Robert Scoble fails to solve my Google Reader problem

Here's a link to an article that I wrote back in 2003 on keeping up with advances in technology for software development. It got pretty wide distribution, and may contain ideas that are relevant to you. http://www.ftponline.com/javapro/2003_12/magazine/columns/objectenterprise/

Hi Justin,

I am not sure whether I could help you solve the issue definitely, but here is what I do. I have a dedicated space of time every morning to read what's in my RSS reader. For now it is about 45 minutes, but according to my amount of work I may reschedule duration. It is a scheduled appointment which I forbid myself to skip. But I also forbid myself to spend more than the time scheduled. So if I find something particurlarly interesting which I decide to investigate further, this will mean that other contents might end up unreviewed. Never mind : within the time allocated to that activity, I have picked content from my reader. The question is not to go through it all, but to perform active go thru within a certain amount of time. You can see it like training if you are, let's say, a swimmer : what matters is not so much how long you train than the way you do in the training schedule. Qualitative approach vs quantitative approach. Plus, we should never forget that there will always be more information that we don't get, than information we actually get. So it does not matter that much if you miss a certain amount of information in your reader, because anyway you always miss the big amount of information that is not in your reader. What really matters is the amount that gets to your brains. Just like what matters in relationships is the 10 or 80 people you do know, not the millions of people on earth you will never get to know ; the very person you are talking to at a certain moment in that restaurant, not the dozens of people in the restaurant you are not talking to at the very same time. When you have this conversation with this person, there is actually no reason to feel about what you are not doing with all the other people : it is the same with the feeds in your reader. Allow yourself XX minutes to "be" in its space, and meet the feeds you can within these XX minutes. The feeds you have not met will not deprive you of the information you have really enriched yourself with by interacting with the feeds met.

(I hope this is not too unclear, I apologize if it is the case -my mother tongue being french.)

Er, get a proper (ie not web-based) newsreader? I use NetNewsWire, and can quite happily keep it at 0 unread items if I have less than about 300 feeds. In fact I have more than that, so there's always a lot of unread stuff, which is no big deal, it just stays unread indefinitely, while I read the stuff I really want to read.

I have over 100+ feeds on Google Reader. Here's how I solve the problem of the unread article backlog. I first use the folder feature to prioritize feeds into a Favorites, Favorites-2, Favorites-3, etc. I then put the 10-15 feeds I most want to keep up on in the first folder and then divide the rest as appropriate into the other folders.

If I should happen to fall behind and don't want to waste time scanning 1000+ articles, I simply flush out the lower priority folders and just read the Favorites. That way I don't miss out on the stuff I really want to read even if I've been away from my computer for several days.