Overloaded: How Do You Manage Feeds?
November through January have been extremely busy months for me. I have had some sort of personal, professional, or family obligation just about every weekend and things on weeknights as well. Additionally, I’ve been juggling a lot more freelance work than I normally take on. My housekeeping has fallen behind, I haven’t played any of the new video games we got for Christmas, and I haven’t had time to read but one book in my stack. In fact, the only personal/home related things I’ve been able to accomplish in these two months are copious amounts of laundry, and reorganizing my record collection.
With all these “real world” commitments it comes as no surprise that I’ve been having a lot of trouble keeping up with my feeds. (Not to mention I haven’t been able to live up to my one real, as in not link dump, blog post per weekday pledge.) I used to manage all the sites I read with del.icio.us. I tagged some as daily, some as weekly and some as monthly. But I found myself never visiting the weekly and monthly tags, and it was difficult for me to keep track of sites that were never updated and remove them. I’ve switched to Google reader, because I check feeds both at home and work so syncing feeds between desktop readers would be nearly impossible.
I’m up to 241 feeds, which seemed pretty high to me since most of the people I converse with regularly online only follow about 50 or so, but the authors of a lot of blogs I read follow 1,000+ feeds. I’m overwhelmed to say the least. I’ve got a rudimentary organization structure, with folders for always, sometimes, rarely, music, food and pending. I need to make a folder for sites that are just link rolls, and a folder for sites like Mental Floss and Neatorama, which are fun reads but never require immediate attention.
The always, sometimes and rarely folders aren’t really working out for me. If I’m out of the office on a weekday, I come back to 2,000 or so posts, and I end up marking half of them as read without actually reading them. I need a better system for distinguishing things I want to read every time they’re updated, things I don’t really care about but are fun to read while I eat lunch, web development and professional blogs that offer information I can translate into tangible techniques and results in the workplace, and everything else. I’ve also started to feel this bizarre disconnect from a lot of the sites I follow as a result of digesting them in the clean, white Google reader template. For some sites this is a blessing, because everyone has different ideas about what constitutes readability, but for others I really miss inspecting the design, and seeing how people choose to present information.
On top of all of the feeds, there’s my Twitter stream which even though I only follow about 40 people has become a complete beast. I like to keep up on it since it’s most up to date for people I actually know and care about what’s going on with them. (Like when they get sick and that sort of thing.) Abandoning most of the feeds doesn’t really seem like an option. Working on the web requires adaptability and intense knowledge of current trends and new technologies. So how do you manage all the incoming information? Do you only read the essential stuff? Do you have a complex set of filters in your feed reader? Do you only check your feeds once a week and skim? How do you divide the essential and non-essential? Do you instead receive your feeds as some type of email digest?
I actually don’t use a feed reader. I have all of my “must reads” linked in categories (tabs) on my iGoogle page, and through there, I can link through to all my other usual reads.
I also rely heavily onthe lazy web. Meaning if someone writes a stellar article somewhere, at least one of my must reads will link to it and I’ll find it. It’s not perfect but I’ve yet to be overwhelmed with unread stuff like I keeping other people saying they are.
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, I really prefer reading in a site than through a feedreader as the author intended it to be read (like you mentioned).
I also have a set pattern of what sites I read in a particular order and when every day, but we won’t get into my obsessiveness
I’m kind of in the same place, but I think I have a few tips that can help.
I’ve divided up my feeds into categories. I tried doing it by frequency like you have, but I always just assumed that the rarely and sometimes stuff can be ignored. I never read them. So, I deleted them.
I now have things split up according to topic. My focus shifts from week-to-week depending upon my work duties (which are quite varied) and what’s going on personally. For instance, I have a folder with all feeds from people I’ve met at the CWSA, one for “Fun & Entertainment”, one for Web Design/Development, and one for System Administration.
I tried to use Google Reader, but I just can’t. I like being able to handle my feed posts as e-mails. I use Viena, which is free and opensource. However, I don’t get to see the site design. I like it because I can quickly scan the titles and delete whatever I don’t want to read.
Anyway, I guess if you find the secret, you’ll have to let us all know what it is!