One short answer — for sure! I think that RSS is a great thing and when I heard from it first, it was a time saver for me! At the time — something like end 2006 — I was reading some sites regularly but not via RSS but instead via going to each of the sites and watching the news which arrived while I was not there.
That was in the past. After I got used to RSS and RSS-Readers, I was able to save about 3/4 of an hour — per day! That has changed! Now I spend about 1 hour per day skimming through my RSS Reader and saving long reads for later which take some more time to read! That — in fact — is exactly the opposite of what RSS was for me in the first place. Now it costs more time than before!
And that is what, why I thought about how to save time reading less but staying at the top of the news. And I found a way — which looks like it will work for me:
First of, I look through my RSS Subscriptions from time to time, searching ‘dead’ once and looking at each feed skimming through the headlines, looking if I found the posts interesting enough to read or if I just noticed that there was a new post but did not read it because I was not interested. After that, I — most of the time — have 10 subscriptions less and that is an great improvement in saved time per day.
The second thing I changed was the way I read. At first I wanted to read long posts the minute they arrive. That was an wrong attempt. Now I save longer posts to read them later when I have time. That can be 2 weeks later or just 2 days but either way, it is better than reading it if I need to get other stuff done — and longer posts most of the time have no reference to actual happenings.
The third thing is that I check my RSS in batch. I now more start NetNewsWire at computer startup rather than checking about twice a day — mostly short after I started to work and than short before I go to bed. Sometimes — if I have nothing else to get done — I tend to jump into the RSS reader to get time down, which I need to stop cause there is never nothing else to get done!
One more thing about which RSS subscriptions I deleted when I was under pressure. While I was at preparation for my final exams, I unsubscribed from blogs like NETTUTS, PSDTUTS and other tutorial blogs. If you not currently trying to actually do the things, you should not follow that blogs. I use these sites but not that regularly that I need to get each and every post right into my head. I use them if I have a problem to solve, than these sites are the go to resources to get tutorials.
