GET INSPIRED EVERY DAY

I read a while ago that reading in bed using mobile devices can really damage your sleep patterns. It has something to do with the light emanating from your phone (specifically the blue light.) And while phones try to get clever about this, I don’t believe there is yet a solution (leave me a comment if you know of one.)

Interestingly enough, I imagined to myself that reading when I wake up might actually help me wake up since it is directly messing with my sleep pattern. So most days, I reach for my phone and try to wake up my brain. Here is where factor #2 comes into play for me: What goes in at the start of the day, can often set a rhythm on the rest of my day.

If I were to start out with a funny video on youtube or something, I might be thinking about it a lot of the morning. If something awful happened in the news, it will likely get talked about. So, first inputs seem to affect me. I don’t know if that is true for everyone, but it seems to be for me.

Inoreader: A Cool Mobile App

So here is a tip from me to you, today. Recently, I came across a mobile app called “Inoreader.” Inoreader is this dead-simple blog-subscription (“rss feed reader”) viewer that will allow you to configured it to go download content from “feeds” (blogs, online magazines, newspapers) all over the web. It even comes with a service that helps you find content, which is nice, but I don’t user it that way. Here is how I use it.

I don’t want to add to the noise of my morning by bombarding my brain with a ton of stuff. I want to curate a flow of information that inspires me to take on the day in positive and meaningful ways. So I don’t want just any list of content. I want to find the right content, and read that.

I also don’t want to get bogged down into long-form brain twisting content. I want quickly digestible stuff, to get my brain headed in the right direction.

So I don’t just go find a ton of stuff that I might never read. I pre-curate a list of blogs that tend to turn our the kind of stuff I want to read in the morning, and that is the only stuff I put into a mobile app.

An alternative to InoReader is Feedly. There are plenty of tools available for the free version, and if you subscribe you can have feedly gather a lot more information and curate it into a daily reader for you.

Here is a little video that shows you how to manually setup the blogs you care about in the Feedly mobile app:

Something Extra

If you are a Christian, like me, you might be interested in curating some inspirational content. This is a touchy subject, to me, however. There is a lot of theologically wacky stuff out there, and so one needs to be very careful not to just gulp down just everything right? So sometimes I prefer to keep things a little more light on the curation side, enough to get my brain going, and then just spend time in the Bible for the meatier moments.

If you are looking for new content, check out the following link which does a great job of bringing together countless numbers of Christian blogs across many topics.

Feedspot Top 100 Christian blogs - Notice that the menu on the left lists lots of different categories of Christian inspirational blogs.

Surely you will find something to sooth the soul, rev the spirit, and wake up the brain!