State of the Firehose
| Source of data | Number of inputs | Change since December 2005 |
|---|---|---|
| Google Reader | 920 feeds | +3171 |
| 31 friends | +31 | |
| LiveJournal | 163 ( 137 +  24 +  2) | +27 |
| Wikipedia watchlist | 321 articles | +27 |
| Gmane | 166 lists | +6 |
| freenode | 9 channels | +1 |
| del.icio.us inbox | 0 | -1211 |
| Total | 1610 |
A lot of people think trying to keep up with this much stuff is nuts, but it’s actually quite doable in a small amount of time, at least assuming you have about 2 hours on the bus each day — which, err, I guess most of you don’t have.
Here’s what I do:
Like Jeremy
Zawodny, The
hardest thing I have to do every day is to decide what to
ignore.
I plow through Google Reader over breakfast — not actually
reading anything, but simply opening tabs of things that look
like they might be interesting.
I probably end up with 30 or so tabs on a typical morning.
Then I get on the bus and read through the tabs, keeping open
only the ones for which I have some specific next action which
requires an Internet connection — tabs I’d like to
bookmark on del.icio.us, vote up (or down) on reddit, etc.
My feed-reading trends over the last 30 days:
Once online at work, it’s a very quick job to execute those next actions before jumping into my first work task of the day. Rinse and repeat for the return commute and you’re all set.
As far as managing the large amount of stimuli, perhaps (heh) left-handedness has something to do with it:
Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows.
The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli.
— BBC: Left-handers ‘think’ more quickly
Yup, that must be it. :)