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.
My Random Thoughts on Life Without RSS
A little bit of background about myself: I have a horrible problem when it comes to maintaining my attention on the computer. So often I will sit down with the intention of getting some work done, only to get sidetracked by one little curiosity after another. Maybe I’ll read some news about an interesting computer game, which will lead me to research new video cards to play said game. That will lead to me research new power supplies to power that video card. And that will lead me to research new cases to house the power supply, video card, and the dozen other components that I bookmarked over the past hour, while I should have been doing my work. In order to alleviate the problem, I made a rule about eight months ago: I would only browse RSS feeds during my work day, and I would never read anything that wasn’t curated through RSS during my 7:30 AM - 4:00 PM work day. All of my… extracurricular browsing could be done afterwards, when I was in the comfort of my home with time to kill.
And RSS worked pretty well for me. By restricting myself, I was able to get the best of both worlds: I was keeping up with the daily happenings of the world, all the while getting my work done without being sidetracked for hours at a time. However, I recently read this article at Ars Technica that discusses the pitfalls of RSS with regards to personal productivity and personal sanity. It’s a great article, and I highly recommend checking it out. After that, I was inspired to take a week off of RSS, and get my news “the old-fashioned way”, to quote a term from the Ars article. Here are some of the positives and negatives that I discovered throughout my little adventure.
Positives:
Less stressful: Like the article that I linked eludes to, there’s a certain stress involved with constantly trying to zero out your RSS feed. My RSS feed has about fifteen subscriptions on it, and if I leave it for a couple of hours, it’s not unusual to have about sixty stories or more to sift through. Leaving it for a day (perhaps you decided to spend a day in the great outdoors) creates a gigantic mess that no sane person would ever attempt to read through in one sitting. Getting news in the traditional fashion means that there is no number staring you down. You don’t have to grind through hundreds of stories that may not even be interesting to you, and that means that you can…
Read stories in more detail: One of the consequences of the “unread stories” number is the inescapable temptation to skim through articles. No matter how enthralling that blog post may be, you can’t spend too much time on it, because you have about 144 more articles to go through after you’re done. During this past week, I found that I have been actually reading the stories that I saved into my Readability list. And not just skimming them either - I was actually reading them in detail. Sometimes I was even re-reading them to make sure I didn’t miss any important points. While my news excursions over the past week haven’t been as exhaustive as they were in the past, they were certainly a lot more enriching.
Save time by avoiding filtering process: This ties in to the first two points, but the filtering process of going through every crappy story to find the gems takes a considerable amount of time. I only had fifteen subscriptions, and it was still and ordeal for me. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who have thirty or more subscriptions in their feed (and apparently such people exist). Sometimes browsing for stories at the actual website can be beneficial, because the formatting of the sites tends to bring the most “important” and breaking stories at the top, while those miscellaneous stories about the royal couple’s new tennis rackets tend to go to the bottom where you (thankfully) will never see it. Obviously allowing somebody else to determine what is important isn’t always a good thing, but there are benefits involved with outsourcing the filtering process to somebody else.
Negatives:
Will inevitably miss stories: When moving away from RSS and back into the traditional realm, one of the things that you have to accept is that you will miss stories. It is quite simply unavoidable. While a lot of those stories are trash as we have discussed, there are definitely some gems that will be lost in the shuffle. Video game websites are a prime example of this. Stories about big budget games often go to the top of the website, while stories about smaller games from indie studios get much less attention, and as a gamer, you run the risk of missing out on some great indie games, just because you will have missed every story that was ever written about them.
Must manually create a list of sites: This may not sound like a big deal, and for the most part it isn’t. I ended up creating a list of all my important websites in various categories (Technology, Politics, Gaming, and Canada) and then I bookmarked them into separate folders. I repeated the process on my iPhone, and for the most part, things went smoothly. However, you will run into the odd site every now and then that has a… less than optimal interface on a mobile device. The CBC’s website is one example of this, where browsing their five or six top stories is easy, but drilling down becomes an exercise in frustration. A lot of popular news websites have iPhone apps that are meant to provide a more intuitive means of finding stories, but a lot of them just run as slow as death. Again, the CBC is a prime example. If the situation is this shaky on the iPhone - the most developer-supported smartphone on the planet - I can’t imagine how inconsistent and frustrating it can be on an Android or Windows Phone 7 device (you BlackBerry folks still read newspapers, right?). One really nice thing about RSS (and the Reeder app in particular) is that it’s a consistent experience. No matter which subscription you’re looking at, it’s nice and tidy, if not particularly exciting.
Not as easy to share stories: Again, this is hardly a big deal, but one thing that I absolutely love about Reeder is its sharing tools. I can post an article on Pinboard, Twitter, Facebook, Readability, and Delicious all without ever leaving the app. While I don’t share stories very often (except maybe on Twitter, where I tend to be a little preachy), it’s nice to have the option without having to resort to little bookmarklets and Firefox extensions all over the place.
Overall, I think the experiment went fairly well. While I certainly missed a lot of stories, I still ended the week with the feeling that I learned a lot. Over the next week, I’m going to try RSS one more time, this time with a far more aggressive approach to filtering (i.e. I’ll be using the “mark all as read” button a lot more often). If the stress returns, then perhaps it will be my final foray into RSS, and my permanent return to the traditional world of manually curating news stories.
