3 Productivity Tips For Blog Readers

Reading blogs is a fun and time consuming hobby, which with a few tips, can become even more enjoyable whilst taking half the time.

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1. RSS Groups By Importance

Love reading TUAW posts? Find some of the Engadget posts a waste of time? Create a few groups in your RSS reader - Very Important, Important, Less Important, Least Important. Then spend some time sorting your feeds into these groups. Then when you only have 5 minutes of time to check up on blogs, go straight into the “Very Important” group to find the content you are most interested in reading.

2. Cut Down To The Essential Blogs

You are always going to learn more, enjoy more, and have much more free time if you are reading 20 blogs rather than 100. Go through your blogs and choose which ones are producing the most original, fun content that you really enjoy, and delete all the other blogs that you find semi-interesting and are mostly “re-distributing” the news.

3. Take The Content In

Spend time to read and absorb every word of your most important feeds. Try and spend more time reading the content rather than browsing and sorting through it. Spend some time with the blogs you really enjoy or those that you find real value in. You will find you learn more by taking your time to read posts carefully.

How much time do you spend reading blogs daily, and how many blog RSS feeds do you track?

Comments

  1. #1

    Richard Neal → www.theappleblog.com

    Right now I have 186 different sites in my RSS reader, and its pretty much impossible to deal with all of them. I keep wanting to cut down, but I like all the sites for different things, so its difficult to let one go.

  2. #2

    Zach Wilt → zamwi.com

    I track 232 RSS feeds, or at least I try to track them. I cut down from about 300 hundred but I have them organized into their categories.

    I also just switched feed readers from NetNewsWire to Newsfire…and I haven’t looked back since.

  3. #3

    Keenan → keendog.blogspot.com

    I only have about 75 feeds, so it’s not a huge deal. Whenever I’m about to unsubscribe from one, that feed publishes a post that makes me think that it’s good enough to keep around in my Newsfire.

  4. #4

    Gabe

    Man! I was just starting to feel a bit overwhelmed with my 19 feeds. Nevermind.

  5. #5

    wphj → www.wphj.wordpress.com

    Good tips, I don’t have much trouble, I only have a couple dozen feeds in NewsFire, but I always decide to remove blogs that post several times a day. It’s unnecessary and it ends up being a waste of time.

  6. #6

    zzap → zzaps.com

    I need to cut down myself, at the moment I’ve got 182 blog feeds, and overall about 300 feeds.

  7. #7

    Sven

    The 3 steps are a little too obvious to be a good article. Blog readers really do not need tips on how to read blogs.

  8. #8

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  9. #9

    Sarit → www.my-paradox.net

    I’m currently tracking 160, but they’re organized in importance folders. Some of them aren’t blogs but notify me of this and that - but I’m handeling it all pretty good since I organized it.

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  11. #11

    Mario Vellandi

    Try and keep the essentials. Then simply accept we can’t read all feeds. Tips and tricks sites are best referenced and searched later when we need that solution. That’s what I did with Lifehacker and some other good sites.

  12. #12

    shadownight → thomasgvl.50webs.com

    Interesting tip about grouping feeds by importance… Mine are grouped by category (Apple News, Blogs, etc.), but I think I’l switch to Importance groups.

  13. #13

    jack

    huh, tell us something we don’t know.

  14. #14

    Weiran

    Thanks for the tips. #1 helps.

  15. #15

    Nick

    Cheers for the tips! I’m guessing I’ve got about 200 feeds in my newsreader and a clean up is definitely in order.

    One of the problems I find with having so many feeds is that I end up reading the same stories three or four times a day. This is particularly annoying if I’m just wanting a quick update.

    Maybe a new feature for newsreaders could be the ability to tag your feeds with certain levels of importance, that way you could just keep them organised in their current groups but also by importance when you need to.

    Just a thought.

  16. #16

    Glenn Wolsey → www.glennwolsey.com

    shadownight, that used to be how I had NewsFire set up - this new workflow works well for me.

  17. #17

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  18. #18

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