Feed cleanup

When I read my RSS subscriptions, I open the list of feeds and start going through them one by one. My brain takes an article and starts asking “Is it long?”, “Does it have lists?”, “Who wrote it?”, “What is it about?”. These are all questions that help me decide if I am going to read, to skim or to skip it. Again and again until I finish the whole stack. This process is too much work because it requires me to take constant decisions. And then I discovered a pattern that changed everything.

Before, everything was organized in folders that revealed the broad subject of the content. So I had design, development, mac, software, etc. as taxonomy. I usually file things thinking of how I will retrieve them. Clearly in this situation is not the proper approach. These categories don’t help me decide if the articles inside are important to me or not. Plus, some authors have different writing topics and can’t be organized as easily as that.

With my new realization in hand I can proceed to fix things. The way I read is not by subject is by importance. So I came up with three folders: must read, medium importance and low importance. I wanted to go with only the first two actually but the difference between medium importance and low importance is significant.

The must read category speaks for itself. All articles will be read regardless of their subject. Here I include feeds from Daring Fireball, A List Apart or the 37 signals blog. Their standars of quality are so high that it is always useful, or at least interesting, to read.

The difference between the medium importance and low importance categories is of approach. When I am swamped with work I will skim the titles of the former category for interesting subjects, but I will remorslessly mark as read the latter. The low importance category also acts as a staging area for feed deletion. If the noise per signal ratio becomes to great I’ll unsubscribe these first.

I just arrived from my summer vacation and my Reeder unread count is 700+ items. This change is already paying its dividends it seems.