Useful Blogs
I read plenty of books, but I find myself often reading articles on the internet as well. I think this is fine as long as I am careful not to waste too much time reading useless stuff. My personal rule is that I need to take notes on whatever I am reading. This rule forces me to really consider whether or not the article is worth reading through all the way. If it’s a useless article, I won’t bother reading it because I don’t want to have to write it all down.
After forcing myself to follow this rule for some time, I started to find it much easier to avoid entire blogs outright and stick to reading a few articles from a small list of blogs instead.
Blogs I visit Regularly
Lifehacker.com
This blog is often a source of neat little tricks to consider in your daily life. Advice often applies to folks in school, but can easily extend beyond into everyday life.
99u.com
This is a wonderful blog that serves up inspirational videos and articles centred around empowering creative people to push ideas forward.
TED.com
This site hardly needs an introduction. Excellent videos about unique ideas are posted here regularly. If you need a short break yet still want mental stimulation, this is the place to look.
RyanHoliday.net
Ryan does not update his blog often, but when he does there are usually some nice tidbits of practical wisdom. His opinions can be a bit sharp, but he presents his content well and exhibits a clear mind geared toward action. Perhaps my favourite part of his website is his reading list. Ryan reads a lot and often and has excellent book recommendations.
Instructables.com
If you like DIY projects this site’s full of them. Even if you’re not great at building stuff yourself, this site is a nice place to seek out unique approaches at design. Very inspirational.
Behance.com
This is THE place to search for digital art inspiration. Excellent artists post their finished pieces as well as works in progress, and it’s all there to look at.
Abduzeedo.com
This site curates cool art pieces. Another source of inspiration. They regularly post typography examples and sweet looking architecture examples, which I really like to look at.
Cracked.com
Proceed with caution. This is a humour site and the articles can be crude. They can also be distracting, so I suggest checking up here only on weekends, when you’ve got a bit of spare time. Despite the heavy-handed nature of the humour, the articles are easy to read and very often share unique or controversial information that can in fact be quite eye-opening and informative.
Zapier.com/blog
They post about once per week, and every article I’ve seen so far has been quality. The information they write about always pertains in some way to their business (Zapier is a webapp that connects a myriad of other webapps together to extend their usefulness), but it is genuinely useful. For example, I learned about Leanpub.com from one of Zapier’s posts, which really made publishing this ebook a breeze!
AsianEfficiency.com
This is a useful website for anyone who likes trying out different productivity methods. I learned about different journal methods and set up some templates of my own using the information available on their site.
Rustyv.com
This is my blog. I post articles pertaining to engineering, thoughts on work and life productivity, and regularly post design and product ideas that I have. You are welcome to check it out and tell others about it if you like it. (If you do, thank you. I do appreciate it!)