My RSS Strategy

Jacqui Cheng wrote a post about how RSS could be poisonous for productivity, and then Marco Arment wrote a story explaining how he gets around the issues with RSS that plague Jacqui.

I think I agree with both in many aspects, but I’ve grown fond of my RSS following technique. It takes a little work, but the end result is that you can keep tabs on the interesting things without going crazy or not getting anything done.

I have found that there are a few distinct styles of blog/news site out there, and that by grouping them and treating them differently I can pay attention to the interesting things much more easily. For blogs like Daring Fireball, The Brooks Review or other sites that post a few links per day with a little commentary, I put those in an “Analysis” folder in Google Reader. I also put sites like Marco Arment’s blog and Asymco in there; though they post a lot less frequently - once or twice a week - the articles are longer to make up for it, so there is the same amount of interesting content overall.

I try to read every one of those articles, and if I don’t have time I save them for later. This is in contrast to the next folder, the one with Engadget, Ars Technica and This Is My Next - I quickly skim through those articles with Reeder and occasionally read the interesting ones. This folder, I have no qualms about hitting Mark All As Read if I’m pressed for time, because these feeds are full of uninteresting content most of the time that I probably don’t need to read.

I do tend to whip through that one more often, however - that way I know if interesting stuff has occurred in case someone asks me about it later. I save Analysis blogs for later, when I have time, but I read every article in it.

In addition, I have folders for web comics (“Funnies”), people who blog about random everyday things in life, real-life friends, old university organization feeds that I still follow a bit, and so on. These ones I tend to read only when I have free time, but I don’t skip through them very often.

The result? I keep up to date and read all the interesting opinions/ideas while not interfering with anything I need to do. One more thing I do is only using my iPad for feed reading, because it leaves my work computer clean of anything that might distract me, at least with RSS.