Reading Intentionally Online - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views
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sha towers on 07 Jun 12The accumulation of feeds becomes one more thing to check, one more inbox to process. Nobody likes seeing their unread items count spiral out of control, and quickly skimming headlines to catch up doesn't feel like engaged reading. Brett Kelly has recently described why he quit RSS in an effort to read more intentionally: I realized that, for some reason I couldn't quite recall, I felt obligated to stay abreast of new developments in technology and such. That fabricated obligation led me to routinely scan big lists of headlines and, more often than not, mark the whole mess as "read" and go on to something else. Imagine this happening 2-4 times per day and I was spending between 10-30 minutes per day skimming or ignoring stuff that, for the most part, wasn't what I wanted to read. Instead of obsessively checking his RSS feeds, Brett has committed to reading longer material (in his Kindle) and to using Instapaper for managing blog and news posts that he'd like to read. How does he discover those posts, if he's not subscribed to hundreds of feeds every day? Twitter: