January 13, 2008
Learning Better RSS Management
People who know me know that I have OCD tendencies. These tendencies express themselves a myriad of ways, but my treatment of RSS is one of the most frustrating. I treat RSS with undeserving priority, and this causes two big problems: 1) I’ll stop whatever I’m doing to read, flag, or ‘mark as read’ all new RSS items as they come in, and 2) I’ll go to absurd lengths to ensure I have zero unread items whenever I walk away from a computer. This compulsion has reached the point of being a real problem, and I’m finally taking steps to rectify it. Here’s what I’m doing…
Step One was admitting there was a problem (isn’t that always the first step?). Coming to grips with my problem was the impetus for my “unresolution” of less frivolous media consumption. Having admitted the problem, the next step was coming up with a workable solution.
Step Two was to reorganize and prioritize my feeds. I cut down my RSS subscriptions from ~100 to ~70. I removed the feeds with a low read count, then removed feeds whose content overlapped with another feed’s. So far, I’m not missing much.
After that, I moved away from by-topic organization to personal-importance organization. My the previous system gave all my feeds the same weight, so I always felt the need to check everything. By moving my feeds into specially named folders (“1. Read Me”, “2. Weekenders”, “3. Read Whenever”, etc), I’m able to build priority into the system. If I don’t check everything in the “Weekenders” folder, it’s OK; they’re better suited for weekend reading anyway.
Step Three was to reduce the reader’s update frequency. Previously, my feed reader updated every 15-30 minutes, so there was a constant influx of new items. I changed my reader to update every 2 hours instead, and so far, this is working well.
My system isn’t perfect yet, and I’m proving to myself that old habits truly do die hard, but I can already say that I feel less RSS-related anxiety. And that’s a good thing.
