Comments on: rss overload

By: David Carlton

David Carlton — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:43:00 +0000

Thanks for the recommendation – This American Life-style goodness that only takes up 15 minutes a week sounds great to me!

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:00:55 +0000

It’s about consumption, right? You want quality over quantity, but it’s easy to feel left behind if you don’t keep up with everything. At least, that’s how it works for me from time to time. These periods of reflection and purging are good. For the most part you’ll find that you don’t even think about some of the sites and podcasts you left behind.

That said, you can also listen to podcasts at 2x speed. ;)

Oh, and if This American Life is still on your ‘must listen’ list, you should totally be listening to the Moth. It’s ~15 minutes an episode, once a week and is very similar to TAL. I highly recommend it. I actually look forward to it more than TAL.

By: Stuart Marks

Stuart Marks — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:57:28 +0000

I find that I don’t have time for podcasts. I’ve tried subscribing a few times but I’ve never managed to keep up. The amount of information per unit time is just too low.

On the other hand I have nearly 200 RSS feeds in my reader. This is probably too many, and I probably spend too much time on it. However one thing that has helped is that I’ve recently set my reader (NetNewsWire) to update its feeds only manually. I’ve found that when new items spontaneously appear I tend to read them compulsively. Now I update once in the morning and read a while, and then read here and there throughout the day. This is more satisfying because I feel like I’m actually making progress instead of just treading water. Also, if I ever get behind, I’ll skim the subject lines and then “mark all read”. I never actually get the number of unread articles down to zero, but this way it does end up somewhat lower.

Probably chunking your feed reading time to a couple specific times a week or even once a day will help.

By: Denis

Denis — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:28:53 +0000

I do not even bother keeping absolutely up-to-date on the blogs I read anymore; typically, I’ll look at the headline, see if it’s of interest to me right now. If not, I’ll contemplate whether I’d like to come back to it (for instance, if it’s about a game people are playing that I have not; a social issue on which I haven’t fully educated myself; et cetera), and then favorite it and demark it once I get back to it.

The moment I stopped feeling guilt for having a reader with numbers in it, rather than being blank, the more I realized I can pick and choose at leisure what I want to accomplish in reading.

Unfortunately, I rarely listen to Podcasts these days, and only when playing some game that doesn’t require much thought (e.g. Torchlight or Diablo 2).