How Do You Keep Up with All of the Reading? 79
An anonymous reader asks: "As a professional working in software, my days are full as it is. Whenever possible, though, I attempt to keep up with my technical reading, whether it be IEEE or ACM journals, conference proceedings, Slashdot, or countless other sources. The problem is, there's no way to keep up! The magazines and journals that interest me alone create more material in a year than I could ever hope to absorb, and don't even get me started on the conferences. Do you, as a software professional, consider yourself up-to-speed enough when it comes to the latest and greatest in the public domain? If so, where do you draw the line?"
Not just IT, of course... (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't just related to IT, of course; most professions require a standard of continuing self-education to get through it. As a medical student, one of my advisors finally explained his methods for dealing with the mad chaos of journal articles, world events, and so forth: quick scanning.
No, not OCR (though that might help in certain cases), but skimming headlines/abstracts/conclusions, etc. Journals typically present a table of contents; read it and pick out the relevant/interesting ones. Of those, read the conclusions or abstracts and decide if it warrants more reading or a "mental note" for reference later---as someone above suggested, just enough to Google later if necessary. The essence of the trick is reading from end to beginning instead of the usual way. (This also assumes the article isn't written with a punchline at the end---most aren't.) It sounds quite simple, but actually takes a lot of practice to convince yourself your not wasting time and subscription fees. Works nicely, though.
Unfortunately, most of us here spend plenty of time on things that don't work so well for this---pleasure reading, watching TV and movies, reading articles that are interesting but don't have a lot of professional relevance, and so forth.
Personally, I'm surprised I had time to write this.
Re:There isn't any way, cut your losses (Score:3, Interesting)
"known knowns" -- there are certain things we know we know: this is Slashdot, we are writing in English, etc.
"known unknowns" -- there are things we know we don't know: P = NP?
"unknown knowns" -- what do we know that we don't realize we know?
"unknown unknowns" -- the real surprises: what we don't know, and don't even realize there is something to be known.