Feeds are an interesting thing. My list of feeds started small, but has now grown so large it’s starting to take over my life. If I don’t check my feeds for an entire day, I could easily have 1500 unread items when I get home at night. That’s unthinkable. Getting through 1500 items would take at least an hour and fifteen minutes, and that’s if I only read a small fraction of them. If I were to actually open up and read every single item I’d spend five hours a day reading feeds.
So instead I read them as they come in. Interrupting my work flow to knock 50 or so out every half hour. But not only is that highly disruptive, it’s not even enough time to get through them all. I still find myself skimming the titles and liberally using the “Mark All As Read” command on entire folders. Which begs the question, if I’m marking entire folders as read, why am I subscribed to those feeds at all? Damn, even as I’m writing this 60 new items came in. I expect to be writing this for twenty more minutes. If I’m lucky I might get five more minutes of writing done before I get distracted and look at my feeds. Which of course will have at least one or two things I want to read, which I will, and then thirty minutes later I’ll finally come back to writing only to realize I’ve lost my train of thought and all momentum and I’ll just give up and scrap it. And this happen fifty times a day.
But not anymore! Right after I finish this post I’m going to town on my list of feeds. I’m going to prune the hell out of them. It’s going to be like watching Edward Scissorhands cut hedges. Bam. In fact, fuck the rest of this post, I’m going to go do it right now.
September 11, 2008, 12:13am
