Reading News The GTD Way

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005

Reading News The GTD Way explains how to apply David Allen’s Getting Things Done philosophy to news/blog reading:

The way most of us take in daily news is horribly inefficient. The problem isn’t how fast we read, or even what sites we go to — it’s the process of finding news, taking it in, and returning to work. Our current habits are based in the need for distraction and the fear that we’re missing something. We wander back and forth between our main sites — refreshing each one multiple times per day, or even per hour. This approach is guaranteed to leave you 1) feeling frustrated, and 2) far less productive. There’s a better way.

Enter GTD.

The better way is pretty simple:

Use an RSS aggregator. (He recommends NetNewsWire for OS X. His buddy uses Bloglines. I use My Yahoo!)
Open every interesting story in a separate tab in Firefox. (Which I’ve been doing.)

Here’s the silly little detail that blew my mind though:

My buddy runs it [Bloglines] from Firefox (naturally), which lets one simply wheel-click links to get them to open in a new tab, just like I do within NetNewsWire by pressing enter or double-clicking a story.

Wheel-click? This whole time I’ve been right-clicking, then selecting the second option.

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Jim: We need a complete and total shutdown on career academics waxing poetic about “free markets” until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
bruce: Markets do things that D patronage media make sound bad, in the service of sob stories for D patronage shakedowns. Markets also do bad things period. D patronage also does bad things period. Markets also do good things. D patronage also does good things. The first amendment allows people outside financial oligarchies and outside D patronage oligarchies to know which is which. Enemies of the first amendment from both intertwined oligarchies are everyone’s enemy.
Bob Sykes: One way to hide information is to mix it into a sea of noise.
Bruce: Scott Alexander made the point that everyone texting all the time is at least practicing basic literacy. And everyone who uses social media instead of television video news is reading, like reading the papers fifty years ago. Kurt Vonnegut used to say that if you walked into a house and saw his books or Tolkein’s, it didn’t mean they were reading the stuff. It was just furniture for a certain sort of person. But some were reading.
Bob Sykes: For some time now, Russia has imposed a total blockade on the Ukrainian Black Sea ports.
Lucklucky: Since when did Afghanistan not initiate the conflict? Or Iran? Actually there are several times the US would have been justified to answer Iran’s aggression and did not.
Phil B: “It started giving more money to the Follow Through models that had not done well.” Or, as it is known in the trade, reinforcing failure. Had those funds been spent on schools and pupils that did well, then how much better would they have succeeded? Compare and contrast the results of spending $50,000 per pupil in an inner city school and $20,000 per pupil in a less “diverse” neighbourhood. But failure must not only be reinforced but rewarded with more cash.
Isegoria: Asking Grok about that claim was eye opening: The frequently repeated claim that the US “initiated 81% of 248 armed conflicts from 1945 to 2001” originates in a Chinese Society for Human Rights Studies report (circulated around 2022 amid US-China tensions). It is not based on transparent methodology matching UCDP, Correlates of War (COW), or similar standards, treats “initiated” expansively (including indirect involvement, proxies, or interventions in existing conflicts), and is widely regarded...
Bob Sykes: One is reminded that of the 250, or so, armed conflicts since 1945, 80% were started by the US, and almost always against countries at peace with us and our allies. Recent examples are Panama, Haiti (too numerous to count), Granada (a UK commonwealth member), Serbia, Somalia (still active after 34 years), Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq (twice), Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, Lebanon (by proxy), and Ukraine. The coup of 2014 that installed the current neonazi junta was our doing.
Isegoria: From The Screwtape Letters (Letter 27), by C.S. Lewis: And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
David Foster: CS Lewis said (quoting very loosely) that if you want to destroy and infantry unit, you cut it off from its adjacent units…if you want to destroy a generation, you cut it off from its adjacent generations.
McChuck: A mild fever for a day or two after an inoculation is nothing. It’s a normal response to your body fighting an infection — which is the entire point of the inoculation. The strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots after the mRNA Covid shots are of real concern — but of course they can’t possibly study those, because they “don’t exist”.
Ozornik: It’s funny to read it against this: “The CDC advised her to take her temperature”, posted here on October 14th, 2026 Both Marburg and Ebola are not airborn and require direct bodily contact to spread. Methinks the author of the book might be either one of the lowest form of human existence – a journalist, or might have monetary interest in scaremongering oblivious sheeple. Oh, wait.
Phileas Frogg: People who intend to sit atop hierarchies should acquire the skills for getting and remaining on top of hierarchies. The great delusion of modern education is that they’ll somehow accomplish this by being good at math or engineering. I didn’t realize until I was in my mid-20′s that networking is an art, a specific skillset that needs deliberate cultivation. The best part is that when you tell most people they don’t believe you and just keep on hammering on about...
McChuck: “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
PM: Phileas Frogg says: “The first country to fully re-embrace rule by warriors is going to be hellacious to deal with for a few years.” Which puts me very much in mind of the Russian Federation’s ongoing initiative to load their bureaucracy with returning veterans of the SMO.
Bruce: Characters in 19th Century novels are constantly “overworking” and then taking off a summer or an entire year from their jobs. Getting ‘tired and emotional’? or other euphemisms for ‘publicly drunk’? Lot of overdrinking at work in 19th century culture.
Phileas Frogg: The side with better PPP is always more militarily dangerous than the side with better GDP. We’re going to learn that hard lesson very soon, but what do you expect? We’re ruled by bankers and merchants, while Russia and China are ruled by spies and engineers. The first country to fully re-embrace rule by warriors is going to be hellacious to deal with for a few years.
Bob Sykes: The novels of Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, truly excellent as stories, also provide detailed descriptions of life in Britain during the 19th Century. Austin for the gentry, Dickens for the urban poor, and Hardy for the rural working class. Also, A.J.P. Taylor’s history of WWI has an analysis of the economic conditions in the run up to the War, and he concludes that working class was materially better off under wartime rationing than during the peace in the early 1900’s. The...
Jim: Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop...

Isegoria

Reading News The GTD Way

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