Easy Way To Save Valuable Time Reading RSS Feeds
- Posted by glen on August 4th, 2006
To Do or Else has a great blog post with 3 steps to sa
ving more time with RSS. It’s a fairly simple post if you’re familiar with RSS, but the key thing that I got out of the article was incorporating the 80/20 principle (also known as the Pareto principle) into organizing your rss feeds. In a nutshell: separate your feeds into the top 20% you consistently follow and cling to every word, and the other 80% you infrequently scan.
The 80/20 principle states basically this: 80% of your results comes from 20% of your resources. Or to place it within this context: 80% of the value of all your RSS feeds comes from about 20% of those feeds.
If you’re like me, you have waaaay too many feeds in your rss reader. Honestly, I think I read maybe almost half of them on a consistent basis. So how do I go about deciding which feeds to
read? My brain tells me. As a matter of fact, my brain has been trained to do this automatically. I scan the list of updated sites and read the ones that are important, and quickly glance over (or completely ignore) the ones I don’t really care much about. By implementing the 80/20 system, my brain only has to look in one place to get the good stuff it really wants, saving me time and brain juice.
Not only that, but now that we’ve separated the feeds into their proper categories, we get a much clearer perspective on what’s really important. Use this system for a week or so and it will become obvious how unimportant most of those feeds in the 80% folder really are to you. You can use this revelation to trim the fat of your subscription list down to what’s really important. It may be hard to let go of those unused feeds at first, but you didn’t really read them anyway, did you? You’ll be surprised at how much time you’ll save reading the rest.
Like the article? Then Digg it!




August 29th, 2006 at 11:40 am
[...] 80/20 RSS principle, and then dropping the feeds I wasn’t really reading. This has cut the number of feeds I actually track down considerably. [...]
August 30th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Thanks for the tip. Bob Walsh talked about a similar idea here: “80/20 Your information feeds”: http://codesnipers.com/?q=node/308
November 9th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
[...] Generally, the more info that comes in, the less you’ll really understand it. The Pareto Principle tells us that 80% of our information only comes from 20% of our feeds anyway. Clean house on your RSS feeds and cut the ones that you don’t really read anyway. You want to keep the feeds that you read 90% of the time without scanning. [...]
November 14th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
[...] Treat Your RSS feeds like a book Triage your RSS Another great tip is to start reading books. A book is an investment, so there’s more incentive to read it start-to-finish. But most people don’t know how to actually pull themselves away from the computer long enough to do that. For some general ways to limit your time on the computer: [...]