schwuk.com

I currently have 59 feeds in my OPML file. 4 of those are planet feeds with x number of feeds each, so the total is easily over 100. If I don’t catch up with my feeds every day or so, I soon get overwhelmed and end up marking a batch as read without even looking at them. To make sure I wasn’t letting them pile up I was reading them far too many times a day.

Many, many places covered how Scoble reads over 600 feeds a day, and I ignored it at first. Then more sites covered it, and I started thinking about my own feed reading habits and decided to follow Hackzine’s advice:

• Use Google Reader (keyboard commands make browsing faster)
• Use “all items view” to see the full river of news in chronological order
• Filter out potentials in the first pass. Take a top level filter for topic, information density, author, and quality of post. Only articles that make the cut are looked at in more detail.
• Superhuman abilities help

OK so I didn’t start wearing my underpants on the outside to satisfy the last one, but the rest did help. Instead of reading my feeds in their categories with the list view (and using a mouse!), viewing all items in the expanded view and relying on the keyboard makes getting through my feeds a breeze. I now set aside a block of time a day to catch up on feeds and have them done in record time.

One tip not covered by Scoble is the use of starring, or rather how I use them. Instead of following links whilst I’m reading, I star an item I want to follow up on and come back to them later (remembering to remove the star when I’m done. If the feed item is just a stub to the real thing, I’ll open it in a new tab in the background (yay Firefox!) and move on, only moving away from Google Reader when I’m done.

The other tip I picked up from Scoble is to share items, which works really well when combined with the Google Reader Shared Items Facebook app.