Lightening The Digital Load
It seems like one of the more time consuming things I do these days is read all my RSS feeds. At one point I peaked around 350 feeds on a variety of subjects, and while I love knowing as much as I did, there was so much redundancy and I started to feel overwhelmed when I couldn’t keep the unread count down.
I eventually wiped out a bunch of feed and got the feed count down around 250, but it crept back up over time, and when I checked the count this morning it was back to 297. While I wasn’t as selective as I’d really wish to be, after 20 minutes with Google Reader’s Trend feature I knew which feeds were least updated and which were most verbose.
First, I wiped out all the feeds that hadn’t been updated in a few months. While these weren’t keeping me busy (how could they when there’s nothing there?), it was a mental victory to watch my subscribed feeds count drop.
After that, I looked at where the most articles came from. MeFi, AskMe, CNN, Reuters, and a few others. Most of what was filling my reader was news, and so much of it was repeated news. Not only that, but all the major stuff ended up being discussed on the other blogs I read. AskMe stayed, but the rest were gone.
I mark everything read as I go past it, because I like to have an empty inbox, just like in my email (which I’ll talk about later), so I couldn’t get a good idea of what I actually read and what I just quickly skip past. I do, however, have a pretty good idea of which articles I’m actually reading and which only occasionally pull me in. Removed, removed, removed.
After 20 minutes of cleansing, I’m down to about 180 feeds - still quite high, but much more manageable. Some are one-a-day posts like comics and 365Tomorrows. Some are personal feeds, like photos from my Flickr friends.
This is a small victory, but a good first step on my way to a less cluttered life, online and off.
Update: After lunch, I cleaned up a bit more, and I’m not down to 136 feeds. The next part of the habit to kick? The idea that I need to check if there’s anything new every 20 minutes. Maybe I can even cut back to every few hours, or even once a day? What a thought!
Another Update: At the end of the day, I looked through my feeds a bit more, and I’m now down to 112 feeds. I’m pretty sure that’s the end of the pruning for now. The next test is to see if I feel like I don’t know as much about what’s going on in the world over the next few weeks.