Texas Morning Media Tour
by srslysam2013
Most mornings, after I grab a cup of coffee, I’ll sit down at my computer and see what’s going on in Texas. My tour usually takes around 25 minutes and 3 cups of coffee to complete. The purpose of the tour is to review the major metropolitan news outlets and periodicals, read shorter articles, and identify longer articles that I would like to read later in the day.
I use Google Chrome for my browsing pleasure, and the Chrome Readability.com widget for longer articles that I plan on reading on my kindle fire. Chrome is fast and has excellent hotkeys so that you can spend more time reading rather than clicking and mouse-ing around. I’ve noticed that I can shave off about 10-12 minutes(40%-45%) by using the chrome hotkeys in conjunction with a specific routine for reading. The purpose of the routine is to separate the content selection process and the reading process, as well as sustain reading momentum and attention.
The routine looks a little something like this. First, I’ll load my chrome browser and my favorites will appear on my home page. Then I’ll hold Ctrl +left click each of the items in my list that I plan on reading that morning. This puts them in tabs to the right of the bookmark page. After each of the sources are open, I press Ctrl+W to close my bookmark tab and switch to my first source page (e.g. chron.com). This is when I browse headlines and Ctrl+left click each article that I plan on reading or browsing. As soon as I finish selecting the articles, I Ctrl+W out of the source and begin reading, Crtl+W’ing articles that I finish or find dull. If an article is too long to read during the morning tour, or would be more pleasurable to read on my kindle fire, I press Ctrl+Shift+K to tell the Readability.com widget to send the article I’m viewing to my kindle in .mobi format. It will magically appear on my kindle in a couple minutes. For articles that I may read, but want to see the others first and come back to, I Ctrl+Tab (instead of Ctrl+W), which keeps the tab open so that I can go back to it if there is time.
Here is my list of sources that I’ll check in the Texas tour:
Here is a video of the routine in action.
Very informative