I am a big proponent of the RSS feed. Although it is not as popular as twitter or facebook, it is a great way to not miss an interesting article on a website that you may or may mot visit regularly. If you do not use it, I would highly recommend Google Reader to keep a track of websites that you like. There are others too, but being a google fan, I haven't tried them. I promise you, you will learn more about things you are passionate about than when you spend time on facebook, and you will never need to worry about missing a feed!
I have been curating my RSS feed from since my time at my undergrad. Its been 4 long years, and over the time I have accumulated a lot of feeds. I used to try trim the number of feeds once in a while, to the extent that I am really proud of my colelcted curation - and needless to say, very attached to it.
While at CMU, I absolutely didn't have time to read, however I still managed to keep up with my favorites. After CMU, I have been into a lot of stuff, including Design, Creativity, Marketing, Advertising, Tech, Startups, News from India included. And the Reader has been a faithful pet, getting to me on a digital platter, all of it..
Now for the problem.
Over a month back, I realized my RSS feed has become an addiction. I was subscribed to over 140 feeds at a point, getting over a 200 articles posted in my reader everyday! That is an incredible overload. Even at 2 articles a minute, I needed to spend close to 2 hours everyday just to not drown under the flood of feeds. On an occasional day, when I missed catching up, it was even worse. And the times when I traveled, there was simply no way I could catch up on the 1000+ unread articles by the time I got back. For such times, there was always the quick route of marking all articles as 'read'. Doing this felt really horrible. I felt like I needed to not miss stuff - its like trying to read all the newspapers for the past fortnight in one go.
Drowning under this weight, I hardly got any time to do anything else. I have a bunch of pictures from over 2 years that need processing, sharing etc. I sorely need to exercise, I rarely update this blog and I have no time to learn new things in depth. And that sucks!
So I decided to target getting down my feeds to a 100 for a start. I got there only last week, gut-wrenched to see some of the stuff I really enjoyed reading. However, if I really have to, I can always head over to those websites. A lot of these feeds posted more than 1 item everyday - and still sneaked in through my no-more-than-10-articles-per-day rule. These had to go.
After getting down to a 100, my next target is 50 feeds. This one is even harder, considering that a lot of the feeds now are my friends' blogs, or webcomics, which usually post only 1 article/day or lesser. I am almost halfway to my new target - down to 76, and I already feel better. This time however, I did not completely remove these sites from my life - I pushed them off to my twitter feed.
The twitter feed is way faster than the reader, but it doesn't show me 'unread' items, which means that I can dip in whenever I feel like it, and not have the 'unread' guilt hanging over my head. That way, presumably I can skim through more stuff.
The high-nosed may scoff that twitter has been around for a while and I should have known this before. I admit that I didn't / don't still get twitter. I hate the fact that I can miss reading something of value. However, I am ready to experiment with it for now. From now on, lots of feeds which post a lot, but in which I read only a few articles - i.e. have a low signal-to-noise ratio will have to go to twitter. The reader would continue to be a place where I add friends, and webcomics and a host of other stuff that doesn't update that often. I guess I would miss a few things, but this would make my reader much easier to clean, make twitter much more relevant to me, and my life uncluttered, happier and more hopefully more creative. In some ways, these would be two separate news providers for me. Twitter carrying the sensational, in the news stuff, while the Reader can continue to be the editorial page - to be read carefully and enjoyed.
Inspired by:
Zen Habits
Chris Brogan - who unsubscribed from over the 100,000+ people he was following on twitter.
Sidenote: Now that I am pushing more things on to twitter, I wonder if I will get to a point where my feed there gets overloaded.. So much so that I can't track it! I guess I will handle this problem when it comes to that.
I have been curating my RSS feed from since my time at my undergrad. Its been 4 long years, and over the time I have accumulated a lot of feeds. I used to try trim the number of feeds once in a while, to the extent that I am really proud of my colelcted curation - and needless to say, very attached to it.
While at CMU, I absolutely didn't have time to read, however I still managed to keep up with my favorites. After CMU, I have been into a lot of stuff, including Design, Creativity, Marketing, Advertising, Tech, Startups, News from India included. And the Reader has been a faithful pet, getting to me on a digital platter, all of it..
Now for the problem.
Over a month back, I realized my RSS feed has become an addiction. I was subscribed to over 140 feeds at a point, getting over a 200 articles posted in my reader everyday! That is an incredible overload. Even at 2 articles a minute, I needed to spend close to 2 hours everyday just to not drown under the flood of feeds. On an occasional day, when I missed catching up, it was even worse. And the times when I traveled, there was simply no way I could catch up on the 1000+ unread articles by the time I got back. For such times, there was always the quick route of marking all articles as 'read'. Doing this felt really horrible. I felt like I needed to not miss stuff - its like trying to read all the newspapers for the past fortnight in one go.
Drowning under this weight, I hardly got any time to do anything else. I have a bunch of pictures from over 2 years that need processing, sharing etc. I sorely need to exercise, I rarely update this blog and I have no time to learn new things in depth. And that sucks!
So I decided to target getting down my feeds to a 100 for a start. I got there only last week, gut-wrenched to see some of the stuff I really enjoyed reading. However, if I really have to, I can always head over to those websites. A lot of these feeds posted more than 1 item everyday - and still sneaked in through my no-more-than-10-articles-per-day rule. These had to go.
After getting down to a 100, my next target is 50 feeds. This one is even harder, considering that a lot of the feeds now are my friends' blogs, or webcomics, which usually post only 1 article/day or lesser. I am almost halfway to my new target - down to 76, and I already feel better. This time however, I did not completely remove these sites from my life - I pushed them off to my twitter feed.
The twitter feed is way faster than the reader, but it doesn't show me 'unread' items, which means that I can dip in whenever I feel like it, and not have the 'unread' guilt hanging over my head. That way, presumably I can skim through more stuff.
The high-nosed may scoff that twitter has been around for a while and I should have known this before. I admit that I didn't / don't still get twitter. I hate the fact that I can miss reading something of value. However, I am ready to experiment with it for now. From now on, lots of feeds which post a lot, but in which I read only a few articles - i.e. have a low signal-to-noise ratio will have to go to twitter. The reader would continue to be a place where I add friends, and webcomics and a host of other stuff that doesn't update that often. I guess I would miss a few things, but this would make my reader much easier to clean, make twitter much more relevant to me, and my life uncluttered, happier and more hopefully more creative. In some ways, these would be two separate news providers for me. Twitter carrying the sensational, in the news stuff, while the Reader can continue to be the editorial page - to be read carefully and enjoyed.
Inspired by:
Zen Habits
Chris Brogan - who unsubscribed from over the 100,000+ people he was following on twitter.
Sidenote: Now that I am pushing more things on to twitter, I wonder if I will get to a point where my feed there gets overloaded.. So much so that I can't track it! I guess I will handle this problem when it comes to that.
