As the year winds down, the blogosphere overflows with nostrums on GTD (Getting Things Done) and plans for doing better next year. Life Hacker Gina Trapani’s new book offers 88 tricks to turbocharge your day. The book’s on the web & free. If that’s not sufficient to turbocharge your day, permit me to offer #89.
Feed readers, or aggregators, enable one to peruse headlines or summaries of blog postings before plunging in to read an entire post. This was a great time-saver when it came out six years ago. Now there are a hundred times more blogs. Keeping up with professional interests has become a time-consuming chore. I’ve found it useful to separate my RSS feeds into “must read,” “read when time permits,” and “read when time is plentiful.”
When time is scarce, there are nine blogs I read, no matter what. (Three of these belong to me and my son.) FeedBlitz pushes these into my email inbox daily.
Several times a week, I check in on twenty thought leaders. They are my inspiration. I keep the feeds to their URLs in SpeedyFeed. I can scan headlines — or hover over a topic to receive a pop-up with a summary of a particular post. Here’s a single pane of my 3×7 sets of SpeedyFeeds:
More obscure topics find a home at Rojo, a free, collaborative bookmarking service. I’m just getting into this one. I had been using SuprGlu. In fact, I had three SuprGlu accounts, broken out by subject matter. Unforntunately, SuprGlu appears to be kaput.
When I feel like a less regimented approach, I’ll drop by del.icio.us. I bookmark things I want to follow for a while before deciding whether to move them up a notch in my RSS hierarchy.
For most of 2006, I’ve used a free RSS reader from Adam Bosworth that presents feeds in a “river of news” format: very pleasant for ambling through the feeds at a leisurely pace. This is linked from the home page at Internet Time.
Update:
This morning I came upon an interesting post in the Software Abstractions Blog that says what I was trying to say a whole lot better, e.g.
6 comments ↓
Dear Jay,
I use a similar method but all within one newsreader by tagging the feeds. That way I am able to read them according to their importance.
I explained that here too:
http://itligenz.twoday.net/stories/3100351/
Doing it that way is more practical in my point of view since I am able to have a variety of parallel categorisation systems (importance, subject, posting frequency, …).
Best wishes
Andreas
I was amused by your posting of Gina’s posting. In particular, I loved that she reads her family’s blogs - clearly this saves a lot more time than actually doing something like having dinner with them.
I quit reading all blogs back in 2004 for 4 months and never went back to reading them regularly again. I found nothing changed in my life, except I had more time.
In particular I noticed a couple of things - There is really nothing on a blog I need today that really can’t wait until I need to Google it. And most writers are, well, not writers.(Sort of like most people who put up web pages back in the 90’s weren’t really web developers). Great for families, friends, and people with too much time on their hands trying to be “busy”.
Think I’ll try to meet Gina for coffee sometime
[...] On the last day of 2006, I posted an article entitled RSS Triage explaining that I used one aggregator for must-read blogs, another for subject-matter blogs, and yet another for entertainment or time-permitting perusal. A fellow named Andreas Weinberger commented with a better solution: put all the RSS feeds into Google Reader and tag them by both priority and subject matter. [...]
personal information workflow…
Last week I helped Jay Cross (#1, #2) to improve his own personal workflow by showing him how to categorize newsfeeds by tagging them with Google Reader.
This partial Mindmanager-map of my own personal information workflow shows how I use tagging to p…
Dear Jay,
a collegue of mine made a diagram (that I scribbled on paper) into a very nice picture.
It shows the categorization of the incoming information.
Take a look for yourself and feel free to use it if it is useful for you too:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/oandreas/390072640/
Regulating your ‘River of Information’…
Dave Winer coined the phrase ‘River of News’ to describe a way of reading newsfeeds. In February 2005 he wrote “…. It’s like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. …” and he was right. Putting all your feeds in Google Reader…
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