Undirected Reading aka Web Surfing.

When things get slow at work I, like most people, surf the web. While some may look view this as a waste of time, I'm more inclined to view it is an important professional development activity.

First, rather than referring to it as web surfing let's call it undirected reading. If you think about it, most of the things we read in life fall into two general categories: stuff we need to read for work, stuff we want to read for fun. However, surfing the web really doesn't fall into either of those categories. Rather, surfing the web is process of discovering what we want to read for fun and what we should read for work.

I'd say, without any statistical basis, that ninety-nine percent of what I read when I surfing the web is neither fun nor useful. Mostly, it's just junk. However, the act of filtering through this great mass of junk does help me clarify my thinking in some hard to define way. It helps me figure out what I'm really interested in.