As I sat at my PC at gone midnight last night, doing email catchup, reviewing comments to various blog posts and RSS feed scanning, I thought – this is ridiculous.
I have various software tools that are supposed to help me be more productive and all I’m doing is spending more time on a never-attainable quest to actually be more productive.
Take RSS feeds, for instance. An RSS aggregator is a great piece of software, a great tool that brings you things automatically that saves you lots of time so that you don’t have to visit loads of different places out there on the net yourself.
I did a quick count of what’s in Feed Demon, my aggregator. There are currently 682 individual RSS feeds spread across 42 different channel groups. As has been the case for some time now, there’s just no way I ever get to see all of this information. Of the 42 groups, I actually have 6 that I do scan every day. Those 6 contain not far off 100 individual feeds. (I’ve also got one group that I call “Keep an eye on from time to time” So why is this one of the groups I actually look at every day?) The rest I sometimes scan. Yet seeing all those channel groups every time I maximize the little FD icon in the systenm tray is beginning to give me feelings of anxiety.
This is all becoming a major problem.
Then one feed caught my eye – a great post yesterday by Marc Eisenstadt on Corante Get Real in which he talks about my problem:
[…] RSS aggregators, as a way of managing zillions of feeds, always struck me as something of a short-term fix for the problem of how to deal with, well, zillions of feeds. They are of course a critical daily tool, and the real benefit for me has always been providing a ‘radar alert’ to keep in touch with what I’d like to call ‘thought leaders’ (forget ‘A-list’ and all that nonsense): the people and services who, in my opinion, have something to say to me.
My conjecture is that tools like this (e.g. RSS aggregators) give users, especially early adopters of new technologies, a two-orders-of-magnitude (i.e. 100x) ‘power boost’ in dealing with the ‘knowledge flow’ (forget ‘information’ and ‘content’) whipping around us. Indeed, such tools are particularly valuable in helping foster and even accelerate knowledge flow among other early adopters (who tend to correlate highly with the ‘thought leaders’ involved in the knowledge that you want to be, well, flowing)! But whenever there’s a three, four, five, or six orders-of-magnitude (i.e. 1000x, 10,000x, 100,000x, or 1,000,000x) increase in ‘adopters of new technologies’, not only are such technologies not new any more, but a two-orders-of-magnitude ‘power boost’ is insufficient, so we turn to new technology to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
So it looks like my problem is an order of magnitude thing. Or the signal-to-noise ratio. Or something. Of course, it may also be something to do with my less-than-perfect organization of self in how I do things like email and read RSS feeds, but I’ll pass on that for the moment (as well as my constant email guilt trip).
It’s now clear what I must do – delete all the RSS channels and feeds that I don’t get to, meaning I will likely end up with just the 6 channel groups I scan every day. Marc’s post is the catalyst for this realization, so thanks Marc. The Spring clean starts this weekend.
And by the way, the Get Real RSS feed is a full content feed, not an extract or headlines only. That’s the smart way to publish and thus consume information in an RSS aggregator (here’s why I think so; and this post as well). If it had not been full content, I wouldn’t have read Marc’s post (and it actually wouldn’t have been in my aggregator in the first place).
How are you managing zillions of feeds?
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
