Well I was out all last week on vacation. It was very nice and I didn’t use a computer once; except for a slot machine. But now I’m back and my feed reader is overloaded with hundreds of unread posts. How does one catch up?
My thoughts are this:
- Spend a couple hours reading though them.
- Spend an hour quickly scanning them and not really reading anything.
- Mark all as read and just start fresh.
- Spend the next week or two catching up on a few feeds at a time.
- Multi Task by reading feeds and watching American Idol at the same time. (ha ha)
Now I love the information in each feed, but when someone misses a few days, the unread count can be overwhelming. So much that I avoided them all together yesterday.
Have any tips or thoughts on how to handle feed overload?
[tags]feed,rss,feed-reader[/tags]
Do the scan option, but add a star to the ones you want to read. After you got it down, go back get a nice mocha or your drink of choose and read the ones you were most interested in. Make it fun, smile….breathe…..
Reading them all is best, but usually not practical. I say scan slowly, so you can catch the really interesting stuff… don’t want to miss that. Marking them all as read is a bad idea for sure, and you’ll miss something that you wish you hadn’t.
When I can’t keep up with my feeds I skim through and bookmark the one’s that look like ‘pillar’ posts. Then go back and read them when I have time.
Have you thought about slimming down your RSS list?
There has only been once or twice when I ‘marked all as read’.
I didn’t like to do it, I guess I’ve got into a habit of checking everything, not wanting to miss something.
At the end of the day, look at the bigger picture. There’s more to life.
I agree with Mr. Airey, the paranoia of missing something ‘good’ makes it quite difficult to mark all as read. Personally, I’ve gone through my ‘Blogs of Note’ folder (which contain the blogs worth reading regularily), and I’ve dropped in a sub-folder that is ‘Best of the Best’ where I limit it to 10 spots. These 10 are the ones that get read first, before anything else – yes, I’m going to be excited about BMW’s new M series, but that has to wait, I have to read X first…
Now, if I find a blog that is REALLY good, I then have to decide which one gets the boot out to the sea of ‘Blogs of Note’. The top 10 are also fluid and can change from week to week, and limiting it to a set number means you can quickly get in, read the best stuff, and get out when your time is limited.
When it comes to the hundreds of posts that seem to rack up within minutes, I have my program display just the titles of each post. Then a quick scan for something that catches my eye (let instinct do the work and it usually picks about 1 in 10-15), open those posts, then mark the rest read.
Just my $0.02 worth.. 😉
Thanks for all the feedback. I won’t be marking all as read, instead I’m picking them off a few at a time. I’ve made some good progress in the past 24 hours but have a ways to go.
One of mine, Search Engine Land, I can basically mark all as read as I listen to the Daily Search Cast as I work so I’ve been catching up on that via the podcast. That helps.
@ Shawn – Have you thought about slimming down your RSS list? – Yes I have thought of that, but not acted upon. 🙂