Broaden Your Horizons by Randomizing Your Reading Material [Learning]

As news sites get more and more personalized it's easy to get caught in the feedback loop of everyone agreeing with you. Sometimes it's nice to step outside of your box and read, or learn about something more random.

We seek out news and information we agree with. This is called confirmation bias, and it's normal, but it's also limiting. When you seek out like-minded ideas, you're bound to get stuck in a rut when you're trying to come up with new ideas. Of course, you can actively push yourself to read or try new things. Or you can put the pieces in place to essentially automate the process of putting new material in front of you.

Get Random Reading Content Delivered to Your Inbox

The easiest, no hassle way to get a random selection of news is to have it delivered right to your inbox. One simple way to do this is through journalism site Longform's newsletters or their Send Me A Story service. Every week you'll get a collection of solid articles from a wide variety of sources.

Another option is DailyLit, a service that lets you read a wide selection of fiction and nonfiction books through RSS or email. You can choose your own books, or subscribe to any of DailyLit's samplers, channels, or tours for a more randomized selection of reading.

Automatically Get Different Points of View for Articles Your Read

When you're browsing the news it's easy to stick with the sites you know. Sometimes that means you're missing an entirely different point of view. To see what others might be saying, we like web client and iPad client also do a great job at showing you every side of story.

While News360 does a good job at trying to show you every angle on a news story, most of the personalized news or digital digest apps (like Flipboard, Trap.it, Prismatic, etc) can at least give you a glimmer of something new every once and a while. This is especially the case if you hook in your Twitter or Facebook account, since chances are you don't agree with everyone sharing links on either social network.

Randomize Your Start Page

Your browser's home page is a great place to dump interesting and random content for your accidental and automatic discovery. Obviously you don't want to do this on your work computer in case you get distracted, but it's a good way to discover new things when you have the time.

Changing your homepage is pretty easy (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer). You don't want entirely random content from all over the internet, so here are a few sites you can make your homepage to randomize (mostly) safely:

Any site or service that supports a random function works just fine, so whatever your preference is, you should be able to find something new and interesting. The idea here is to put different types of content in front of you on a regular basis without forcing yourself to look at viewpoints you don't agree with. Hopefully you'll learn some cool new things.

Title image remixed from Jon S.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/1f3mPh71dTA/broaden-your-horizons-by-randomizing-your-reading-material

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