This post is only tangentially related to finance. It discusses my approach to reading more in less time via free, publicly available tools and downloads. Can reading more help your investing skills? Quite possibly, though more information does not necessarily lead to better comprehension or decision-making. The latter two are different skills.

I spend a lot of time reading online and over time I have developed several tools to help me get through the "stack" faster. They are:

RSS feeds: this is the orange button that you find on many sites, including on the company-specific filings page in EDGAR. I use Google Reader to read the feeds. Reader brings most of the things you would read over the course of the day on one continuously updated screen. You see the headline, where it came from and decide whether to click to read. Most feeds are "full" feeds, that is, they do not require you to visit the site to see the entire article. You can add or drop subscriptions as you wish. Google Reader is a major timesaver as one can see only news and articles he cares about, and, more often, one does not need to leave Reader to read the whole article.

Mozilla Browser: I am not a big fan of Firefox, but IE is unsafe, while Chrome is snoopy. The German and French governments officially warn against IE. I also greatly dislike that MSFT broke up the navigation buttons into three sections on the screen. Chrome, while apparently more robust than Firefox, has abominable privacy and content policies.

Browser Buttons: if a site does not have a feed (like Bloomberg) but you visit it often, you can drag and drop the square "B" from the address bar on the button bar for a one-click visit. Since I have a lot of these, I learned that I can right-click on the button, select "properties" and delete the textual name. This way you get only the "B" for bloomberg or the blue "t" for twitter: this way you do not run out of space quickly. Buttons are substantially quicker than bookmarks.

Reading "regular" articles outside Google Reader: I am subscribed to several feeds that often have "linkfests" to interesting articles that they found. This requires leaving the Reader page to the regular net in a new tab. There are two time-wasters that happen then: one is "pagination" when the site owners want you to click a lot of times to generate page views. Well, I dislike this greatly, so I either go for the "see on one page" button, or click "print" which usually pops a window with the full article.

The second problem, besides pagination, is that many sites have too much area dedicated to advertising. This disfigures the text. Forbes is a big offender: today the page with the most emailed article has 1 (one) full sentence readable when you load. You have to scroll down for the rest. This problem is neatly solved by a free add-on called "Readability" from Arc90 Lab. This is a button on your browser that strips out nearly all ads and displays the text in one neat column in a format of your liking. You just load the page, and click on the button.

Now on to some advanced "faster and more" reading techniques:

Part of "faster" reading is having the pages load faster, either in Reader or in the regular interwebs. Waiting is time taken out of your life. There are several things that I have done to assist me in speedier reading.

Blocking Flash animation: there is a free (donation suggested) Firefox add-on that blocks all Flash animations (mostly annoying ads) and leaves a play button in the space that enables you to play them if you want to. It is called Flashblock. Pages both in Reader and outside load faster now that you do not have to wait for some moronic ads to load.

Blocking GIF animation: open a blank tab, type on top about:config. Find "animation". Doublelick on the line. Enter "none" in the window that pops up.

Blocking most ad images: I noticed that a lot of ad images do not come from the site itself but are generated by Doubleclick. Well, just rightclick and "block images" from them. Voila!

And a special note to advertisers and their spawn: I do not want to click on my state to refinance my mortgage. I do not want to consolidate my credit card debt. I do not want to go back to school, and I know that Obama does not urge me to do so. I do not want to compare my car or home insurance rates. I do not want to click to take the survey. I do not want to cartoon myself. I do not want to be a product tester. I do not want to become a fan of your product. I do not want to click to turn the volume on. I do not want to see my credit score for free. I do not want to read about your "guaranteed" ETF trading system. I do not want 10 free trades. I do not want to send in my federal tax return for free. I do not want this free report. Thank you.

If you have your own trick/s, please leave a comment. Would like to see what others do.