I’ve observed an interesting pattern in the way I keep up with RSS feeds.
When I have few items in my feed reader, say less than 10, I jump in and read them all. Interesting or not. This means I waste my time reading articles which aren’t interesting to me, because there’s just not a whole lot to read.
The logical next step is to subscribe to more feeds, and ones which are more targeted to my interests. What happens is that I fall behind and have to play catchup, which means I waste time reading posts which are out of date. This becomes frustrating, “screw it” and I stop reading feeds altogether.
Lately, I’ve been subscribing to even more blogs which completely overloads my Google Reader inbox. Mentally I realize that I will never be able to consume the information as fast as it comes in, so I just focus on current relevant posts and let the rest fall by the wayside.
I feel more in touch the past few weeks. More up to date, and interested in my topic again.