RSS, while a great way to pull content from several places to one single application, off late is becoming a burden for most people. RSS, kind of becomes a habit and one keeps adding plenty of feeds to the already overflowing reader. For example, it almost takes one full day to finish all the news that are consolidated by my feed reader. Many people take pride in saying that they have 400+ feeds subscribed in their favorite reader application!
Here are some of the ways to optimize your time spent on your RSS reader.
- Unless you are a journalist or a professional blogger, you don't really need to keep your RSS window open all the time. Fix a predetermined time when you browse all your news. Make it a habit like newspaper reading - You spend some time in the morning and then forget about the paper for the rest of the day.
- Use Trends. If you are using Google Reader, there is a very useful feature called trends. This shows the reading habits of you. Make the top 40 list and seriously consider removing the feeds which you have not read in the last one month.
- Subscribe to highlights rather than full feeds. Many websites offer highlight feeds, rather than full feeds. Highlight feeds are usually sent only once per day and is a selection of best stories of the day. Great way to reduce lot of unwanted content.
- Categorize your feeds into daily, weekly and monthly. Instead of categorizing feeds as sports, technology, gadgets etc., I classify them as daily, weekly and monthly based on how often the authors update and how important a feed is. You then access the feeds under those folders only once in a day, week or month. I did this change recently and is working out very well for me.
If you have any other suggestions, you can leave them in comments below.
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