Darren R Hill

‘Time is an illusion, lunchtime, doubly so’ Douglas Adams

And time is our most vital resource. I recently realised that I was wasting too much time on keeping up with various RSS feeds. The ability to have the latest posts from my favourite sites arrive in one place is great, the downside is that it can take ages to wade through everything that arrives. I needed to sort things out and make sure I got the information, without the wasted time. So I set about finding a solution. I’m now handling my RSS feed once a day and taking only 10 minutes to do it. These are the simple rules I followed.

Set a time – you could sit with the your reader open on your desktop or smartphone constantly being updated. You’ll never miss a thing and you’ll know exactly what is going on. You’ll also get nothing else done. I now set aside 10 minutes a day to go through my reader. At any other point in the day, my browser will only be open for more productive activities like farmville Nozbe.

Scan headlines -I use google reader and the ‘n’ button has become my friend. This takes me from one post to the next. Some of the feeds I follow have a lot of posts, well over a hundred a day, so to be able to skip to the next post at the touch of a button is wonderful. Once I got into the habit of doing this I found I often hit the n before I realised that the headline was worth following up. Thankfully google had already thought of that and added a previous keyboard shortcut. And they have some more shortcuts that come in quite handy here.

Divide your feeds – google allows you to divide your feeds into folders, more than one folder in fact. This enables me to separate work related fields, news and  friends’ personal blog feeds and so on. Now, depending on my context, I only need to scan through the relevant folders.

Do not fear ‘Mark all as read’ – I used to live in fear that I would miss a really important post on the net. I had to see everything as soon as it was published. But when I realised that some of the stuff I was retweeting was being retweeted by others and even reblogged by others, I began to lose, or take control of that fear. Now, if I don’t have the time to go through my feeds I will happily click the ‘mark all as read’ button. If there is anything important that I miss it will appear again in another stream or I’ll pick it up via twitter, it may even appear in the same stream at a later date.

Read later – Depending on time I can either quickly read the article there and then, or more likely save it for my specific ‘reading time’. This can be done by simply starring the article and leaving it there. However, I prefer to keep my feed reader as clear as possible, so I open the article, which checks that it actually exists, and then, add it to Instapaper. There is a handy little bookmarklet to drag to your toolbar to do this. The article is then stored for a time when it can be read… or deleted as irrelevant.

By scanning my separate RSS folders, I am able to go through the list in about 10 minutes, saving any articles I wish to read. If I don’t manage to get through the list in the time allocated, I hit the ‘mark as read’ button and close the browser window, safe in the knowledge that what is important will resurface again.

Now what can I do with all that spare time?