Still Catching Up with RSS

Ever since I went to California a few weeks ago, I have been trying to dig out of the RSS feed backlog. Google Reader says I follow 133 different feeds. I’ve gotten pretty good at scanning most of it. Of course there is no way one could read it all. I don’t try to. I just read the interesting bits.

I have managed to develop a technique for getting that list of articles in RSS manageable. At the moment, I have approximately 50 items I’ve marked for “read later.” Things I want to read and respond to, but not necessarily right away. It’s essentially the same technique I currently use on my email inboxes–the information FAD. It’s one of those things I picked up from the Stephen Covey class I took last year. It boils down to taking each article and quickly doing one of three things:

• File it for later reference
• Action the item (i.e. take action on it immediately)
• Delete the item (or in the case of RSS, mark it as read)

Of course, I don’t always get everything done. That’s unreasonable. But I do leave the computer at night with clear inboxes.