RSS Tricks

I wonder if many other people are as obsessive about the organization of their RSS feeds and subscriptions.  I’ve worked my list over to a science, effectively managing about 200 subscriptions and about 250 posts a day into handy categories for maximum focus.  When you’re reading on a variety of topics, it is most helpful to sort them so that you’re not bouncing around too terribly from topic to topic, lest you lose focus or miss important details.  Once you get in a specific zone, changing up the topic causes you to lose focus.  To keep on track, I use these categories:

-Awesome
-Amusing
-Frugal
-Inspire
-Friends
-Productivity
-Local
-iPhone
-Work (Medical-Health)
-Work (Development)
-Maybe
-Added August
-Added September

The ‘Added’ categories are fairly recent and I use them to file new subscriptions until I’m completely certain that I want to add them to my daily repertoire.  If they don’t make the cut, they are moved to ‘Maybe’ which is checked only about every week or so.  The ‘Work’ categories are separated into medical-specific blogs and career development resources, which is also a fairly new change for me but has been completely helpful when I want to review medical development only or articles more based on HR or corporate development.

I’ve found GReader to be most optimal for me since I’m reading my feeds in a few different places; I use the star function to mark posts for reading later if I’m not in a place where I can really read and absorb something, or if I want to read it in a different place.  Every few weeks I go through and make sure these are read and unstarred.  This system works well for me and I can’t imagine not using it, with the sheer amount of information that I’d like to be connected to on a daily basis.

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