10th
GTD with RSS
A minimalist guide to Getting Things Done with your RSS.
First a few steps to consider when managing your RSS.
a. Filter, filter, filter.
Organize your RSS through folders and tags. Google Reader offers brilliant solutions for creating folders and subcatagories. Channeling them will allow you to better keep track of them, how frequently they update, and eventually what topics you need, not want to keep track of.
b. Minimize, minimize, minimize.
Going through hundreds of feeds a day, RSS soon became much more of a chore than a pleasure. An easy way to remedy this is to purge. It’s cathartic and streamlines everything.
Simple purging tips: Watch your trends, one reason I love Google Reader. See what feeds update the most infrequently but provide you with the most meaningful content and keep those. Get rid of the rest! The less you have, the more efficient you are. Instead of just skimming hundreds of posts you can now focus on the select few that work best for you.
Still not ready to part with your hundreds of feeds? Well then find those few blogs that go through similar blogs as you and they post about them as well. Let them do the grunt work, and reduce redundancy. I find that by finding the right blog, they can combine up to 15 sources into one site. Check out Lifehacker or Scobleizer, great examples of combining resources from all over the web.
c. Manage, Manage, Manage.
Keep track of your trends, see how often you check your feeds, how many you go through a month, the number of feeds you actually have, which ones update the most frequently, the most infrequently and which feeds have a higher percentage of posts you actually read. To keep your sanity you can always del.icious the blogs you decide to remove from your feed in case you need to find them later.
One thing to do with feeds is as you’re going through them, find a headline you’re interested in, scan through the content and see if you can read it on the spot. If you feel you need more time with it, open it in a new tab. By the end of my RSS session I’ll have quite a collection of tabs open. Then I attack those in 30 minute increments throughout my day. I find going through 20 tabs throughout the whole day helps keep me relaxed, interested and makes for a great break. And since it’s tabs and not my Reader, I don’t come across new posts that keep me tied down. Or if you don’t want to have too many tabs open, tag a post as Followup and only restrict yourself to seeing what’s in that followup folder when you have time.
d. Share, share, share.
Sharing is great for focus and referencing. By sharing I find that you only pull the most important elements you come across. A blog is a great tool for this. Sort the information you come across into catagories and then in one post you can cover months worth of material you’ve come across. Keep a del.icious as a reservoir for content, and a blog as a channel or face for it.
My Top RSS, and Organization
Blog:
The Best Article Every Day
Deals:
The Bargainist
Del.icio.us:
By having RSS of other peoples Del.icio, it saves me time from having to search the web for resources, I can just pool theirs together into my reader and scan them quickly.
Scobleizer
SteveRubel
GigaOm
aDang001
Gadgets:
Uncrate
Uncrate has a feature called Uncrate Stuff where you create your own personlized Uncrate page filled with items you save from their page.
Guides/GTD:
Lifehacker
ZenHabits
Google Operating System
Tech:
GigaOm
They feature 5 other blogs on the sit, but GigaOm will do weekly posts highlighting the other blogs.
Mac:
ThinkSecret
Macinstruct
The Apple Blog
Notes: One day I’ll feature every RSS feed I have, as well as do a Podcast feature because those are just as relevent in obtaining information and time management.
