Recently I've been thinking a lot about how to consume information more efficiently.

Historically my primary method of consuming information around my interests (technology) has been through browsing websites that aggregated it. Reddit, Hacker News, Medium, etc. This takes a lot of time because I must sift through a lot of content that may not be relevant to me, and I end up spending more time looking for something to read than actually reading and learning.

Recognizing that, I ranked different methods by efficiency I use and came up with the following:

• Personal Recommendation (from a friend/coworker)
• Newsletters that I subscribe to
• Blogs that I follow
• Niche news aggregators and forums (eg. lobste.rs)
• Social media (eg. Twitter)
• Semi-mainstream news aggregators (eg. Hacker News)
• Mainstream news aggregators (eg. Reddit)

I've begun to challenge myself to exhaust the top-level options before moving to the lower levels, and unsurprisingly I've found that I spent significantly less time searching for information than I did consuming it. I hardly ever reach the lower levels, and I feel the quality of information I’m consuming has on average increased.

This process was pretty simple, but I’m happy with it and I thought it was worth sharing. I plan to continue this strategy until something better comes along.