Eliminating noise – the learnings

Back in November I decided to delete all the feeds in Google Reader besides friends’ blogs, in order to eliminate noise and potentially decrease the time I spend reading news. Back then, I was spending about five hours per month reading random news and even though that’s just 15 minutes per day, I decided it was too much of a distraction.

Fast forward almost three months later, I now spend about two hours every month on news when I’m at my laptop. I also spend, probably, another hour or so on my iPad, but I can’t really track that without RescueTime. I haven’t saved a lot of time (and that wasn’t the point, anyway), but I find that my days are much more productive because there’s less noise, less news, less procrastination going on.

I’ve also discovered Flipboard (I know, I’m kinda late to the party), a brilliant iPad app that makes it incredibly easy to go through my only news sources at the moment: The Economist, The New Yorker, Hacker News and TechMeme. Each morning, while I have breakfast, I flip through the sources and click on the articles that seem of interest. The whole process usually takes about five minutes and I’ve realised that the most important bits of news usually surface to the top.

Now, there’s another thing that’s been bugging me lately and I even blogged about it awhile ago. I think Facebook is, mostly, a waste of time. So in February, I’m going to try another little experiment: only visit Facebook on weekends. I wonder how that’s gonna go.