How I wasted my morning reading RSS feeds
If you’ve dabbled into anything web 2.0, you know a major plus for aggregating all your social and informational needs is through RSS feeds. We have one too, right here. So how many are you subscribed to, 10? 50? 100? 1000? I actually know some people that have thousands and they just sit there reading them for countless hours like I just did. Don’t.
Many people get the feeling that they “have to read everything or else miss out on something” or there are others who don’t read them for a long time and go on binges of a million posts at a time. Both ways are wrong and waste valuable time.
The idea for RSS feeds was for updates to come to you rather than you refresh at a page for updates. It became a huge convenience for people that track lots of websites but with more information, we feel more compelled to digest all that information. Once again, don’t.
Most if not all RSS readers have this magic little button called “Mark all as read”. If you are the awkward type that have never clicked on this before, what it does is magically clears all your RSS feeds to “read”. Go on, try it now, I promise it’s painless.
When I was away last week I had over 1500 updates stockpiled up and was afraid to let it all go. I thought “oh no, all that valuable information will be lost, all those tips, videos, photos, interesting tidbits… well my life will go on” and magically my RSS reader was clean.
If you still feel uncomfortable getting rid of all your unread feeds, then try a folder management system. Seen in the picture above, I categorize with:
- Daily Read
- Random Updates
- Skim
- Unimportant
~Kevin Xu
i think its actually better if you over-suscribe, that way you wont miss anything; you can just skip the ones you dont want.
I can often spend a full day reading information on teh net, whether it be from my RSS or blog hopping etc. In the end somedays I’ve learnt a lot, others I end up with lots of ideas but most I just end up with sore eyes ;o)
Basically we’re all information-aholics. Ever get stuck on wikipedia or hours? There is just so much information on the net!