Help…My Attention is Dead!

I was just talking about this today. I think the most important thing I’ve learned from RSS is that occaisionally you just need to clear everything out and start over. As important as it is to stay on top of this stuff, if you miss something, it’s not the end of the world. It’s been a good lesson that although hard at times to remember, makes things much easier to deal with.

Funny… I just wrote a blog entry that’s very similar to this:

http://scottsphotolife.blogspot.com/2006/01/overload.html#links

I think it’s a meme and we’re all feeling it. I went through my bloglines feeds and deleted about 2/3rds of my subscriptions and killed all the RSS email feeds I get. It’s now down to a semi-manageable 30 or so blogs.

I once asked the managing editor of the Washington Post what it was that made them special. He said:

“People buy our paper for what we don’t print”…

He was right. They did the filtering for us and we paid them for their editorial perspective.

I wrote about this back in December. The only way I’ve found that’s effective is to completely turn things off and go on vacation. If I don’t do that, then everything just seem to slip back in whenever I’m near a computer. I found that two weeks with essentially no computer in front of me completely cleared my head and allowed my to start thinking about things clearly again.

I narrow down my RSS reading by sticking to full feeds. Who needs to use even more time to click through to a story you already know about, don’t care about or wasn’t described well in the feed title or tease text?

My tip is to save things for offline reading. I’ve got a U3 usb key with the scrapbook extension. Now those deep reads that I am frustrated for having to jump over are saved to a _toread folder on the USB key, and I’m no longer frustrated. If the pieces are good then they will surely keep for a while. Later, when away from the net with a bit of attention to spare, for example on a train, I’m able to fire up my copy of firefox and even without being connected to the net can read the deep reads in my own time. The great thing about the USB key is the computers I’m using (office, laptop and slate) are all feel ‘in sync’ but without having to turn the firehose on again.

Exactly as Kurt mentioned. Just staying away from all this fiesta for a while is real good and gets you back fresher and you’ll have an outsider look at your own feeds and headings.

I experienced it the last 2 days where we had to switch office space and no phone or internet was there for 2 days. When I got connected this morning I deleted around 15 or more of my subscriptions and actualy unsubscribed 2 mailing list subscriptions too.

Having access to so much information so easily is a great thing. It’s also a real pain in the rear. All of us that regularly read RSS feeds or use customized home pages (like Netvibes, etc.) are getting into trouble with our attention. I delayed getting into the RSS feed arena for some time, but finally because I needed to do some particular research, I started poking around, hooking into the appropriate feeds, getting an RSS/feed reader, etc.

But the more you read blogs, the more you read other blogs, that the originaly blogs link to. And instead of reading those new blogs you’re discovering, you just add them into your list of feeds. And the list keeps on growing…

I’ve cleaned out my list from time to time, but it’s not an easy process. I always think, “If I delete this feed, what happens if he finally posts something that really twigs to me.”

Now they’re always going to try and come out with more and more sophisticated ways of reading the information -you- want, but because there’s simply too much information (and much of it is diluted and repetitive) I’m not sure software systems will ever catch up.

I think the key is to realize that we really don’t need that much information. We don’t need to read 50 posts about Yahoo potentially purchasing Digg, and so on. And, at the end of the day while lots of us are interested in lots of things, the goal of having such broad access to the information should be to really hone in on those topics you’re interested in.

It might be that you’re interested in a specific topic for a specific period of time. So focus on that. But when you’re not as targeted to that topic, either get rid of the feeds or hide them so they’re not in your face.

I particularly agree with your 2nd point too - an idea building on something I’m already comfortable with.

There’s so much news about new software ideas, Web 2.0, on and on, but it’s often hard to digest. I’d rather wait till I find something that’s relevant to what I’m already thinking about, and not broaden my interests too far and get overwhelmed.

Your family, friends and workmates should be the only feeds you need. Seriously. You can’t get much more relevant than that.

So the most common way to deal with our attention problem is to quit cold turkey for a while…that’s an odd behavior, isn’t it? It certainly means that we’ve tried less drastic ways, and those haven’t worked. Kind of scary, actually.

I guess what I was trying to say (and probably not too well) is that feeds alone aren’t the answer. I have a love/hate relationship with my 100+ feeds in Bloglines, and am currently trying to regain other aspects of my live via the Bloglines Diet. (That diet, BTW, means I actually visit the sites I want to read [including Bokardo], instead of Bloglining them as is the usual case.

If someone could devise a FeedBook that could download feeds and let me read them when I’m out having coffee, or on the couch or wherever I’m comfortable (e.g., places where I usually read a book or the paper) that would be a help. Currently feeds are too much a part of deskbound “work.” The rush of feeds actually takes away the pleasure of reading.

My mantra is that feeds you don’t read can’t harm you in any way. I stopped reading feeds almost completely, and never felt that something is missing. When I want to get fresh info about what’s going on in the outside world, I look at the websites which rank the news, preferably with human votes, like digg comagz.com and reddit. Takes 10 minutes to see what’s new.

We have been trying to tackle this problem as well - we have resorted to building a ‘heads-up-display’ so that we can track headlines WHILE we work instead of having to bury our head in a feed reader.

What’s more our project will eventually let us set rules for what’s important to us - the more important an item - the more the gadget goes out of its way to interrupt us.

I’d love to hear comments/feedback! http://www.touchstonegadget.com

Fantastic article covering some points I really needed some good usability info for.
Best regards from Poland