Weekly Review 1

Last weekend I added my reading log to the site. This weekend I added pagination to my blog posts. In between, I felt like I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to manage what I follow in a new way. I uninstalled Twitter and Reddit from my phone and I've drastically reduced how often I check them, which has been particularly difficult this week as I want to know what is going on with the impeachment. Regardless, I've set both aside in effort to regain some of my time. In the space left vacant by them, I've started to follow RSS feeds again using Feedbin. That, along with newsletters, are going to become my primary inputs largely because both are slower: blog posts and newsletters are updated much less frequently than the never ending social media stream. But, not all has gone smoothly. I have discovered just how difficult it currently is to manage the newsletters I follow. Gmail's filters are powerful, but clunky, which makes me want to read newsletters in Feedbin rather than in my email, but getting them into Feedbin has been a chore. It has taken way too much time to organize them, forward them, and clean up the ones I don't care for anymore. Between my feed reader and my newsletter subscriptions, I feel like I'm flailing at this point in a system I don't feel comfortable in, which won't be much better than following Twitter if I don't get organized. To add to the problem, I find plenty of things I'm interested in reading with my system, but I don't have time to read them when I find them, so I'm back to figuring out how to save things for later, which has taken me on a detour of evaluating Pocket and Instapaper again. That will inevitably lead me to taking the time to figure out when I will read the things I save later, because past experience has taught me that it is all too easy to add something to that list and then just watch as it grows and grows.

Honestly I think most of my issues when it comes to all of the above is how I approach the need to feel like I'm keeping up. I recognize sometimes that I will all to easily just add a new feed to Feedbin or I will subscribe to a new newsletter just because, in both cases, I find something that seems interesting in the moment and think I might find something worthwhile in them again at some point. Same with marking something to read later, which I will do for anything I even find potentially interesting. What's missing in all of that is an answer to the question of interesting for what purpose? I'm not saying something has to serve an end to be valuable. It can be interesting just because it is, but there is so much interesting in the world. There is no end and it is quite easy to fall in the trap that all you get accomplished is managing the firehose of things you find online.