I’m Sick of Getting 1000+ Unread Articles a Day!
That’s it. I give up.
I’m sick of constantly getting over 1000+ unread articles in my Google Reader each day.
The great thing about the Internet is that it allows everyone unobtrusive access and opportunity to discover literally millions of content sources all over the world.
And the bad thing about the Internet is that it allows everyone unobtrusive access and opportunity to discover literally millions of content sources all over the world… especially since the number of hours a day we have to consume content remains unchanged.
Follow just one or two “celebrity” bloggers from the Silicon Valley echo chamber, and there goes all your free time after work. If you have TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb or Silicon Alley Insider in your list of feeds, you can kiss your weekends goodbye. And if you subscribed to Louis Gray’s Shared Items feed, your Google Reader is basically toast.
Social media and modern web technology just makes it way too easy to discover dozens of new blogs and feeds to follow every week. The life of an Internet maven has never been tougher than it is now.
So this is it. This calls for something drastic.
No, not as drastic as implementing a scorched earth policy and start from scratch using Toluu (although I did pause and think hard about it). But still drastic enough.
Here are the 10 guidelines which I follow:
- Delete away all of my folders in Google Reader, so all my news feeds are now flat. Having a flat hierarchy helps me place equal importance to each feed, so it’s tougher for me to only read short feeds when I am lacking in time.
- Unsubscribe all of my aggregator feeds, except for TechMeme. So no more Digg, reddit, or Slashdot for me.
- Unsubscribe all of my feeds which contain more advertising than useful content, like Lushhome.
- I look at my Google Reader Trends page, and any feed which produces more than 10 items a day but yet has a read percentage of less than 5% I will discard. Bye bye, Download Squad.
- All of my feeds which contain frivolous content (like The Superficial) are placed it in a folder named “time wasters”. When I lack time to read, these are generally the first to receive the MAAR (Mark All As Read) treatment.
- All of my Google Reader Shared Items feeds are placed in a folder named “recommendations”. When I lack time to read, these are generally the second group to receive the MAAR treatment.
- Configure all of my feeds to display newest posts first (this is the default setting). For folders, I configure it to “auto”. This way, when I do have time to read, I know I will always only be reading the latest news.
- Everyday, I’ll read whatever I can, and at the end of the week on a Sunday night (when news is generally the slowest), I’ll MAAR the rest so I always start out the week with a clean slate.
- If I am really short on time, I’ll only read TechMeme as a proxy of finding out what was important the past week, and MAAR the rest.
- I have a folder named “must read”. These are feeds that are immune to the wrath of MAAR and I will absolutely read every single last article. This group shall never generate more than 50 new articles a day. Currently, this exclusive club of mine only contains the following members: Yawning Bread, My Wang Says So, Futuristic Play, Dosh Dosh, Snopes, TorrentFreak, PhotoshopDisasters, and the feeds for all of my friends in the “Drinking Buddies” list on the right. And yes, PhotoshopDisasters is tagged as both “time wasters” and ” must read” in my system.
My last bit of advice to anyone who may be considering something similar:
Don’t worry about missing out on the really important news.
The nice thing about social media is that if a piece of news is important enough, somehow it will always bubble up and present itself to you, even if you don’t read it first hand in your Google Reader. Somehow, it will find a way to manifest itself in your FriendFeed network, your Twitter stream, or in an obscure comment in some guy’s blog post which you read three weeks later.
So how do you tame your Google Reader?
Woah. 1000+ unreads are surely a huge number. Though one thing I do is to keep my follows on Twitter. Meaning I read those articles that come to Twitter first.
Good to hear your strategy on combating the wealth of great content over on the web. Lol.
Daniel
I follow #5 and #10 myself. Categorising by priority helps to focus what to read and which can be MAAR-ed. Good tips!
@Daniel – Yeah, 1000+ is really insane, and impossible to keep up with. Now that I’ve removed all of my aggregator feeds, it’s down to a much more manageable few hundred a day.
And your comment about Twitter is a good point. Usually, if the news is important enough and coming from people that are interesting enough for me to follow on Twitter, I will generally see it and read it from Twitter first, even before getting to Google Reader.
The beauty of social media is that there is more than one channel to get the word around.
@Daryl – Thanks, Daryl. Sometimes I wish that Google Reader had a function which allows you to MAAR everything except for the currently selected folder or feed.
(Of course, the obvious workaround is to categorize your non-”must read” feeds into a folder of its own so you can MAAR it at will, but somehow that just doesn’t appeal to me as an elegant solution. Maybe I’m just anal.)