are interested.

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centdev
I try and take an information break a few times a week where I'll let a day or
2 go by in which I don't check any tech news. Information is dripped fed to
people nowadays anyway. So its always great to see that every new post in my
reader is something completely new.

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revorad
Just don't read for a few days. It's a really nice feeling to come back and
find that actually it's not _all that_ interesting. And thanks for the
reminder, my fast is overdue.

