My Feeds - Do I Have it All Wrong?

February 10th, 2007 by Michael Gray in Blogs

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So I’ve been catching up after working on client stuff for the past two days and think I may have my feeds set up incorrectly.

Here a look at the high level folders I have

I’m hitting about 175 feeds, the problem is lots of them are aggregated feeds so there’s probably way more in there. I’m also finding myself marking entire folders as read without even scanning them sometimes, which is bad. Here’s look at my volume of reading

Who knows what I was doing when I read almost 900 feeds in one day, but reading 300+ feeds in a day means I didn’t get much work done. So I’m thinking I need to trim down to two or three folders

Stuff I have to read
Stuff I’d like to read
Stuff that’s not really important that I read (of course I could always just delete these)

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5 Responses to “My Feeds - Do I Have it All Wrong?”

  1. Tom Says:
    February 10th, 2007 at 10:45 am

    Now I am using newsgator in outlook so this may not apply, but it probably could in Google News Reader

    I have a folder that I call SEO. In it I have the feeds that I read daily, including this one. But I also have a subfolder called notdaily (not very original but what the hey). That has a dozen other feeds that if I have the free time I scan, but if it is a busy day I ignore and just read the important feeds.

    Thus, I see what I feel is important on a daily basis, but have the others is I have some free time.

    Hope this helps.

  2. Martin Muehl Says:
    February 10th, 2007 at 2:08 pm

    I would definately recommend a Tier 1-folder for your mnust read blogs. And don’t get obsessed with having to read all blogs.

  3. webprofessor Says:
    February 10th, 2007 at 2:30 pm

    You know the million dollar idea would be to have the posts in the feeds group themselves by topic. I dunno if theres something out there that does that already but it would save time by cutting out the echo effect.

  4. Ahmed Bilal Says:
    February 12th, 2007 at 3:48 am

    I’d say you’d could have something like this:

    1) Must Read

    In this folder, group feeds by topic into subfolders - Darren Rowse talks about setting up feeds by projects which I think is a great idea, so if you had 5 sites you were blogging daily on, you’d have a subfolder for site A, another one for site B, and so on.

    I would recommend against putting any feeds in here that aren’t directly related to work.

    2) Want to Read

    Only those feeds that you would read in your downtime (like Dilbert), and then again only those that you think absolutely cannot live without (like wolf-howl.com - hehe).

    And for your own sake, be very, very harsh when it comes to pruning your feeds. Nothing is gained by glazing over 1000 headlines in 5 minutes - you’re not using them, you don’t have the time for them and the information overload in those 5 minutes makes the next 15-20 minutes less than 100%. And what about the potential for distractions?

    Minimize distractions, cut your feeds by half :)

  5. SeoRookie Says:
    February 15th, 2007 at 12:29 pm

    I have mine set up like yours. For the “must reads” I just click on it from within the category. I don’t have as many feeds as you but I usually just scan the titles.