RSS, Focus, and Attention

I love RSS because of how it focuses my attention on the right stuff: big, complex, and contradicting ideas that let you chew on them over extended periods of time. No one can jump into your timeline and hijack your focus or throw junk in front of you.

If you take a week off or a month off, it doesn’t matter. I never feel the pressure to “finish” RSS, unlike I do with email for instance.

Except, well, there’s sort of a problem with RSS. On twitter dot com, retweets often lead to the most powerful ideas—the most interesting people—the notes you might not come across very often (like right now I think Ronald Klain is the best retweeter of them all).

I guess my point here is that sometimes I want my attention pulled out of my feed and sometimes I want to be entirely submerged with the voices I’m familiar with. (This reminds me that I should probably link to more things that catch my eye, and perhaps less time blogging as if it’s therapy.)