Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2007
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2007
Today’s post is a direct question that I hope you’ll answer.
Here I am, finally in a place where it’s my JOB to keep up with everything new happening in the digital world. I’ve got my RSS feeds, my email notifications, my network of amazing people who constantly keep me up to date via Twitter, email, and even the occasional text message to my phone. The technology is certainly available to keep me on top of things. However, as I go through all this info everyday and open a new Firefox tab for all the things I want to read I realize something. I NEVER actually have the time to read all this stuff I find! (Never mind the heart attack I have every time Firefox crashes with 20+ tabs of things I need to read open.)
I know that many of you out there do the same thing. It’s time we started thinking, not about new technologies, but about effective use of the technologies that we have. So how do you stay on top of it all? Do you open a bunch of tabs like I do and hope that you get to them? Do you bookmark everything via del.icio.us and hope you find the time to get to all of those bookmarks later?
Fess up and give us all your best UberNoggin advice for keeping on top of the information delivered to you. Leave a comment and give us all your sage wisdom.
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Sarah,
Not sure about the twitter or other stuff, but for blogs, I have a desktop news aggregator and all the blogs I follow are in there. So when I open the program, it automatically updates all the RSS feeds and shows them to me. I personally use RSS Bandit, but I am sure there are others too. Hope this helps. And no, I don’t read all of them I select according to the heading.
Hi Sarah,
I definitely find myself in a similar situation to you (and, I imagine, many others!), and have recently been asking myself these same questions.
The answer I’m starting to formulate in my head (though I’m not sure it’s quite true yet) goes something like this. We can’t stay on top of it all. Nay, we shouldn’t. ‘It all’ has gotten to be so much that simply taking it in would result in cognitive overload, and ‘staying on top of it’ results in some wild relationships to our feed readers, where missing a day makes us anxious of all the posts we need to catch up on.
I don’t think that we should stop reading all this stuff, but maybe just need to be more selective about what we do read. Perhaps it’s more about paying attention to those key nodes, those figurative tipping points that will lead us to all the critical stuff not already in our readers, and about sticking with them and not adding new somethings to our aggregators every day without doing an internal reflection as to whether those somethings are really adding value or simply ‘feeding’ (no pun intended) what can sometimes be intellectual materialism.
These are important questions to ask, not only from the perspective of how to use this technology effectively, but also of how to maintain our sanity and intentionality while doing so. Keep on asking the tough questions Intellagirl!
PS – I totally added about twenty feeds from your .opml file when you posted it the other day, so I definitely can’t claim to be an expert on how to manage all this either! : )
Sarah,
I agree with Rafi…. “just need to be more selective about what we do read.” I do two things in that regard… I try to weed through blogs and am constantly removing blogs that don’t post frequently or which I don’t find particularly useful. I’m keeping tabs on everything at a superficial level and am focusing my efforts on a more limited scope – there’s feeds I get to daily while there’s others I may only get to once every couple of weeks or so.
With the taggging feature of Google Reader, I use a limited set of topic tags for articles that I like, think others should read, or need to go back to at some point. Since each tag in Google Reader can be shared as its own RSS feed, I end up creating an RSS feed of those articles. Others can access that list, including me
Links to my shared news feeds are in the sidebar of my blog.
-Chris