DavidGoodman.Net

As I described in yesterday’s post, I’m moving from the ‘firehose’ model of taking in information to a more nuanced, and, I hope, cognitively healthy model based on selective reading and limited participation. Regularly following the feeds of over 60 websites was leaving me in a twitchy state of continuous partial attention.

If you break that phrase down, you get a good idea of the problem. It’s continuous, i.e. all the time. Even when I wasn’t in front of a computer, I had a phone. ‘Clearing my feeds’ became a constant, and I’d guess, conservatively, I was scanning and marking feeds read 20 or 30 times a day. It’s partial - because it didn’t take all that much effort, it’s something I’d do constantly, through a browser, on my phone, you name it. Even when there are much bigger things going on, a part of my attention was always on RSS. Finally, there’s the word itself - attention. I think some of the web punditry about attention borders on the absurd (I can’t help but think of this guy going on about protecting our precious bodily fluids), but at the same time, it is very easy to burn away hours and hours of your life on utter trivialities. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want and need to do - I don’t regret a minute spent completing Grand Theft Auto IV for example, which I’m sure the world at large sees as a triviality, but which I see as 60+ hours of interactive entertainment, and significantly more fun that sitting watching TV. But when trivialities become daily, and eat up a steadily larger chunk of time, they start to become unconscious obligations. RSS was becoming that for me.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad. I had RSS feeds which only updated two or three times a month, but which always provided in-depth, detailed, fascinating writing. Or indeed, just a bloody good chuckle. These longer, fascinating articles were what I really wanted, so when I binned RSS yesterday, I took note of the dozen or so sites I regularly found good, lengthy, interesting articles at, then stuck them in a bookmarks folder. Using Firefox’s open all in tabs functionality, I’ll scan these once or twice a day (taking maybe a sixth of the time it took to ‘clear my feeds’) and spot articles I’m interested in reading. In the past, this is where reading long articles fell down for me. I’d open a load of tabs, leaving articles open for days at a time and never getting round to reading them.

Enter Instapaper.

Instapaper is an incredibly simple, elegant solution to finding, storing and reading long content on the web. Clicking a ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet instantly saves any article to reading page associated with an email address or username you supply. You can also password protect it. You can then log in from any browser, (including your phone) to read your articles, which are formatted for simple reading on any device. If you finish the articles you’ve stored, you can read the top articles saved by other Instapaper users. In a single move, this has made long web content accessible and removed any need for RSS. I’m still reading words on the web, but now I’m enjoying it again.