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You want to read your favorite blogs, get e-mail newsletters every day, you have websites you check regulary, newsgroups, mailing lists, forums, interesting Wikipedia articles - a lot of digital input you want to keep up with. But unless you make reading on the computer your full time job - you can’t. So how to select the really important stuff out of it and keep an overlook of everything?

Recently RSS became popular and made some aspects easier. RSS feeds can help you to get all the information together without opening hundreds of websites every day to check if something has changed. You can usually select special channels of interest to get more specific news. On the other side you probably have to deal with a larger amount of information.

But the biggest problem is: when and how to read/process all the information?

Sometimes you only want to read about a specific topic, sometimes you just want to read a bit of a complicated article or just read about anything randomly to build new connections / enhance creativity. You can all do that with incremental reading and do not have to worry to miss something. Sooner or later (you can influence that) it will appear in your incremental reading process.

So how does it work?

You collect all the information you want to process and store them in one place. The you review all the articles (or any other kind of information) randomly or by category. You can highlight important parts, set a reading point (bookmark), extract fragments and generate Question-Answer items for later repetitions.

I am currently using Supermemo for incremental reading and can recommence it very much (I do not know any other software which supports it, if you know something please write me an e-mail). You can however “emulate” the process with other tools as well.

What about a classic knowledge base?
Software that helps you build a knowledge base is good for storing information and searching in it. But you still have to do deal with the scheduling if you want to review information you are not actually searching for.

the basic work flow for incremental reading:

*try to get most of the input from one application (e.g. an RSS reader), so you do not have to check many different places/websites
*go through all you RSS feeds
*make a quick decision (title, tags) for every article if it is worth reading
*import the articles in you incremental reading software (you can copy & paste to Supermemo)
If you have a tight schedule, you can limit yourself reading for 30min / one hour per day, or just do a bit of incremental reading when you have some time. But you do not have to read each interesting article completely because of fear to forget about it if later if you do not read it immediately. Instead of that you can get things done and read whenever you find some time.

You can get a good in-depth article about incremental reading by the author of Supermemo here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 5:39 pm and is filed under learning, gtd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.