Cutting down on feed consumption

As many people out there, I read web feeds frequently. Usually, I read them each morning, and then each evening.

But some time ago (20 days ago, to be exact), I got flooded by problems, and had to stop reading them.

But the feed reader still sat there, accumulating stuff...

Over 20 days, it accumulated 3,100 feed items! It took me one full day to read through them. Just think about it - it is an equivalent of spending 1-2 hours each day just to clean the flood of incoming feed items. Clearly, it had to stop somehow.

On the course of my "reading marathon", I noticed that I do not read many feeds (Slashdot, Lifehacker, Habrahabr) "cover-to-cover". Instead, I just look at the headlines - and in most cases (90-95%) dismiss the item without reading, since I'm not interested.

So today, I embarked on the quest to clean up my feed list. I deleted the ones, that delivered non-interesting content (0 valuable items in the last 10-15), or were just dead.

In the result, I trimmed my list from 65 feeds to 30 feeds, and reduced overall feed flood by > 90%. Quite impressive, if you would think about it.

I'd say that this story about feeds is just an example - how some destructive habit can ease into our lives and start sapping on out time, preventing us from improving and advancing our lives. I think that each person should conduct some "review session" on his lifestyle and habits every once in a while, and that would definitely increase the quality of our life.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 2, 2013 at 3:43 AM

    I had a similar issue some time ago. My solution was to read news... Only on Fridays.
    This way, reading news isn't something you switch to constantly. It's not interrupting anything. And, by the way, if you read news as a huge stack -- you quickly get bored and want to remove some useless stuff.

    (My similar post on Russian: https://frndc.com/display/vasya/3859128 )

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