You open LinkedIn, looking for one person’s take on one topic. Twenty minutes later, you’ve read four unrelated hot takes, a humble-brag about a promotion, and an AI-generated poem about “leadership.” The person you actually wanted to hear from? Buried three scrolls back, if you find them at all.

That’s not an accident. It’s not even really a feed — it’s a guess, made fresh every time you open the app, about what will keep you scrolling the longest. Sometimes that guess overlaps with what you actually wanted to read. Often it doesn’t.

Here’s the fix, and it’s been sitting inside LinkedIn’s search bar the whole time.

What we’re actually building

A feed made of only the people you chose — bookmarked, one click away, refreshed every time you open it. It’s not an official LinkedIn feature; there’s no button that says “Save My Custom Feed.” What you’re doing is building a very specific search, then bookmarking the URL it produces. LinkedIn doesn’t advertise this, but it works, and once it’s set up, it feels like cheating.

The real reason this is worth five minutes

Your feed is optimized to grab the fast, reactive part of your brain — the part that reacts to a bold claim or a hot take before you’ve decided whether it’s worth your time. That’s useful for the platform. It’s not useful for you.

A curated feed flips who’s in charge of that decision. Instead of your attention getting grabbed post by post, you decide up front, once, whose thinking is worth more of your time. Then the feed just… does that. Every time. That’s a small decision that keeps paying off — less noise, more signal, and twenty minutes back that used to disappear into the scroll.

How to build it

You’ll need two things: a list of names and about five minutes.

Step 1: Open a search.
Click into the LinkedIn search bar at the top of the page and hit enter without typing anything — or type a + and hit enter. Either tells LinkedIn: don’t filter by keyword, just give me a raw search I can build on.

Step 2: Filter to Posts.
You’ll land on a results page with tabs across the top — People, Jobs, Companies, and so on. Click Posts. Without this, you’ll get a mix of profiles and posts, and the feed you’re building needs to be posts only.

Step 3: Change the sort to Latest.
By default, LinkedIn sorts by “Top Match” — the algorithm making judgment calls again. Switch it to Latest so you’re seeing things in the order they were posted, not the order LinkedIn thinks you’ll like.

Step 4: Add your people.
Open All Filters and look for From Member (sometimes labeled “Posted by”). Start typing a name and select the right match — LinkedIn will often show several people with the same name, so check the photo or headline before you click. Repeat for everyone you want in the feed. There’s no cap most people will ever hit.

Step 5: Bookmark the result.
Once your filters are set, you’ll see your custom feed. Bookmark that exact URL. That bookmark is now a live, standing search — click it any time, and LinkedIn re-runs it fresh, pulling in new posts from your list automatically.

That’s it. Five minutes, and LinkedIn is now working for you instead of the other way around.

What to know before you rely on it

A workaround has edges. This one lives in a bookmarked URL, not an account setting, so two things follow. First: it can break if LinkedIn changes how its search URLs are structured, which platforms do periodically — you’ll know because the bookmark dumps you on an error page or a blank results screen instead of quietly failing. Don’t panic, just rebuild the search; same five minutes it took the first time. Second: adding someone new means updating that URL yourself — right-click the bookmark, choose Edit, paste in the refreshed link, or just rebuild the whole filter from scratch once your list has grown enough to be worth it.

Make it work harder

Build more than one of these. A feed of five industry voices you trust. A separate one for people talking specifically about your niche topic. A third for competitors or peers you want to keep half an eye on — each is its own bookmark, and none of them cost you more than the five minutes it took to build the first.

You can also pair a feed with a keyword instead of the blank search: start with a topic — “instructional design,” in quotes for an exact match — then layer the From Member filters on top. Now you’re seeing only your chosen people, talking about only the topic you actually care about.

Check it on a schedule, not a compulsion. The whole point here is breaking the scroll habit, not building it a new home. Once a day, on purpose, beats the general feed on autopilot.

The bigger point

This is a small hack standing in for a bigger habit: deciding, on purpose, what gets your attention instead of letting a feed decide for you. LinkedIn happens to be where this particular trick lives right now. The instinct behind it — curate before you consume — is the same one worth applying everywhere your attention is for sale. Twenty minutes back, every time you open the app, adds up faster than you’d think.