Excellent question! For starters, I don't come in at the Gates, I come in at Newest Nodes; then I hit last hour of cb. Secondly, I have my Nodelet Settings and Display Settings configured such that I see everything else I care about at one glance: any new messages in my inbox, any changes to the various Cabal wikis, any new patches from pmdev... Once I've checked all those, I head into the chatterbox to join in the fray.