Chipping away at my Reading List

I have a problem

Every morning before I start working (unless I have pressing work to get stuck into), I warm up my brain by:

Going through my email to see new issues of newsletters I’ve subscribed to.
Checking dev.to, medium, hacker news, linkedin, github etc. for some new tech content.
Trawling some tech related social media for a little bit, just to see if there’s anything else I’ve missed.
Doing the Wordles.

The whole process is relatively quick. Despite all the browsing and clicking around, it’s usually done within about 15 mins. The reading is typically skimming, and any articles that are worth continuing to read will get bookmarked, or saved into my Reading List on To Do so I can read them later. And therein lies my problem. I never read them later.

This is my attempt to fix that.

355

Every year I complain about how the lists are just getting longer and I do nothing about it. This is the current breakdown:

207 readings in my Readings list.
41 blogposts in my Blogposts list.
14 books in my Books To Read list.
89 bookmarks in my Twitter Bookmarks list.
4 Saved posts in Linkedin.

So without breaking these down further, that’s 355 items to read. Some of the bookmarked items from twitter or saved posts from LinkedIn (and honestly potentially many other items) may be a collection of resources. The number could look more like 500+ for all I know. Let’s manage the list a little better.

The chipping away part

I’ve barely started and it already feels like this will be a heavy task. So, I’ve decided to create a series of blogposts for it. I’ll also tag them all with chipping-away for easier browsing later, but this’ll be where the series starts off. When each post is published, I’ll add a link here.

I’ll be sure to write about any interesting or insightful patterns I may have noticed. I’ll also add the reading list statistics to my now page, if you’re curious!

Part 0: When do I read all this

That’s the most difficult part I suppose. Not much of a reading list if it’s not being read. No use adding to it if you’re not using it.

I’m going to dedicate the first half hour post lunchbreak, similarly to how I organise my morning, to reading the first thing off the top of my reading list. The only reason it should be anything else is if there is something more related to the problems I’m solving at work today. If I don’t manage to read after lunch, then I have to replace my morning routine with this.

My ideal cycle for these articles is weekly. Check back to see how I went. Wish me luck!