Peripheral vision | A reading inbox to capture possibly-useful references | Beware automatic import into the reading inbox

Interesting colection of notes from Andy Matuschak:

Peripheral vision: "My physical workspace is full of subtle cues... together give me a kind of “peripheral vision”: when I’m doing one thing, it’s easy for me to fluidly notice other nearby things... Software systems, by contrast, often lack this kind of peripheral vision.". I started here because this sort of peripheral vision - pulling in resources possibly relevant to the writing task at hand - is something I'd like to include in MyHub,

That led to his definition of what I call a reading queue in my personal content strategy: "each item ... gets trashed ... gets read in a serious fashion ... gets read shallowly and filed ... (maybe) gets added to some other list like “recipes to be cooked”". And the key characteristics it should:

1. "zero-friction capture" (yep: one click add to To Read)
2. "zero-friction to read" (yep: I don't want to rob publishers of traffic, so we simply capture the URL)
3. "zero-friction listing across item type" (not sure what he means, but he does mention that current systems are "usually siloed by content type", and the MyHub queue has no types - that's up to the reader to decide)
4. "encourage lingering items to be removed" (yep: items not read after 30 days are flushed).

Finally, something that gives me pause: "Beware automatic import into the reading inbox", which is something Priority Sources do: "it’s important that everything added is either read or removed... [s0]add everything yourself... [otherwise] when you sit down to read, you’ll see lots of content that you have no immediate connection to... interspersed with content you intentionally added". The latter is diluted by an overlong reading queue stuffed automatically by RSS, email, twitter accounts and lists. "If you automatically import content, it becomes more expensive to groom your reading inbox."

One possible solution: when the RQ reaches a certain level, it no longer accepts automated additions. But this has certainly made me question the priority sources feature.