Here’s how to handle information overload by setting up a triage workflow with Feedly

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

“Too much information kills information.”

I remember wondering if that was true in the pre-internet world.

Of course, we had books, newspapers, a few TV and radio channels, but accessing information was limited by multiple constraints. You had to buy books and newspapers, go to the library, or turn on the TV at a specific time to watch the news. I remember being in awe of people subscribing to many newspapers and reading them daily.

Today, I don’t question that saying anymore.

The age of information abundance.

I won’t talk about misinformation and fake news.

That’s a whole different discussion deserving a lot more space and a level of expertise I do not possess. Still, even considering only trusted sources, the volume of information we can access has grown beyond our ability to absorb it. I consider reading very important, but I also feel the need to do other things. This is why I decided to deconstruct my reading habits to introduce a triage phase.

For this, I use the Feedly app.

Information triage in practice.

Feedly is an RSS reader on steroids.

I can follow news outlets, small and large, blogs, newsletters, Twitter accounts, and much more. I can add individual sources that I trust and subscribe to tags and topics to surface news from other ones. They are also experimenting with machine learning to cover more complex issues.

I launch Feedly when I have short periods available.

I set it up to show the most compact view, just a list of titles with no images to limit distractions. I never read full articles in Feedly. Instead, I leverage the native Instapaper integration. I scroll through the list of titles, and whenever I see something I might want to read, I save it to Instapaper.

When I reach the bottom of the list, I mark everything as read.