Customize Your Monitor Setup

The easiest thing you can do is to change your screen settings to become more eye-friendly. This document from Cornell University and this guide from Charles Poynton have some suggestions that you can use as a reference. Some of these include placing the monitor 25 to 30 inches from your eyes, matching the screen brightness and contrast to your work area, and tilting the monitor so that the bottom of the screen is a bit closer to you. Here are some additional factors you should consider:

• Display width. Some people argue that using larger monitors or multiple monitor setups improves productivity. When it comes to reading, though, you have to make sure that the paragraphs you’re reading aren’t too wide. Yes, a 23-inch monitor can be handy, but not when you read blocks of text that stretch out across the entire screen.
• Focus. Though this is more of a problem for CRT monitors than LCD ones, everyone who spends a lot of time reading on the computer should ensure that the text is in focus. Even slight blurring on the edges will strain your eyes, because they’ll attempt to correct the focus themselves.

Use Tools for Easier Reading

Apart from changing your monitor’s settings and position, you can also use tools that make online content easier to read. Many browser add-ons and extensions do this. Examples include the following:

• Readability. This bookmarklet removes the clutter from text you’re reading online. You simply choose the style that’s easiest for you to read, then add the Readability button to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. Every time you click on the button, Readability will format the text on the current page in the style you selected.
• TidyRead. TidyRead is a Firefox add-on similar to Readability, but it gives you the option to change style settings every time you use it. It also has a “Smart Mode” feature that detects article pages so that TidyRead is automatically activated when you open an article page. There’s also a version for Chrome.
• Reading Glasses. This Chrome extension allows you to select the text you want to read and then lets the rest of the page become less visible. It prevents your eyes from being distracted by ads and other unnecessary clutter.
• Reasy. Reasy is a browser add-on based on the concept of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). This means that the text you’re reading will be presented to you one word at a time — kind of like flashcards. The benefit of this approach is that it increases reading speed. Reasy has versions for both Firefox and Chrome.
• NoSquint. Apart from some minimal style edits on a page (such as text color and background), NoSquint is a Firefox add-on that lets you set zoom defaults for the sites you visit. Just as the name implies, you don’t have to squint to read small text or view fine details in the sites you visit.

Of course, none of these tools and techniques will really work if you constantly abuse your eyes. A previous post tackles how we can take better care of our eyes even if our workload requires a lot of online reading. By combining proper habits with the right tools, eyestrain and fatigue from online reading will no longer be an issue.

Share your eyestrain avoidance tips below.

Photo by flickr user Toms Bauģis, licensed under CC 2.0.

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Any professional who uses writing in any capacity can benefit from getting another set of eyes on their work, and from looking critically at the work of others in similar fields.

BookGlutton can simplify that process by bringing it to the web. It seems primarily designed to cater to people wanting to set up an online book club, but as users can upload their own original works for shared reading, there’s nothing stopping us from using it as a collaborative work tool as well.

The built-in library at BookGlutton leans strongly towards public domain titles for which the copyright has expired, for obvious reasons. Reading and commenting on these works with a group of peers will probably help to improve your writing skills, but I’ll concentrate on its use for gathering feedback on your own work for the purposes of this overview. As is always the case when it comes to sharing work with other professionals, there’s always the worry of revealing valuable IP, but I still recommend a peer review process whenever possible.

The only formats BookGlutton’s upload function supports currently are ePub, HTML, and HTML+ZIP (Zipped HTML files). That means to get my work on the site, I had to use Word’s “Save As Web Page” command to get my .doc file ready for editing. Once uploaded, you can edit the work’s title, author, and description, and decide who to share it with.

My file had that aggravating problem of putting little question mark icons where quotes and apostrophes were, but otherwise the formatting translated well. Once you’re in reading mode, you can highlight text and “Mark” it, leaving comments that others can see and reply to, depending on who you chose to share them with.

The ability to see threaded discussions about any given passage is where BookGlutton shows its real potential as a tool for collaborative editing. You can’t do inline text changes, but for broad, big picture editorial work, this kind of commenting works much better than, say, track changes in a word processing program.

You can also chat in real-time if more than one user who has access to the work is logged in at once. The “Talk” window on the book’s left-hand side allows you to do this, and updates automatically when each user changes pages and/or highlights a new paragraph. This could be very useful if you’re lucky enough to be able to schedule live editing sessions.

Whether you’re a writer working online, or an online worker looking to improve your writing through feedback, BookGlutton is a web app with a lot to offer. It’s also been updated within the last couple of days, so even if you had a look before and weren’t too impressed, it might be worth a second glance.

I can’t wait to upload my endless volumes of memoirs and force my friends and family to read it with me and shower me with praise. And it better be praise.

Have you used BookGlutton, or a similar app, to get feedback on your writing? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Except that reading so many posts each day isn’t productive, in most cases … it’s busy work, it stresses you out (especially if you’re not keeping up with the hundreds of posts you need to read), and it keeps you from doing truly important work. Not always the best idea.

Instead of reading more productively, try simplifying your feed reading. Read less, spend less time reading, get more done. And stress out less.

Sound impossible? It’s simple, actually.

Three steps:

1. Cut down your feeds. I started with about 100 feeds, and through a succession of cuts, I’m now down to only the 10 most important feeds. Each time I made cuts, I unsubscribed from about a third of my feeds. The first day of cuts, I was down to sixty-something feeds. Second day, about 40. Third day, 27 feeds. Fourth day, 18. Fifth day, 12. It took me six days of cuts (spaced about 3-4 days apart) before I got down to just my top 10. But you know what? I don’t miss the other 90 feeds I cut at all. I’ve narrowed my reading down to the 10 feeds that give me the absolute most value each day … and for all the rest, I will usually hear about the best posts somehow.

2. Set Google Reader to list view. I recommend Google Reader, as it seems to me to be the fastest of the feed readers. But if you’ve got another preference, that’s fine, as long as you can switch to list view. I used to read it in full mode, and scan through each post to see whether I wanted to read the full post. However, that took a lot of time … switching to list view gave me the headlines to scan through, and nothing else. Now, I quickly scan the headlines, and wheel-click on the posts that interest me so that I can read them in a new tab. After picking the posts I want, I “Mark all as read”, close Reader, and go to read the posts in their tabs.

3. Only read 5 posts a day. When opening the posts I want to read in new tabs, I only select 5 posts. I might want to read 10, but that will take an hour. I only give myself 20 minutes or so of reading, so 5 posts is just about right. You might choose a different number, but the key point is that limiting the number of posts you read saves time, and forces you to focus on just the most important ones. Eliminate the chaff and just read the wheat.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks