rss

I won't quote you a zillion statistics on the problem information overload causes. I'm sure it's one of the items on the Galactic Scorecard that the Federation of Sentient Species uses to evaluate progress. You know, rate on a scale of 1-5 the following:

• Plays well with others (didn't annihilate selves with nuclear bombs)
• Picks up after self (didn't dirty the nest with pollution or global warming)
• Is careful with lunch money (didn't squander finite oil supply)
• Learns well (managed to create an effective planetary data network)
• ...

If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. -- Peter Drucker? [1], [2]

As a follow-up to Afraid to click? How to efficiently process your RSS feeds I decided to time a few of my RSS processing and organizing [3] sessions. I've included the results below, with average time spent/post in bold. (Note: See the above article for the simplified workflow I use.)

Here are the results:

Test 1

#    : 139 posts
avg  : 33 minutes / 139 posts -> 14 seconds/post

Test 2

#    : 81 posts
avg  : 26 minutes / 81 posts -> 19 seconds/post

Test 3

#    : 242 posts
avg  : 43 minutes / 242 posts -> 11 seconds/post

I recently came across Tim Ferriss's [1] entry How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning, which motivated me to post an "aha" I recently had about processing RSS feeds. (What I took away from the Scoble video was how selective he his in deciding to read a post, how he makes that choice, and that he uses feeds for "relationship work" - networking - so he can be smart when talking with someone. However, I didn't get much on how to handle so many feeds.)

The current spate of RSS feed-reading tools is missing a major feature: None of them (Bloglines, Google Reader, NetNewsWire, etc.) provide help with answering the major focus problem, "Which feeds should I pay attention to?" They are great at collection (one of the five GTD workflow phases I teach clients - gathering new feeds, and sorting them by source, date, number of unread, etc.) but that's just creating a bunch of haystacks. They still require us to laboriously look through each to find the needles (i.e., to assess value).