Information Overload = Loss in Productivity: Trimming Down the News Aggregator Fat
It's very easy to let your news aggregator get out of control. It seems that I am more often likely to just click that "subscribe" link on a Web site or blog and never read the feed again. Well train time is starting to be maximized again by reading my aggregator (BTW...the new beta of FeedDemon rocks) and getting up to speed on what is going on in the Web world as well as the legal industry. But I find that I was skipping a lot of feeds and only reading the ones that I the "usual suspects". So I started trimming the fat. I'm still easily over 200 feeds, but they are much more focused than they used to be. Some I still subscribe to just for reference purposes, but others are the daily, sometimes hourly hits. I hope that by trimming my feeds down I can focus on what I want to monitor and move on and get to work during the day. Instead, I have found myself doing the "oh, I haven't checked that feed in a while" which I'm sure I'm not alone in that practice.
So what is the ultimate tip? All I can offer is focus on the "hubs". The ones that will aggregate other information. This will allow you to keep tabs on items in certain areas without having to sift through the other stuff. I don't have 200 hubs, but I have hubs for certain areas. For instance, do I really need to monitor the Post, Tribune, and NYTimes? No, just pick one and move on. If you really like certain areas of each paper, grab the specific feeds for each. Web Dev is by far my largest category. But there is so much to cover there that it is almost impossible to not have a ton of feeds.
Another tip that I've heard from folks like Steve Nipper and Dennis Kennedy is "probation lists". I couldn't get into that. I just didn't see the need to put something in a category that wasn't going to get updated or read anyway. I always figure I can resubscribe to the feed if I really need to.
So give it a try. Can you trim your aggregator fat?