Reading Articles

Bloglines (RSS Reader) is my window to the world. Six months ago, I grabbed all of Jonathan Snook's feeds from his public bloglines account. That gave me about 19,000 articles to read. In 6 months time, I read all the new articles as well as a backlog of 8,000 articles. I am now down to 11,000 articles. It feels like for the last 6 months I have ate way too much brain food each day. My mind gets full of information and I slow down when producing.

This information addiction manafests itself in on my delicious account. Here you can see a result of this maddness. In a few months time of normal every-day use of delicious I have over 550 bookmarks in my account. 550 is a lot of bookmarks to accumulate in a short period of time.

So now it is time to slow down the intake of information and focus on producing. I hope to have a lot of great work accomplished in the next few months.

While reading blogs and technical articles - I noticed a pattern that had developed over time. I start at the bottom of the articles and read up to the top. After skimming the document, I read back down again and read the parts I care most about more thoroughly.

Why do I start at the bottom?

I get to see the final product, first! Rather than wasting time on something I don't care about, I read the final product (conclusion) which determines how important the article is to me. Then, I read up and scan all the keywords, headings and interesting content. When I read back down again I know what I'm looking for and skip through the parts I don't care about.

I am convinced this reading pattern allows me to read and skim through more articles in a shorter time period while soaking up the things I really care about.

I've been asked how I read so much and I think I finally figured out part of the reason why. Have you ever caught yourself reading from bottom to top?