brad garland

Lately, I’ve been doing some self-reflection on things (highly motivated by the birth of our baby girl, I’m sure) with life, work, family, the whole gambit. During this self-reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that there a few things that I need to change in my life to be more productive, more streamlined, and more available to enjoy the things I love. I’ll be posting about the rest of these changes soon, but since I spend an extreme amount of my time online, let’s start there.

The first thing I’ve decided to do is a bit of spring cleaning, in June, to my daily routine starting with my web browsing habits. Reading my RSS feeds is one part of my routine that has become a significant time-waster and has the tendency to take up WAY to much of my time. I can spend hours looking through various blogs/articles and never really get anything out of them. It seems like I have to always know what the latest news is and I constantly check them throughout the day. Ridiculous, I agree.

Also, by doing this self-reflection and stepping back a bit I’ve noticed that I might possibly be going through information overload. I have so much information coming at me from the Web, RSS, Podcasts, Emails that it becomes daunting and that’s only Internet based content.

How I got to RSS Overload

For over a year now I’ve fully embraced the simplistic and efficient nature of the RSS feed. They get me the info I want, without all the ads and additional distraction, in a nice tight little package. Now? I’m now at over 100 text-based RSS feeds and about 40 Podcast Feeds. I got so much content coming my way, I can hardly see straight.

At first, I used the Sage RSS Reader, a Firefox extension, for my viewing but grew tired of everything being in the sidebar so I started looking for alternatives. At about that time, the Google IG page caught my eye. It allowed me to have my RSS feeds, email, weather, etc. all on one page which really helped for viewability purposes and I preferred the layout. Then, my collection of RSS feeds grew too overwhelming for the IG page. So I, again, head off on a quest for another RSS alternative. I played with Pageflakes a while, and some other AJAX’ed homepages but decided on Netvibes. Netvibes had a nice collection of additional modules (like delicious, flickr, weather, ebay) and you could seperate your feeds onto different tabs and the default font size was smaller so I could cram more onto one page.

My Proposed Solution

I’ve not only decided to reduce down the amount of RSS feeds that I view but I’m going to switch my primary viewer from a browser to my smartphone. Why you ask? My hopes in doing this is because of tedious nature of navigating through a mobile phone (although it’s getting better) I’m hoping it’ll limit me to ‘hitting the highlights’ and moving on. I only have about 15 feeds on my mobile now and don’t want to exceed that.

How do you avoid information overload? Comment and let us know. Also, how many RSS feeds do you usually read?

UPDATE: Well, I’ve shorten down my feeds to one page (see screenshot here). All the feeds I have now on the page now are mainly work related and all other feeds are on my phone, using Newsbreak (actually bought it I liked it so much the other day). Hoping to limit the time, while I’m at work, looking at feed. Woohoo, more productivity.

[tags]self-reflection, RSS, Sage, Firefox, Google IG, Pageflakes, Netvibes, Information Overload, Newsbreak, mobile, Windows mobile 5.0[/tags]