I've been a Feedly subscriber for a decade now. I've curated the best sources of information about development on the internet. But this is the first year that I stepped up my game. I told myself that this is the year I try to focus on reading what is important to me. I was wasting a lot of time on Reddit just browsing mindlessly.

The best thing I did was purchase the Feedly Pro+ package. The subscription lets you follow your subreddit, Twitter, and mailing newsletter straight from Feedly. First, I cleaned up all my subreddits and Twitter subscriptions to keep only the ones about IT. Then, I created a dev-social folder in Feedly with Reddit, Twitter, DZone and Changelog. I order them by the most popular articles or tell Leo (the Feedly AI assistant) to prioritize subjects. It now prevents me from just browsing mindlessly and keeps me in the same app where my curated list of blogs is.

Also, the pro subscription lets you also annotate the article you read to help you make a more active reader. Active reading is something I should've started doing way earlier. I always tried to take notes on the side on a personal wiki, but it's hard to keep doing. Highlighting what is essential is a lot easier.

Finally, once that was set up, I discovered Readwise. I already wrote about it in a previous post, but I feel like talking about it again for how amazing it is. Readwise takes all those annotations and makes you reread them in small batches every day. So not only do I try to read actively but now, when I annotate, I know it will be helpful, and I want to find the vital information in the texts I read. In addition, Readwise import works with Feedly and everything else: books, pdfs, podcasts, you name it!

There's so much information and not enough time. So I found a way to cut through that!