‘ve been on a mission the past 6 months or so to organise my life and surrounds a lot more, to eliminate all the excess and crap, and to somewhat head partway toward a more minimalist lifestyle.
This morning, before heading off to see some clients, I decided to give my RSS subscription list a going over as there had been 5 separate occasions in the last week where I declared bankruptcy and marked all as read…..
One of my problems is that I can sometimes get overwhelmed at the sheer number of articles in my reader, I see that big number of 450 or so new articles each morning and think how the hell am I going to get all that read before work!
In reality however, there’s probably only 20 or 30 articles in that bunch that actually are worth reading as there’s all the ‘repeater’ blogs. The repeater blogs are the ones that pretty well publish the exact same news item, press release, product release, event coverage, whatever….your TechCrunch’s, Inquisitrs, Mashable’s, Engadgets, etc.. I think they account for the bulk of my RSS content each day, maybe something around the 90% mark.
First things first it was time to cull the blogs that I regularly DON’T read, so that took care of about 20 different feeds straight away, then came the repeat offenders….err the repeater blogs. So how do you decide who to keep and who to cull, good question. There was no exact science to working out who to ditch out of TechCrunch, The Inquisitr, Mashable, Engadget, ReadWriteWeb, it was more of a gut feeling of who was adding opinions that were more often like mine. In the end I kept Engadget, The Inquisitr, and ReadWriteWeb, they’re just a better fit for me.
After all the culling it was time to better organise what was left, cue some advice from Minimal Mac’s Patrick Rhone on how he handles his RSS feeds. Patrick’s system makes a lot of sense to me, so basically that’s what I adopted.
So how’s it all working? Pretty good so far, a lot easier to actually read the good stuff and I don’t feel as guilty marking things as read now as normally I’ve read the good stuff in my A-List already.
If you’ve got any tips on getting organised, be it in your daily life, work life, around the house, on your computer, wherever else, just share your tips in the comments below.
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