It’s that time of year again, when resolutions are made and things of old are thrown out to make room for the new. My house is no different, in fact as I write this, my fiancée is clearing out a few kitchen cupboards along with a myriad other activities. Not to be outdone, I wondered if we bloggers can apply the same cleansing process to our virtual homes. I started by taking stock of my time on the computer.
Somewhat worryingly I found that I spend an inordinate amount of time catching up on e-mails, RSS feeds and Twitter.
Information Can Be Detrimental To Your Knowledge
One of the main problems I’ve faced recently is information overload. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on blogging and social marketing and anything else related to becoming a freelance writer. All of this led to downloading various e-books, subscribing to RSS feeds and e-mail lists and the end result is that I’m going round in circles. With no obvious way off this merry-go-round, something had to be done.
Now I should point out that I am a hoarder, an avid collector of things based on the simple premise of “just in case”. If you told me to throw something out my usual retort would be “but it might come in handy one day. Better keep it just in case”. Imagine the prospect of me being able to successfully clean up my carefully constructed spaghetti of digital information!
I knew it wouldn’t be easy but here’s how I got it done.
How to De-clutter Google Reader
One of the great things about Google Reader is the “Trends” page. This incredibly useful statistics tool gives you an insight into your subscription and reading habits including percentage read. They even have an unsubscribe link next to each entry which is really handy as it removes a potential block. Without it, you’d have to navigate to the specific feed, click on a drop down menu and then click Unsubscribe. That additional bit of work, though minor, could be enough to make you procrastinate or even change your mind.
My tips for getting started:
- Decide on some metrics and apply them. The best place to start is to compare Items per Day against percentage read. Whatever you decide on…
- Be vindictive. Don’t hesitate in hitting the unsubscribe button. Having said that…
- Use discretion where necessary. Some of my subscriptions update once a month so the trends page reports a 0% reading trend which I know to be untrue.
Using those three tips I’ve cut my feed subscriptions down from 70+ to 53 and there’s still some more that can go.
How to De-clutter Your Inbox
This task is a little harder since you don’t have statistics to back up your decisions so a little more conviction is called for. You can approximate the process though by asking yourself some questions:
- When did I last act on an email sent by [insert sender here]
- When did I last read an email from [insert sender here] rather than just ‘mark as read’
If it really is a difficult choice, see if you can subscribe by RSS instead, then set a date in your calendar to review it in 3 months using Google Reader’s trends page.
How to Deal with Twitter
One of the things that irritates me about desktop clients such as Twhirl or TweetDeck is that messages that are “marked as read” still appear in your timeline the next time you log in and with no obvious distinction between what you’ve read and what you haven’t, Twitter can be overwhelming, particularly if you follow a lot of people.
Another problem I face comes from following BBC News. The Beeb feed often updates with 1 to 3 Tweets at a time! Catching up first thing in the morning is getting to be a burden. There must be an easier way to stay up to date than this?
Admittedly I have yet to come up with a solution to Twitter; it’s too useful to ignore but it’s rapidly becoming a timesink. Anyone have any tips for me? How do you manage your Twitter time? Or your e-mail and RSS for that matter?
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