I think a lot about productivity, managing energy, time, etc. A big part of this is my information intake of which my RSS reader is a meaty (though not the biggest) portion.
I have a lot of theories around this. One of them has to do with temporality. For example, today on the bike I read The Economist instead of HBR or Harper’s because I know the Economist is relevant this week and may be less relevant in a few weeks. I will be awake for about 11 more hours today (Sunday) and I will be working for probably 9 of them. There are many things I simply need to get done today. If I start to drift into stuff not relevant or necessary for my work today and tomorrow, I will try to re-focus. Of course, this approach needs to be balanced with long-term projects, deep thinking, books, etc.
My RSS reader, though, has not until now been structured like this. All my 280 feeds have been in one giant folder and a few times a day I scroll through my New Items folder. Sometimes I would stop and slow down, since a couple dozen warrant close reading of each and every post. Others I skim quickly. Some things I need to read now, others I could read in a week and still be OK. So I reorganized my feeds into four folders:
"Mass" is for high volume feeds that I must skim to keep up. I will only read Medium and Low feeds once every two days. High Priority I will read several times a day.
Damn Ben, once again you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve got to do this.
Good idea its a pity that Feeddemon doesnt easily do this, eg assign a ‘priority’ to each feed and wether you want it full, extract or headline. Which reader do you use?.