Immersing yourself into the blogosphere and social networks keeps your finger on the pulse and helps you connect with others. A feedreader helps you quickly scan articles, blog entries, and site to keep you updated. However, they can be a time killer and easily overwhelm a person.
My feedreader has over 400 feeds. It wouldn’t sound so bad if each feed contains four to five new entries per week, but some sites post over five entries per day. When feeds feed on your time, how valuable is it?
With numerous high quality sites out there, it’s easy to add feeds and find that your reader has way too many. You don’t want to forget about these sites, but you also know that it’s unrealistic to keep up.
Here are tips to help manage feeds without eating too much time of your day:
- Have a goal in mind before using your feedreader. Are you looking for something to link to and write about in your blog? Do you need an article on a certain topic? When you meet that goal, close the feedreader.
- Organize your feedreader by topic. If you write about geeky topics, it might help to break down topics by sub-topics such as hardware, software, programming, security, etc. Look at the kind of information you need and create categories for those needs so you search fewer feeds. When you need a laugh or a lift, you can refer to feeds categorized under Humor, Fun, or Entertainment.
- Limit the blogs and sites you check regularly. It might help to create a separate folder for regular reads.
- Use a feedreader with a search feature. You can’t have a category for everything, so search helps here.
- Avoid using the feedreader to just surf (unless it’s a slow day and that’s what you want to do). This is a sure way to while away your time.
- Delete useless feeds. If you discover a feed that hardly produces the content you need or want, delete the feed. You have plenty of other good ones.
For sites that provide e-mail updates, I subscribe because they come to me. I can easily delete the e-mail or scan it to see if I should check it out — I make the decision based on my current schedule and to do list for the day. Subscribing to their e-mail feeds reminds me to check the site when I can. Although, this tip might not work well for those who have inbox overwhelm.