too much rss can make you blind
I was recently feeling overwhelmed, being unable to get my head around my personal organization and time management. It’s ultimately a good thing because it was my internal manager telling me to stop, drop and re-tool.
The main culprit of my concern was all of my own doing. It was my RSS feeds….all the blogs and news feeds I subscribed to got to be too much. I would open the reader up and there would easily be over 500 posts. A day. Every day.
No way in h-e-double hockey sticks did I read all those posts, many on technical issues that I wanted to try and understand but more often than not came away feeling more like an English speaking student in a French high school. Nothing made sense and my shot at a prom date was nil. Even on other non tech posts there was a bunch of content too that I felt obliged to scan. Crikey!
I needed to hold an intervention with myself. Armed with a delete key and an itchy index finger, I started cutting and deleting and I felt much better. I was reading stuff from people I thought I should follow but it turns out they didn’t keep my interest (and I’m sure people could and have said the same about me…posts like this don’t help my cause.)
To now scan about 150 posts in my main areas of interest with people whose content I more closely value is a cake walk. Again…I scan all and read some. But to start with such a big number as I used to really made me feel overwhelmed. Now, not so much. It used to be hitting “Mark All As Read” was a kind of a white flag, a surrender of sorts for posts that I would never get to. Now it’s cause I scanned and am done. Much better feeling.
How are you at managing your RSS habit?
Awwww, Peter, if you had been that English speaking student at MY French High School, I would have been your prom date…if we had HAD a prom! 😉
I felt the same as you did Peter, and I have given up trying to “keep-up.” I do what I can, when I can, but am starting to re-tool my physical surroundings to make work flow for efficient…it’s ALL a work in progress, non?
Peace!
L.
It IS a work in progress Liz, and that’s a thought that keeps running through my head.
We all kind of shape our behaviors in life by rules and etiquette and yet with social media, I’m not even sure the rule book is in draft form let alone published.
The inmates are running the asylum. Good news is we’re only all part crazy.
Best always,
– Peter