One important part of blogging is that one needs to keep himself up-to date, with all the happenings, news, events (or what ever you want to call it) of the particular subject on which one starts a blog. However, because there are so many blogs, online newspapers and various other media from where one can find information, it gets difficult to keep a track of each and everything. RSS readers help in reducing this pain, however information overload can make life difficult too.
1. Remove unwanted feeds – I’m damn sure that most of you’ll have many feeds that either don’t get updated often or don’t give enough value and its only that you were lazy enough to remove them that those feeds are still in your feed reader. Apart from that there are many feeds that update too much (read: Techcrunch, Mashable) that they don’t give enough value now. Make sure that you put all those feeds in a special folder, notice them for some time, if you think they are worth something then keep them else just remove them.
2. Create list of must read feeds – Always ensure that you have a separate folder of those feeds that you won’t miss at all. This folder should have only those feeds that you can’t live without and that you won’t take the chance of marking them read even if there are 1000s of unread items.
3. Use Google Alerts instead – I prefer to use Google alerts instead of subscribing to individual feeds as I get access to various other new blogs that I may not have come across and I get access to wider range. That way, I ensure that I stick to my niche and don’t divert myself from my main goal. Of course, it tells me little bit of information about my competitors too!
4. Use news aggregators – You may prefer to read Google news, Digg & Techmeme for quick access to the hottest information around the world. That way, you’ll not miss the important news and you’ll also be in a position to mark all items as read too.
I hope these simple tricks will save your time and eyes. Feel free to share your ways of dealing with information overload. It’s one thing that everyone is struggling with.
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Great tips mayank, I just posted about getting your Feed Reader organized and decluttered, maybe that is also interesting for you and your reader, http://notaniche.com/how-to-declutter-and-organiz...
It saves me a lot of time and keeps me from information overload.