Dr. RSS or: How I Learned to Stop Reading Everything and Love the Aggregator
Feel like you’re buried underneath your reading list? Too many blogs to read and not enough time to do it? Read on:
When I first started toying around with RSS feeds & Google Reader (and up until this week) it has felt like a never-ending battle or chore for me to empty out all the posts there. Two things kind of hit me that caused me to change how I read my subscriptions:
- When the Reader team added a link to the Trends page on the main Reader interface
- When Leo at zenhabits put up his post on “How to Drop an RSS Feed Like a Bad Habit”
I had looked at the Reader Trends page before when it debuted in January, but I never really paid it much mind. After Leo’s post, I decided go back and give it another look, and I asked myself, why would they implement a feature like this when people (meaning myself) just go and read straight through their feeds in the Expanded View? Then I realized, that a lot of people don’t do that and it had never occurred to me. We can read our feeds the way we read newspapers - who actually sits there and reads the Sunday New York Times cover to cover?
We read through the paper looking for stories that are interesting to us, we don’t (or probably shouldn’t) read through the newspaper cover to cover because it is there. It is okay to have content sitting there in Reader! Our RSS aggregators are not our Inboxes (GTD or otherwise), what do we gain from having an empty feed reader?
Now I have implemented a couple of tricks to make feed reading more pleasurable and less of a chore.
- Take my favorite feeds and tag them together (under their own category). Now, I don’t have to sift through my Tier Two feeds to get to the ones I am really interested in. Added bonus: If you go to Settings->Preferences and Change your Start Page to this new tag, you’ll go straight to that group when you start Reader
- List View! Expanded View forces you to scroll through content that you might not otherwise read, just to get to the next post that you may or may not want to read as well. Now I use keyboard shortcuts (when I remember them) to go through and directly open up all of the content that I want to read in tabs
- Leave stuff in Reader! If nothing else, it is something to look forward to the next time you come back to Reader. Trust me, it will still be there when you come back. Also, it is not very fulfilling to read everything on the Net.
Just a little bit of discipline can help make your RSS experience that much more pleasurable and you will still be able to get your fix.
Note: You can also use this when you have email lists that you are on; think about it, what do you gain from having read all those emails as soon as they come in? Set up your email client to filter those automated emails away from your main inbox(es) and read them when you want to, not when they tell you to. Also, having all those unread emails is an ego booster, it says you’ve got more important things to do than read those daily emails from (insert e-store or mailing list here).
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