Productivity: Reading News The GTD Way

Daniel Miessler has merged the GTD method into his daily reading news routine. It is not about separating your news into different contexts, but he is using another philosophy behind GTD – which is about depending on a system you trust:

… The system I use is based on two products — NetNewsWire, an OS X based RSS Aggregator, and Firefox (thanks to Ken for showing me the power of the combo). The way it works is actually quite simple: I first go through my feeds one by one, from top to bottom. When I hit a story I enjoy, I either double-click it or press enter. This creates a new tab in Firefox (which remains in the background) for each story I want to read more about. So if there isn’t enough in the RSS feed, or I have some other reason to check the actual site out, I have that content waiting for me in Firefox.

Next, in phase two, I close my RSS reader and head to Firefox. Waiting for me is every single site that I found interesting for that session. This includes personal blogs, security news, world events, etc. I then move from right to left skimming the content of each tab. Once I’m through with each, I cmd/ctrl-w out of the tab which automatically selects the next one on the left. I move through each tab in this fashion until I have read all my content. After I’m done, I minimize my browser and get to work…

The point is to trust your system (in this case they are your software and your workflow) – so that your mind will be free and not as stressed.

Productivity: Reading News The GTD Way – [dmiessier.com]