We all know the reflex. A five-minute break between meetings, a moment of waiting, and we open X or LinkedIn. We scroll. We skim a few headlines, giving ourselves the impression of being productive, of “doing our tech watch.”
The problem is, that feeling is an illusion. In the end, we close the app without retaining anything concrete, left only with a sense of noise and wasted time. This is what I call “surface consumption”: a form of intellectual malnutrition where we consume without ever being nourished.
In the first article of this series, we established why it’s crucial to take back control of our information flow to build deep expertise. We laid out the “why.” Today, we move on to practice. We’re going to build the “how.”
This article is a construction plan. Step by step, we will assemble the tools and strategies to build your one-stop shop for information: a centralized, personal, and intelligent system designed to turn chaos into knowledge.
Step 1: Unification – RSS as a Universal Language
The foundation of any robust system is a standard. For our one-stop shop, that standard is the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. Think of it as a universal language for content. Whatever the source—a blog, a YouTube channel, a newsletter—our first goal is to translate it into an RSS feed.
Fortunately, most content sites (blogs, news sites) natively offer an RSS feed, even if it’s sometimes a bit hidden. This is our simplest starting point. But the real power of our system lies in its ability to standardize sources that don’t play along.
For newsletters and mailing lists: The solution is remarkably simple. Tools like Kill The Newsletter provide you with a unique email address. You subscribe to your newsletters with this address, and the service transforms each received email into an item in a personal RSS feed. Your inbox stays clean, and your newsletters are treated like any other source of information.
For everything else (YouTube, Reddit, web pages…): This is where projects like RSS-Bridge come into play. It’s a tool (which you can self-host for complete control) capable of generating an RSS feed from almost any web page. A YouTube channel, a subreddit, a public Facebook page… RSS-Bridge can turn them into standardized feeds, ready to be integrated into our system.
At the end of this step, the initial chaos of formats and platforms has disappeared. We are left with a collection of uniform RSS feeds, the raw material for our one-stop shop.
Step 2: Centralization – Building Your One-Stop Shop for Information
Now that we’ve transformed our heterogeneous sources into a collection of standardized RSS feeds, we need a home for them. This is the role of the RSS aggregator: the heart of our system, our one-stop shop.
For this task, my tool of choice is FreshRSS, an open-source solution that I self-host.
The main advantage of self-hosting is complete control and the absence of limits. While many SaaS solutions often impose restrictions on the number of feeds in their free tiers, a self-hosted solution frees you from these constraints.
Of course, hosting your own instance requires some technical effort (a topic we will cover in a future article in this series). If you prefer a turnkey solution to get started, services like Feedly or Inoreader are excellent alternatives.
Whatever solution you choose, the goal is achieved: all your information feeds now converge in one place, ready to be processed.
Step 3: Intelligent Filtering – Your Personal AI Assistant
We now have a one-stop shop, but we face a new challenge: volume. How do you process hundreds of articles every day without spending hours on it? Brute force is not an option. The solution is to intelligently delegate the first pass of triage.
This is where an automation tool like N8N, which I also host, becomes a game-changer. In my system, I’ve built a workflow that takes each new article from my RSS aggregator and submits it to an artificial intelligence.
The principle is simple: I’ve given this AI clear instructions on the topics that interest me and those that don’t. It acts as a personal assistant that performs a pre-triage for me. This filter is incredibly effective, eliminating over 60% of the content before I even see it.
The result? The noise disappears. What remains is a list of highly relevant articles, ready for the final triage by a human.
Step 4: The Final Triage – The Human Touch to Keep Only the Signal
The artificial intelligence has done the heavy lifting by eliminating the noise. What’s left in your aggregator is a highly relevant selection. This is where your expertise comes into play, but in a targeted and efficient way.
This final step is not a reading session, but a decision sprint. In the clean, distraction-free interface of FreshRSS, your role has a dual purpose:
- The Quick Scan: In a few minutes, you scan the headlines. This is enough to keep you up-to-date on general news in your areas of interest without having to read everything. You absorb the relevant “background noise.”
- Selecting the Gems: You identify the articles or videos that deserve deeper attention. These are the ones you’ll want to consume in their entirety.
For each gem identified, the only action is to redirect it to the ideal medium for consumption—a topic we will cover in detail in the next article of this series. By radically separating triage from consumption, you ensure you dedicate the right level of attention to each type of information.
The system is now complete. From a chaos of sources, we have distilled a controlled information flow, ready to be transformed into knowledge.
The Architect’s Toolbox: Lay Your First Brick with Feedly
The system we’ve just described is powerful, and it’s normal that it might seem complex to tackle all at once. The idea, this week, is not to build the entire cathedral, but simply to lay the first foundation, quickly and easily.
- Create a free account on Feedly. It’s an excellent RSS aggregator that will get you started in minutes with no installation required.
- Add 3 to 5 high-quality sources you already consult. Think of that tech blog you love, that relevant YouTube channel, or that newsletter you always open.
The goal isn’t to read everything yet, but simply to start centralizing. The mere act of seeing your sources arrive in one place is already a victory. The advantage of this approach is that it’s reversible: later, if you decide to build your own system, Feedly will allow you to export your list of sources to import elsewhere. You lose nothing by starting this way.
Conclusion
Building a personal tech watch system is an investment. It’s not about finding a productivity hack, but about building an infrastructure for your own learning. By shifting from a passive consumer subjected to algorithms to an active architect of your own flow, you don’t just save time: you take back control of what you learn.
Don’t get lost in the race for volume; the true value of your tech watch lies in the quality of the filter you build to keep only the relevant information: the kind that truly helps you grow.