2025 Hindsight: Oof - it’s exhausting just reading this. I’m not nearly as thorough in my boiling of the ocean as I was back then. Which is maybe a bad thing now I think about it. Maybe I know more now, or maybe I’ve gotten complacent. Also, there’s a reference to the book ‘Chaos Monkeys’ which is meant neither as an endorsement of him as a person, nor of his attitudes to women, but the book still has lots of useful historical information on the early days of Facebook ad products, even if you have to hold your nose while reading it.
How to read?
Or perhaps a better title would be ’how to edit’. We all have to keep informed about a lot of fast moving stuff for what we do - ’header bidding, ’privacy policy’, ’verification’, ’messaging apps’ - and information comes at us from all sides, but we don’t often talk about how we deal with it.
Your email probably has a collection of ’important PowerPoint decks and PoVs I must read when I get round to it’. Perhaps you also have a range of email newsletters that you try and scan. Maybe you’re old-fashioned enough that you still read things on websites when you find the time for what we previously didn’t need to call, ’on-platform’ consumption.
Editor-in-chief?
The increase of sources and subjects of information coupled with the decline in high-quality, paid-for specialist media, means we have had to become editors of our own news feeds - curators of the content with which we ’feed our eyes’ for the purposes of work.
And if we are all editors now then surely it’s worth giving some thought to how we read? Worth considering how we filter and digest information we need to do our jobs well?
How do you read?
In my experience it’s not something that we talk about enough, so my small contribution is going to be to describe how I read. Inevitably I’ll have to cover something about what I read as well, but that isn’t really the point. The topics that matter to you will be different and the sources you consume will differ too, but maybe it will give you cause to reflect on the way you read too.
My solution is also moderately technical. Nothing you couldn’t pick up with a few hours of fiddling, but fiddling is involved nonetheless.
The aim, however is simple.
- I filter fairly aggressively to focus only on things that will repay effort.
- I try and gather all that filtered material in one place.
- And I try to read quite ’actively’ - taking notes and screenshots as I go, to force me to digest the information and integrate it with other things I’ve read.
Plumbing
In doing this I use a number of hacks, plugins and gewgaws to help me. Apple News does much of the filtering for me, and is good at surfacing things I care about. Zapier (similar to IFTTT) does some gathering of email attachments for me - big PowerPoints, pdfs and the like. Feedly collates RSS feeds for me, and Pocket is generally where everything ends up - one big reading collection that I plough through for a couple of hours every weekend, making notes organised by topic, rather than source.
It’s not perfect. Apple News doesn’t have all the sources I want, so I need to top up with RSS, but then the RSS feeds don’t get any kind of algorithmic filtering so they have to be low volume ones. Sometimes I gather too much stuff, and even the strongly reading queue starts to look bloated; at which point I usually just wipe and start again, rather than live with the ongoing guilt.
But broadly I feel as though I can get through a lot of stuff, on a lot of topics, without it taking up too much time. Just as importantly, I’m not trying to keep track of reading in lots of separate ’buckets’ as it all ends up in Pocket.
(I used to use Evernote for this purpose, but it annoyed me too much last year with the lack of reliable background syncing - no point in having a beautifully curated collection of things to read if you can’t easily get them on the screen you happen to be holding - especially if you’re on the Tube.)
And one last technical note - a lot of this happens on a mobile device (iOS in my case) where the sharing features are massively powerful. Whether I am in a browser, or another app, the share button instantly lets me add anything good to Pocket, for me to read later. The Pocket setup walks you through this fairly well.
What I read
I wrote a ’things to read’ post a while back which mostly still stands. I’ve tweaked the sources a little, but the big change since I wrote that is in how I read them.
Apple News
I used to scan a vast range of RSS feeds manually, but that got to be too much of burden and I need a bit of machine help. I could of course have used the biggest algorithmic news feed on the planet, and have filtered everything through Facebook, but I’m old-fashioned enough to want to keep my news separate from other stuff, so Apple News it was.
And as these things go, it has turned out to be a pretty good product - showing me good quality things I want to know about, from places that I don’t.
I have spent some time training and tuning it of course - partly just by reading things of course, but also by muting some channels. Sometimes what you don’t want to read is as as powerful signal to a machine as what you do.
My current Channel list includes these. (I can’t work out the syntax to link them directly to the Apple News app unfortunately.)
- The Economist (Apple do a nice integration so I can enter my subscription details and see paid-for articles within my feed)
- Adage
- Anandtech
- Ars Technica (UK and US flavours)
- Benedict Evans
- Beyond Devices
- Boing Boing
- business2community (which I discovered via Apple News and is actually rather good.)
- Daring Fireball
- Digiday
- The Drum
- The Hollywood Reporter
- Fast Company
- Hacker News Digest
- McKinsey
- MondayNote
- ProPublica
- Quartz
- Recode
- The Register
- TechCrunch
- VentureBeat
- The Verge
- WSJ
Email newsletters
There are a number of good newsletters which have links to lots of useful articles. Some of them are highly domain specific, but others are just more generally interesting.
The most unusual in my view, are the weekly emails that come from the main ‘read later’ services themselves. Pocket and Instapaper both have weekly selections of the most widely read and shared articles on their platforms. And as those platforms are generally used by people who take their reading seriously there is usually some good stuff that you would otherwise have missed.
For the rest I tend to look out for
- Enders Analysis (if you have a corporate subscription)
- Forrester (ditto)
- Ben Evans
- Ben Thompson
- Fintellect
- Adexchanger
- Mobile Fix
- Midia Research
- ExchangeWire
- McKinsey Highlights
- Parse.ly email
Email attachments
There are always lots of PowerPoint decks and PDFs flying around on email, but email isn’t unfortunately the most relaxing place to read them.
As mentioned above I used to use Evernote, which makes this simple because you can forward the email to your Evernote account and it will automatically add the attachments to a notebook of your choice.
Pocket, by contrast doesn’t accept anything which it can’t access from its servers as a URL, and doesn’t accept anything other than PDFs, so the flow here is a bit more complicated but the end result is the same.
I have an email address setup where I forward important email attachments. There is then a Zapier listener which looks out for email attachments and then saves them to Google Drive. Then another one turns Google Drive docs into PDFs and sends them to my Pocket account.
Low volume RSS not in Apple News
So not every source I find interesting has published itself on Apple News yet, so there are a few blind spots. I have whittled down my list of RSS feeds to those which are high quality and low volume, and those feeds get a direct line straight into Pocket.
You can’t have too many of those because that is the queue for filtered reading but as long as they aren’t too high volume it is generally OK.
Books
‘Get stewed: Books are a load of crap.’ - Philip Larkin, A Study Of Reading Habits
I won’t bother listing golden oldies, but some books I have enjoyed in recent years:
Tim Wu, The Master Switch is an awesome account of the history of different telecoms technologies in the US as seen through the lens of regulation. Sounds riveting? Actually yes. Tim’s new one, The Attention Merchants isn’t quite as good, but worth it if you haven’t read Martin Mayer’s Madison Avenue and books like that.
Susan Crawford, Captive Audience is also similarly regulatory focused, and similarly gripping.
Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction is a good account of the dark side of machine learning, as, weirdly is Tim Harford’s Messy as well as covering all sorts of other things.
Am also a fan of Matthew Syed, and his Black Box Thinking is worth a pop, even if you’re not into all that growth mindset stuff.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things and Chaos Monkeys are both good Valley books, as of course is High Output Management by Andy Grove.
I’m still not sure what I think about Paul Feldwick’s The Anatomy of Humbug but let me know what you think if you read it.