I just put a hurtin’ on my Google Reader list. I was following 40 sites. Now I’m down to 22. There’s a ton of information on news sites, blogs etc. that you can follow but ultimately does it enrich your life? Or do you find yourself spending lots of time trying to catch up on unread entries that you skim past at best?
I found myself in the latter situation, so I started dropping feeds, people, and even entire categories that I’m not really focused on anymore. Cutting my number of followed sites by 45% is going to give me about 80% less content to filter through, but the remaining 55% of sites I’m still following provide most of the value anyway (deeper news analysis, friends, etc.).
Something I’m learning about myself: analysis breeds paralysis. For most things I need to know just enough to make a decision on it; any more is likely to leave me spinning my wheels in place. I’m not doing this because of some need to be productive. I just want to sharpen my mind a little more and I can’t do that when I’m tempted to graze and skim on information a few times a day. I’m already down to twice a day for email, the feed reduction should help too.
3 Comments
And I’m increasing my intake… up to 140ish feeds I’m subscribed to. For some reason I think I feel the crunch a bit less than I used to. I unsubscribed from the diggs or the Slashdots, just because they were putting out way too many stories to track.
Part of it is likely that I can get my feeds on the go (via Newsgator’s iPhone app), and it turns out that I have a lot of downtime (waiting to get seated, waiting for whatever, etc.) Just takes a couple moments to stay up-to-date, and I only lose out on time that would be dead to me anyway.
Zach, I get that and it’s why I use google reader too. But I found a lot of duplication in the stories covered, like 3-4 sites on the same thing with nothing new to say. I’m getting most of the information I had before in a lot less time. I’m okay with missing some of the smaller stuff I might have otherwise caught; if the news is important enough it will make its way to me.
Perhaps it’s a different strategy in analyzing then. I tend to use the sponge technique… I like getting some repeats in stories, as it’s a helpful prod that says “look at me! I’m an important story!” I figure if people are talking about it more, it should be worth my while. (Though that sounds similar to what you commented on, albeit on the smaller scale.)