Three Tips on Tackling RSS
Three months ago, I put together a blog post that discussed the benefits and drawbacks of living without RSS, based on my own personal experience. After writing that post, I actually returned to my old ways and fired up Reeder once again. However, I embarked on a mission to extract the benefits of RSS while avoiding the pitfalls. Would I be able to get that smooth, consistent news-reading experience that RSS offers while still avoiding the stress that comes from having hundreds of unread stories to sift through? Ultimately, I found that while there is no perfect solution, and while the process of manually curating stories will always have a few advantages over RSS, there are three simple rules that you can follow in order to make RSS reading a less stressful experience.
1. Purge articles regularly: This one might be a little hard to accept at first. One of the big advantages of RSS is in its ability to give us an exhaustive list of every article on a given website. Some websites have layouts that are so counter-intuitive that the overlooking of important articles is almost an inevitability, and from that perspective, RSS seems like a great way to prevent that from happening. However, I have ultimately come to the realization that you simply cannot have it all unless you are willing to sacrifice your time and your sanity in order sift through hundreds of irrelevant stories in order to find the gems. If you want to avoid the stress that comes with curating an RSS feed, the best thing you can do is to set up a schedule for purging stories. For myself, I perform the purge once a week. Every week on Sunday evening (because I have nothing more exciting to do on Sunday evening), I take one final dive into my list of unread stores, and then I hit that “mark all as read” button in Reeder. In that one instant, hundreds of unread articles are obliterated, never receiving a chance to see the light of day (unless somebody tweets one of them). Essentially, this allows me to start the next week completely fresh, and it also allows me to deal with a list of feeds that never contains an overwhelming amount of articles (this past week was something of an exception, since all of the CES-related news pushed a ridiculous amount of detritus onto my plate).
2. Use a “read later” service: This is probably the most obvious suggestion of the three, but it’s important enough to warrant mentioning. When looking through your list of feeds, you have to move at a steady pace if you want to avoid having stories pile up on you (stories which will ultimately get purged if you don’t read them in time). Of course, some of the most interesting stories are also some of the most lengthy ones (Glenn Greenwald’s consistently excellent articles come to mind). Whenever I encounter a long article that looks like something I would want to read, I just hit that little Readability button at the top of Reeder, and just like that, I can move on with the knowledge that I have not turned my back on that potentially interesting article. There are plenty of “read later” service out there nowadays (Instapaper, Read It Later, and Evernote Clearly are three examples of alternate services that perform the same function), but Readability happens to be my personal favourite. Apart from having full Reeder support, I love how Readability can be configured to send a daily digest to my Kindle. This allows me to establish a solid workflow where the “curating” and “reading” aspects of the RSS experience are kept separate. While I am at work, I spend my breaks going through my RSS feeds without reading anything in a great amount of detail. I take potentially interesting stories and send them to Readability, which in turn sends those stories to my Kindle in the form of a daily digest. Once I leave work, run my errands, walk my dog, and get back from the gym, I can sit down on my couch with my Kindle and read through all of those interesting stories that I was tagging throughout the day. It’s like having a newspaper that is comprised entirely of content that you selected. The separation of curation and in-depth reading has helped my own personal sanity level, and I would recommend that system to anybody who has ever felt that they are not receiving an enriching reading experience.
3. Limit the amount of feeds that you subscribe to: Again, this suggestion seems to run counter to the very idea behind RSS, but I have personally found it to be quite important. The specific number of feeds in your list is going to depend on your own personal situation (specifically, how much time you have and how much time you are willing to spend), but subscribing to one-hundred different feeds is counter-productive regardless of how much free time you have available. As of right now, I have about twenty feeds in my list, because I know that I can’t conceivably handle more than that in a given week. When looking at a website and contemplating whether or not to add it to your subscription list, you should ultimately ask yourself “does this website produce enough good material on a consistent basis to justify adding them to my list?”. Your should treat your list of RSS feeds like an exclusive club that only the best of the best can belong to. For the websites that don’t make the cut, you can always hope that their strong material makes it onto your Twitter feed. Actually, I almost think of Twitter and RSS as two equally important news sources that compliment each other. RSS gives me the news from my tried and true sources while Twitter gives me interesting articles from places that I typically don’t visit on a daily basis. As of right now, I have about twenty unread articles in my Readability list, and I am willing to bet that about half of them have come from Twitter. Your RSS reader should be a collection of the best websites, not an exhaustive list of all websites.
Hopefully the advice given here will prove useful to some people. I don’t profess to be a master of productivity by any stretch of the imagination, and I am always learning new ways to be more productive and more enriched (those two things are not mutually inclusive by any means). With that in mind, perhaps I will have to write a follow-up post in a few months time if my workflow changes.
