Every year I learn new tips on productivity when I attend the Blogging While Brown Conference. For the last 2 years the opening keynote has been presented by Scott Hanselman. He is an amazing speaker and this year he presented with Adria Richards by his side. One valuable take away that I took was about information overload. Scott said “If it is not family or making you money, get rid of it.”
To me that comment made me think of all the time I spend online reading articles and visiting sites. I had a huge issue with my Google reader. I has subscribed to so many blogs RSS feed when I actually read none of them. The main reason I did not read them was because every time I opened my reader there were over 1000 unread articles sitting there. The visual number simply made me immediately shut my reader, only to not read any of the blogs I really wanted to. Too many bloggers think that you should follow them if they follow you. I feel that you should only be following blogs when you are truly interested in their content.
Before I left LA I cleaned my reader out. I removed over 100 blogs from my RSS reader. I needed this, I needed to only see the information that I was actually interested in and could actually read in less than an hour. It took me over an hour to delete all the feeds that I was no longer interested in, but I got it done. Now I feel lighter, and when I open my reader I have a few articles to read and process. These blogs are the most important to me.
In order to remove a feed from your Google reader, you will have to click on the arrow next to the blog name and unsubscribe one at a time. If you open your Google reader and instantly get depressed and the number of unread articles, I highly suggest you do some spring cleaning too.
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I spring clean my reader about once a month. I have to as like you it gets too overwhelming and then I find I am reading nothing including what I do want to read just because I want to get rid of the scary number staring at me. Also organization. I have my reader in categories so now the blogs I want to read whenever they are updated are in one folder and at the top. This way I can read them and ignore the rest if time is not on my side.
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I have gone through on numerous occasions and deleted blogs that are no longer even published, ones that are just not of interest from both GFC and Reader. They will stay gone about 2 days and then they will all reappear. I have Googled this issue and come up with other people who have the same problem. It is so annoying. I finally decided that I would create a special email from most of the ones I want to read all the time or network blog FB the others. It has been a real downer.
I agree. I want to read and follow the ones I enjoy and unfortunately, when I was new to this, I followed TOO many and now can’t get out of them.
Thanks for the post!
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Thanks for the reminder! My reader is very cluttered and I need to delete many blogs.
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