The best way to consume anything longer than a Tweet
If you are someone who has not done much reading all their lives, picking up that book, owning your learning and developing a consistent habit to read can be a daunting task. I was one of them, but then Blogs changed me. A 300-page book can feel a bigger commitment, a 2–3 page blog may seem a good baby step.
Some of the really smart bloggers digestify, and simplify knowledge from books and observations into blogs.
Publishing on the internet means there are no publishers to convince. No editors trying to save their ass. Which is great for humanity. But it also means you have an endless stream of virtually infinite blogs at your click. And there’s no gatekeeper. You’re all on your own.
Every company, from Facebook to Medium, are trying to do this curation for you. Their fancy algorithms are the gatekeepers of the 21st Century. But their motivation is to try to bait you into addictively consuming an endless feed of content, not to nurture your brain. I, instantly, switch off YouTube’s AutoPlay.
The blogging platform Medium is trying to be the YouTube of Blogs. But YouTube has mostly monopolized the platform for internet videos, Medium has not for blogs. I, personally, don’t choose Medium as my go to platform for publishing blogs. Mainly because I would prefer my favorite bloggers like Shane Parrish, Morgan Housel and the likes to continue publishing on their independent websites. It allows me to consume blogs in a setting I deem to be the best for me. More specifically, Medium doesn’t integrate well with my favorite tool, Pocket.
Here’s how I consume blogs in the most constructive way :
Step 1 : DISCOVERING BLOGS
I discover blogs from multiple sources, but my preferred platform to follow a blogger is Twitter. The 140–280 character tweets serves as a small pitch to what the blog is about. Also, on Twitter you can very easily ditch the algorithmic feed for a chronological feed, by unchecking “Make best tweets appear first” in settings. It really makes me more self-aware of the kind of content I am consuming, and what is most useful and relevant to me.
Step 2 : DON’T READ WHEN YOU DISCOVER : Download the Pocket App
- As I discover blogs through various mediums like Twitter, I don’t wanna read it at the moment I discover. In fact, I consciously refrain from it. Reading tweets demands very different attention than reading blogs. I wanna allow my brain to focus on one thing at a time. So I only want to consume the tweets on my feed without being directed to any other kind of task like reading blogs.
The activity of discovery is separate from the activity of reading blogs.
- So download the Pocket App, save all the articles you would wanna read to the app and leverage all the curation you have done so far (more in Step 4).
Step 3 : INTENTIONAL CONSUMPTION : when you want to consume, what you want to consume on-demand
- Pocket serves as a two-factor authentication against the blog I wanna consume allowing intentional consumption, not addictive. FUCK CLICKBAIT.
- When your brain is ready to provide the attention that a blogs demands, open the Pocket App. To continue focusing on one thing at a time, I tend to consume related blogs as a group. Imagine if you were reading newspaper, and all articles instead of being categorized were just jumbled up. That would be pretty disorienting. And that’s what happens if you simply consume as you discover on the Internet.
Focusing on single lines of thought is how I know to be the best way to build the knowledge spiral.
Step 4 : POCKET – The gift that keeps on giving
Build your own digital library
- Pocket builds up a dataset nothing else quite does : a complete history of all the blogs you have read. Pocket can be your personal digital library.
- Highlight key points in an article and pocket keeps it in one place for you. Something you can’t when you open up an article in the website. And of course, the highlights, the blogs and every content you ever save to Pocket is searchable.
Tap into Pocket’s own Social Network
- About 20 million users save billions of content from all over the internet to Pocket. You can follow the users. Depending on what you save and consume, Pocket recommends what you might like. And these are some excellent recommendations.
- Watch out for recommendations sent as e-mails by Pocket. I have known these to be some of the best articles I have discovered.
Read “comfortably”
- The app automatically downloads all articles for offline use. My favorite is the Article View which extracts only the actual reading content from the web page, removing everything else, the obnoxious ads, the social media buttons, presenting the article in a simple readable format. You can even have these articles sent to your Kindle, if that’s something you’re into.
- Reading is workout for the mind. But the chaos of virtually infinite content posted on the Internet each day can make it feel exhausting. This way of consuming blogs introduces some order for me. An order I can develop a habit around. And that’s sort of really the end goal : Read Everyday.
