Simplify

In the past, I’ve been a slave to Bloglines. The little numbers next to each feed taunted me reminding me of yet another area of my life where I was quickly falling behind. No matter how frequently I read, those numbers just kept going up. For some feeds, the number would go up as I was reading (ahem … Boing Boing).

As part of my move towards simplifying the amount of information I consume on any given day, I decided I had to be much more disciplined about what I paid attention to in my news reader.

My first idea was to subscribe to only certain categories for each blog that I read. For example, I read Jeremy Zawodny’s blog for his insights on Yahoo and the web at large, but I’m not so interested in his flying posts. My plan was to subscribe to all of his categories except for those related to flying. But his blog doesn’t offer feeds based on categories. In fact, most blogs I read don’t seem to offer this option.

So I switched tactics. I thought maybe I could find a news reader that will group the posts in a feed by their category, but again no such luck. If anyone knows of such things, please leave a comment with the info.

So I moved on. I started to look at what I was reading and how frequently I needed to read it to keep up. I quickly realized two things. First, I was reading far too many feeds for legacy reasons. Second, because I grouped my feeds by topic (ie. Business, HCI, Sports, News, etc.) and not by my reading habits, I was wasting a lot of time and effort picking and choosing what to read based on the amount of time I had.

To solve both of these problems, I ruthlessly asked the following questions for each feed on my list:

Is the reason I subscribed to this feed still relevant?

If not, I unsubscribed. For example, I subscribed to Search Engine Watch when I worked for a search engine company. I no longer work at that company and while I’m still interested in search, I don’t need to know every little thing that happens in the industry, so I unsubscribed.

Would the ability to do my job suffer if I stopped reading this feed?

I subscribe to many feeds under the guise of staying up-to-date on my industry. This question alone helped to cut out most of what I was reading. If the answer was no and it was for an Internet industry feed, I unsubscribed. For example, I currently work for a social networking company. I was subscribing to Inside Facebook to stay on top of what Facebook was doing. But my company has shifted focus away from general social networking to professional networking. Since I use Facebook and I read Mashable, I don’t really need to subscribe to Inside Facebook. So I unsubscribed.

Am I scanning this feed for targeted updates I could better get elsewhere?

If yes, I unsubscribed. For example, I used to work for a price comparison engine (www.become.com). During that time, I subscribed to Brian Smith’s Comparison Engines blog. But I don’t work for Become anymore and I realized that I mostly kept up on Brian’s blog to see if he wrote about Become. So I unsubscribed from the blog and signed up for a Google News alert for become.com. Less noise, more relevant content.

Do I need to read this feed every day or is weekly good enough?

Here’s where I had to really be honest with myself. Do I need to read the latest and greatest tech news on the day it happens? Or is it okay to be a week behind? Even in the fast-paced Internet industry, for most things I decided it was okay to be a week behind.

i was able to cut my daily blogs down to three.

Is this feed for pure amusement?

There are plenty of feeds that I read merely for personal enjoyment. For example, xkcd, 43 Folders, sports news, etc. The last thing I should be doing is stressing about keeping up with these feeds, so I tossed them into a Whenever folder and only read them when I have a free minute or two for a fun break.

That’s it. As a result, I spend about 15 minutes a day reading blogs instead of an hour or more. Once a week, I spend less than an hour catching up on the weekly news.