Extending Deep Work Session / Barbell Reading to Social Browsing

JoshA

Ideas from Sfast's Deep Knowledge Work / Barbell Reading emphasise reading/processing books. I've found it helpful to extend these ideas to the web. I track the meaningfulness of my X/Internet browsing sessions based on ideas that I come across which I can either exploit immediately or require deeper processing.

Often a post might require ~20minutes of processing - say a statistics method I'm not familiar with - which is enough that I cannot do it during a browse, but is not long enough to warrant time in my calendar. In these situations I've found it helpful to group bits from the web - or any source - into a small project, which I sit down to process twice a week.

This also applies a time-test to the item. If I don't get around to processing it in the next two weeks, I delete it.

This flow helps make browsing social media actually productive.

andang76

Oh yes, this kind of principles can be generalized to process many things.

ctietze

Time-boxing and batching tasks like that sound useful! I like the "delete after 2 weeks" rule to avoid piling up stuff that demonstrably has not been worth your time