Plugging the RSS time-sink

RSS feeds can be an easy way of saving time – subscribe to your favourite sites feeds and you’ll always know when they’ve been updated without having to check them individually. I’ll explain a great way of reading your feeds using the online Google Reader which ensures you read the most important articles whilst saving you from going through every article.

The problem – there’s too much information in your feeds

A common problem can occur as people add more and more feeds, they start to be bombarded with information. If you see the feeds as they come in using a notifier, the problem could become as annoying as the old email problem. You end up with a massive time sink, and far too much information than can be easily processed.

You might have some of the following issues:

• you find yourself reading posts for hours each day
• you panic when you get back from holiday and find over 1000 posts to wade through
• you worry about missing something important so don’t want to skip any feeds

The solution – apply some GTD style rules to manage your feeds

This is the solution I’ve come up with, it can help you achieve the following:

• reduce the time you spend reading feeds
• increase the number of relevant articles you read
• share the most useful feeds with your friends

1 – Use Google Reader to manage your feeds

I recommend signing up to Google Reader if you don’t already use it.

Here are a few of the benefits:

• Google Reader lets you check your feeds from anywhere, you’re not tied to the desktop
• Google Reader lets you easily apply all the rules described here
• Google Reader allows you to easily import existing feeds to test it out, and export them again if you change your mind

So give it a try, at least for the purposes of this tutorial. If you really don’t want to, you’ll still be able to use the principles of the next steps.

2 – Pick a regular time to check your feeds each week and limit the time you allocate

Check your feeds once a week. That’s it. I know this is radical, and it might not match your needs, but the amount of time I’ve saved from doing this is huge. When I check them I allocate 3 hours, and when the time is up I’m done.

You may feel once a week is too little, but I would urge you to try it just once. Its true, you might miss something important, but someone else will probably mention it soon enough and if its that important you’ll hear about it then.

If you really must check every day, ensure you allocate a limit, say 20 mins a day, or 1 hour every 3 days. The important thing is to create a plan and stick to it. No more checking every hour, no more 6 hour sessions reading pointless articles.

Choose your time, choose the length, try to keep it short, and move on to step 3.

3 – Go through the post titles and mark the articles that interest you

When you’re ready to check your feeds do the following:

1. Minimise the posts so you can only see the post titles – in google reader this is the ‘list view’
2. Go through each feed in turn, adding a star to the posts you think might interest you – be selective, you can’t read everything
3. When you have marked all the feeds, mark the entire lot as read.
4. Now go to your starred folder, although the posts will be marked as read, they will still appear in here

Now you have a group of posts that interest you, its time to start reading.

4 – Read your marked posts, most important first, until your time is up

Work out how much time you’ve got left. That is how long you have to read your articles. You have to read the most important ones first, otherwise you might run out of time!

When you finish each article do the following:

• think about sharing the article with your friends – in Google Reader you can click the share button
• remove the star from the article

When the time is up, either remove the stars from the remaining items, or leave them there for next time. There might have been some less interesting articles that week.

5 – Your done, move on, life’s too short

You’ve finished for the week. Next week there will be lots more to read. Stop and continue your work.

Its now 4PM on a Wednesday, so I’m going to spend 2 hours reading my feeds. Catch you next month.

By Mark Kirky

image by Orin Optiglot

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