I love the phrase “getting caught in the melancholy of the infinite scroll.” That’s just one gem from Alexis Madrigal’s The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can’t Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook. He explores this strange dark side of “flow”, where we get stuck in an online activity and can’t stop doing it, even though there’s no tangible benefit:

What is the machine zone? It’s a rhythm. It’s a response to a fine-tuned feedback loop. It’s a powerful space-time distortion. You hit a button. Something happens. You hit it again. Something similar, but not exactly the same happens. Maybe you win, maybe you don’t. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It’s the pleasure of the repeat, the security of the loop.

We certainly do seem to treat “pull to refresh” like a slot machine in a casino. And the chances of winning something valuable are about the same, too.

In Idle minds L.M. Frank writes about what happens inside our brains when we’re not actively working on or thinking about something:

Some researchers now think that resting-state networks may prime the brain to respond to stimuli. “The system is not sitting there doing nothing and waiting,” says [Andreas Kleinschmidt, director of research at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research’s Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit]. Cycling activity in these networks may be helping the brain to use past experiences to inform its decisions. “It’s incredibly computationally demanding to calculate everything on the fly,” says Maurizio Corbetta at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “If I have ongoing patterns that are guessing what’s going to happen next in my life, then I don’t have to compute everything.” He likens the activity to the idling of a vehicle. “If your car is ready to go, you can leave faster than if you have to turn on the engine.”

It makes intuitive sense that we can’t just continue to create and consume information — our brains need time to process it all. And yet we still so often celebrate 80-hour weeks and shun “downtime” because we’re so afraid of not being productive. It seems like we’re doing ourselves more harm than good if we don’t give our brains time to be idle.

Ainsley Wagoner shares a story from architecture school in How We Measure Success. She describes a lecture in which their architecture professor first painted a picture of what it’s like to chase the best internships straight out of school, and work oneself to death. And then the professor contrasted that option with this one:

Or you can stop right now and ask yourself what kind of life you want to have. Look around you and figure out where you can make a real impact as designers and architects. Become developers, change the zoning laws, get involved in your communities to affect real change, you can do so many things besides being a cog in the starchitecture mega-firm machine. But whatever you do, you need to ask yourself what your priorities are. What do you want your life to look like in ten years? And allow the answers to that question influence your picture of success.

I don’t think this is a question you ever stop asking yourself…

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The idea that we allow too many distractions to take our focus off the work we’re supposed to be doing is not new. And the solution — just turn things off! — is not rocket science either. But I find it interesting just how many blog posts we’ve seen about this topic over the past couple of years. Working in the Shed by Matt Gemmell is another really good one:

We act as if we take concentration for granted, yet everyone has had trouble keeping their mind on the task at hand. We litter our menubars with icons, keep notifications enabled, and run our email programs, chat apps and social media clients all day. Something’s got to give, and invariably it’s our creative output.

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There have been quite a few posts over the past few months about what to do once Google Reader shuts down this weekend. I’ve been sticking my head in the sand, hoping that Silvio Rizzi will come to the rescue at the last minute and let me keep using my current setup, which is to use Reeder across all my devices (Mac, iPhone, and iPad). But alas, it looks like that’s not going to happen. So after much weeping and gnashing of teeth, here’s the setup I’ll go with for now.

• Feedbin as RSS sync backend. I tried Feed Wrangler, but the lack of tags/folder structure is a deal breaker for me. I also set up Feedly, and it works nicely, but I’m just a bit worried about the service in general. There doesn’t appear to be a business model, and there’s currently no way to get your feeds out of the service. So, for now, $2/month for Feedbin is what I’m settling on. I really hope they add the ability to reorder and edit tags soon (come on, give the feature request some love!), but that’s the only major problem I currently have with it.
• ReadKit on Mac. ReadKit just got a major update to support Feedbin, and it also lets me see and read all my Instapaper and Pinboard links in one place. This will be my desktop replacement for Reeder.
• Reeder on iPhone. I don’t know how much longer Reeder will be around, but the iPhone client does support Feedbin, and it’s still my favorite RSS client ever, so I’ll stick with it for now.
• Mr. Reader on iPad. Mr. Reader also just got a major update to support Feedbin. I used Mr. Reader before, but switched to Reeder when the iPad app became available. But since the Reeder iPad app is now very old (and still only supports Google Reader sync), I’ll move to Mr. Reader for the time being.

This is obviously quite a disjointed setup, and I’m not going to give up hope that there will be One Client To Rule Them All in the coming months. But this setup will hold me over until then. Like having to listen to Owl City while you wait for a new Death Cab for Cutie album to come out.

But I do feel like I now know way too much about the RSS reader landscape than I every wanted to. Thanks, Google.

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