>>insert something randomly funny here
A little sappy, but nonetheless;
One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.
Having started a regular 9 to 5 job now, I don’t nearly have as much free time as I once did. Because time is a lot tighter than it was in the past, I have had to budget my time carefully.
My Google Reader has over 20 feeds, which on a high-volume day can pull in more than 1000 items in a single period. On an effort to make it manageable, I have a separate folder for the nice-to-read-but-not-essential feeds, feeds like xkcd and Digg, which I just ignore if I have no time.
Other feeds though, have a higher importance. Some of these feeds include the New York Times, Metafilter and Paul Krugman. These feeds require a lot of quiet reading time, which is a luxury nowadays.
I’ve taken to installing the Google Reader application on my Android phone. It allows me to quickly star items that I find interesting, and when I get back home at night I can peruse them at my own leisure.
Some items are magazine-length articles, which given the sheer volume of items, can become too time-consuming to read, given the limited amount of reading time I have. For articles like this, I use Instapaper to save them with all extraneous formatting stripped out. I then sync my phone with the Instapaper server to download these articles.
Because my commute sometimes involves going into tunnels, my 3G signal may get cut off, and dropping to GPRS makes me want to pull my hair out. In cases like these I break out the Instapaper application to clear the backlog of articles.
In this way, I’ve cut down my computer time by write a fair bit, leaving me with time for other pursuits, and some much-needed rest.
