Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
arstechnica.com
Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
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Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#2"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task."
Okay, I call shens on this whole article.
Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.
The problem they're talking about is checking your RSS feed obsessively - which has exactly the same issues as checking your email obsessively, or your texts, or your Facebook wall, or whatever the heck else that you should stop interrupting yourself with constantly.
"Keeping up" does not have to mean being OCD at the expense of getting work done.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#3I just use FeedSpeak (http://feedspeak.tk) - an app that reads your RSS feeds to you, so you can listen to articles while doing other things.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#4"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task." Okay, I call shens on this whole article. Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.…
The entire article was invalidated (in my mind) by the simple fact that you can choose when you want to open your RSS reader. You don't have to be pinged every 20 seconds. Don't punish everyone just because you can't control yourself.
RSS is immensely useful for staying up-to-date with postings from a broad collection of websites, and without missing a lot of good content, and it's pretty much universally supported. It annoys me very much that there are so many "hip techies" encouraging killing RSS when it is clearly superior to Twitter, or manually browsing all of the different websites, at syndicating content.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#5"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task." Okay, I call shens on this whole article. Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.…
Agreed.
I personally go through my RSS feed every few months and re-evaluate my feeds. If I have feeds that have low signal to noise ratios, or simply publishes articles that I never read, I remove them.
Also, I segregated high volume feeds (such as Flickr picture feeds and Gizmodo/NYTimes/BBC etc.) into a separate account. I have two accounts, one (low volume) where I try to take a closer more thorough look at everything, and another (high volume) where I simply do a quick scan then mark all as read.
Don't blame RSS for your inability to manage it.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#6I just use FeedSpeak ( http://feedspeak.tk ) - an app that reads your RSS feeds to you, so you can listen to articles while doing other things.
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Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#7Google Reader Notifiers
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apflmjolhbonpkbkoo... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kfimchjilnmjmjpdge...
Make checking efficient.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#8"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task." Okay, I call shens on this whole article. Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.…
Agreed. I personally go through my RSS feed every few months and re-evaluate my feeds. If I have feeds that have low signal to noise ratios, or simply publishes articles that I never read, I remove them. Also, I segregated high volume feeds (such as Flickr picture feeds and Gizmodo/NYTimes/BBC etc.) into a separate account. I have two accounts, one (low volume) where I try to take a closer more thorough look at every…
Exactly... but, i can imagine how someone who is obsessed with keeping his rss feed reads all read will have a problem.(much like email). I personally have found it useful to have a limit of not more than 100 posts a month.If i do, i unsubscribe on some feeds that have become irrelevant to me.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#9Way back in the olden days, I built a lovely reader (inventively called Reader) at Earthlink.
The key feature to Reader was that it did not have unread counts at all. You could flip through the articles and it would keep keep track of where you were. If you left for more than half an hour, the rest of the articles were marked as read.
It was very liberating to not feel like you were ever trying to keep up with your feeds.
These days, Fever App seems the way to go... http://feedafever.com/
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#10"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task." Okay, I call shens on this whole article. Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.…
Agreed. I personally go through my RSS feed every few months and re-evaluate my feeds. If I have feeds that have low signal to noise ratios, or simply publishes articles that I never read, I remove them. Also, I segregated high volume feeds (such as Flickr picture feeds and Gizmodo/NYTimes/BBC etc.) into a separate account. I have two accounts, one (low volume) where I try to take a closer more thorough look at every…
The 'trends' tab in Google Reader is useful to check on that: it gives you both how many items a feed published and how many you clicked on for the last 30 days. This can be useful to confirm the ratios.
Most of my feeds publish only two or three times a week, some even less, but with high signal to noise ratio; that's where RSS really shines, since checking them manually would kill a huge amount of time.