Ask HN: How do you manage your news reading time?

I actually read HN way too much while at work (case in point). I just cant help it.

I usually skim the titles to see if there is anything interesting. If I find something interesting I read the first paragraph to see if its actually interesting or link bait

One good way to stave off a news site addiction is to enthusiastically participate in comment threads. After being drawn into 2 or 3 good flameouts you'll curse the whole medium.

I often skim the comments here before I read the post itself. It's a decent filter.

Since I'm about to start a non-tech job, I'm looking hard for ways to compress my ~30 min daily update (including politics, science, tech, blogs) into <10 min.

I'm thinking of setting up a system that gives me certain amount of "online cash" every week, and whenever I'm "over-budget" it donates the balance to Sean Hannity:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/snuznluz.shtml

I find it's best to enforce a time limit. I use LeechBlock (a Firefox add-on), in particular.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

I use HNs no procrastination feature, but still find myself refreshing the page too often as the 3hour self imposed limit draws closer. I am thinking of upping minaway: to 240, but raising maxvisit to 30...

I notice a lot of repetition across the sites I frequent. I'm asking myself, who are the best aggregators, of both story and comments. If they are a bit behind some of the other sites in timing (e.g. Slashdot), perhaps that is a good thing, as it lets the "truthiness" gel and the counterpoints to accumulate.

I'm not saying I've succeeded, but that's my current thinking.

Also, I'm using news browsing way too much as avoidance. Inasmuch, it's an emotional activity. Acknowledging this allows me to tackle it more directly. (Some recent... news stories, argh! -- discussed an apparent strong correlation between emotional intelligence and procrastination. They got me thinking...)

EDIT: I should say "negative correlation", as in, the higher the EI (however that's measured), the lower the incidence of procrastination. It may not be rigorous, but I've found it useful to consider.

I subscribe to 55 different feeds including Hacker News. I use Google Reader as it is the fastest, most portable option and it isn't blocked at my office. To be honest, I don't find balance. I just let it roll. I find that no matter how much time I spend on either work or "sharpening the saw" (to borrow a CH term), I will likely get the same amount of work done. Why? I really don't know, I just do.

Google Reader is nice because I can let it go and come back later and still see all the old items and skim through the headlines. If there's something I like but it is far too long, I'll star, share and email it to myself.

If you have certain areas that you're particularly interested in, make a customized feed. For example, I've used Yahoo Pipes to create a feed to filter out Delicious Popular items that contain words (topics) that do not interest me (e.g. Twitter, Illustrator, etc.). I simply load the customized feeds on Google Reader for efficient browsing.

If you come to Hacker News mainly to read through discussions, I've found subscribing to AskYC RSS feed helps (or to visit AskYC archives on searchyc.com), since they seem to contain the most interesting opinions & discussions to me. Other than that, make a commitment to check HN only twice a day (e.g. once in the morning and night) or something, since you won't miss out on top items that will be on the front page all day long.

I used to refer the first page as the "to-read" links, but found more than few times that first-page-links can be misleading.

Now I skim thru the links, then check out the comments and decide if it is my-click-worthy.

But I usually find few 'unworthy' link-comments where many of us here pour our hearts out and thus making the link-baited article itself useful. I can't decide if that's good or bad :)

I created a site that pulls news from my favorites (HN, TechMeme, /. etc.), uses some smart(ish) processing to figure out what might interest me the most, combines duplicate stories and puts it all in one place. It's sort of a meta aggregator, hence the name--Meta.li. It looks for things like how many times a story was voted for, commented on, viewed etc. on the source site and ranks links accordingly. The layout is a great example of cognitive overload, but it works for me.

http://meta.li

The abridged version:

I use Google Reader and delicious. I make liberal use of starring articles (rather than reading them inline) and then as a secondary filter I also will tag them as "Read tonight", "Read this week" and "Read someday" in delicious on the second pass.

I have had to let go of a lot of temporal "breaking" news since it's just so hard to keep up with it, but this process lets me still see the headlines and see what's going on, without getting sucked in

And discussion in the comments definitely take more time than reading the original article ;)

I have a full discussion of my process here:

http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/how-to-effectivel...

It's a big problem. My solution (which amazingly worked, after I unsuccessfully tried several) was to block reddit in the router. Why reddit? Because on HN I saturate reasonably easy. Not so many new posts, and it's harder to absorb the information. Why in the router? Because re-activating it would require a router restart, and some 5 minutes without net. It's not a "one-click" procedure.

Now don't get me wrong. I have nothing against reddit. I've had both interesting conversations there and enjoyed the time I spent on it. But it's way to easy to waste hours per day... so I'm ultimately better without.

I became very sensitive to my I/O rate. I feel I'm spending too much reading News and too little producing (code, writings, etc.)

As a trade off I've created a lifestream blog using Google Reader as backend for aggregation.

So when getting input I'm immediately producing output.