Ask Unclutterer: Managing RSS feeds

Reader Lucia submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

I like following a lot of websites in a RSS reader — I use Google Reader — but sometimes it’s too much. I check it and there are more than I can read. Now the count is 1000+. Help!

This is a great question and a problem that I’m sure many of us have faced in our online lives. Here are two tips that I hope will help:

  1. Declare RSS Reader bankruptcy. If you have more posts than you could possibly read in two hours cluttering up your RSS reader, it’s time to start fresh. In the left-hand column of your Google Reader homepage, click on the link to “All items.” Then, in the middle column, click on the “Mark all as read” button. Poof! Instantly you are all caught up with reading your RSS feeds.
  2. Create prioritized categories. Once you are out from under the slew of unread posts, you can set up a system to prioritize future readings. Instead of organizing your RSS feeds by content, order them by priority. I have three: Must Read, Really Like, and Fun. My “Must Read” category is filled with blogs I need to read every day for professional reasons. For instance, my Unclutterer feed is in this category so that I can make sure our RSS feed is functioning properly. “Really Like” is filled with close friends and favorite business, writing, and organizing blogs. And “Fun” is filled with silly, but low-priority blogs.

    When I’m pressed for time, I go to the “Subscriptions” list in the left-hand menu and then click on the “Must Read” folder to only see the most important posts. If I get through this list quickly, I’ll click on the folder for “Really Like” and get through as many as I can before my scheduled blog-reading time has expired. Whatever I don’t get to, either gets marked as read (see tip #1) or just sits unread if I know I’ll have more time later in the day to do some reading.

    To create categories, click on the blue “Manage subscriptions >>” link in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen. Select the “Subscriptions” tab in the orange menu bar. Then, click on the drop down menu next to one of your feeds and highlight the very last option “New Folder.” Create your Must Read, Really Like and Fun folders and then assign all of your blog feeds to those three categories. When you’re finished, choose “<< Back to Google Reader" in the orange settings bar to return to your feed reader. Whenever you add a subscription, you need to manually assign it to a folder.

When reading RSS feeds, I like to set a timer and only read blogs for a set amount of time. If not, I can spend hours cruising through the internet. Obviously, I hope that Unclutterer makes your “Must Read” list! And, for anyone reading this post who doesn’t know what an RSS reader is, be sure to check out Matt’s post on this subject “RSS feeds: A primer.”

Thank you, Lucia, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column.

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

Posted by Erin on Apr 17, 2009 | Comments

23 comments posted

  1. Posted by Brian - 04/17/2009

    I use “mark all as read” at least once a day. I’m sure I miss lots of good stuff, but I figure that if something is important enough, lots of people will post about it or someone will share it with me, so I’ll see it eventually.

  2. Posted by Eric - 04/17/2009

    I use google reader as well. The trick I’ve found is keyboard shortcuts and speed reading. I use the expanded new items view and just go from item to item with the ‘j’ key ( or to back up ‘k’ ). I use stars ‘s’ or view ‘v’ if something is remotely interesting and keep going.

    I always try to read the whole new feed before going to do something else.

    If it goes over a few hundred ( say on vacation or something ) I have an “important” folder that I read and then mark all as read.

  3. Posted by Shawn - 04/17/2009

    The prioritized folders idea is so simple, yet I had not thought of it :) Thanks! Now all my feeds are binned into either A, B, or C priority folders. In honour of this quality advice I put Unclutterer in A of course ;)

  4. Posted by Mo - 04/17/2009

    You can take advantage of some of Firefox’s features. Bookmark folders have a “open all in tabs” option down at the bottom. Stuff that I read when I’m in the mood rather than I need to goes in those. I have a quilting blogs one, writing blogs, etc.

    There is also a great add-in called Morning Coffee. You add websites to it (choosing every day, M-F, weekends, an individual day, …). When you click on its coffee cup icon, it opens your sites for that day in tabs. Great for occasionally updating sites.

    I like these because it lets me choose when I am accessing something, rather than drinking from the firehose in the reader. (which still has a fair amount of stuff in it.)

  5. Posted by Gumnos - 04/17/2009

    In my Google Reader (GR) setup, I have a “Read All” tag for my must-reads, and a “Read Fast” tag for my feeds that have a lot of noise (Local & World news, tech/gadget news that I only sample). I read them in list-view rather than expanded-view, only expanding those that have headlines worth that pique my interest. I also only show unread items. After scanning the headlines for a given category, I use the “A” keyboard shortcut to mark the rest as read. GR is smart enough to not consider them actually “read” (affecting Trends statistics) but doesn’t bother showing them to you again. You can then use the Trends page to see the percentage of ones you actually read in relation to the volume of feed traffic, allowing you to unclutter your feeds, weeding out the noise.

  6. Posted by Isolde - 04/17/2009

    You just saved my life ! Yesterday I wrote on my own blog “I can’t make out with my RSS feeds”, and began to unsubscribe to most of them. And today your post to help me not to throw myself in the same mess again. Thank you so much !

  7. Posted by Eric Lightbody - 04/17/2009

    I also wrote on some tricks for conquering google reader here: http://www.ericlightbody.com/2.....le-reader/

  8. Posted by Mike Dunham - 04/17/2009

    I was about to comment on the Read It Later extension, but I followed Eric Lightbody’s link and saw he mentioned it. I check Reader in two passes now – first is headlines-only, clicking the checkmark for the ones I want to read, and then I go through Read It Later.

    I also use categories, but I do it a bit differently. I have a couple of categories that have either a LOT of information (regular news feeds from newspapers and such) or a lot of redundant information (four football news feeds, for instance; nearly every story will be on a minimum of three of them). If I go a couple days without checking Reader, I start with these categories because I can cut through hundreds of headlines in just a couple minutes. The number of unread stories remaining in my other feeds is usually pretty manageable at that point.

  9. Posted by Joe Chiarelli - 04/17/2009

    Great idea. I use netnewsgator as it sync, i can view on the web or in my client app at home.
    Great idea for using folders..

  10. Posted by Ryan Glitaro - 04/17/2009

    TIP 1

    Here’s another tip to help you at least feel less stressed about your constantly rising unread counts – HIDE IT!

    On the left hand panel, next to Subscriptions, click the little arrow key for a drop down menu, and you can select Show Unread Counts, or Hide Unread Counts. Hide them – the subs will still show in bold but you won’t have that big looming ’67′ nagging you that you have all this work to do to get through 67 posts.

    You can do the same up at the top in the section that shows All Items.

    TIP 2

    Also, this has been said before, but it’s liberating to just select All Items, and Mark All As Read. Done. Just think, before you had all this content streaming into Google Reader, you got along just fine without reading every post on every blog about every subject you’re interested in! You’ll feel that little twinge of “OMG, what if I missed something important!”. For like 5 seconds. And then relief. Move on with your day. :)

    TIP 3

    I also find myself often clicking Mark All Read on blogs that I used to read more voraciously. If that’s the case, I just remove the subscription. I can always pop in on the site from time to time, the old-fashioned way (by, you know, actually visiting the site) if I need a fix. This works especially well when I have a few blogs with mostly duplicate content.

  11. Posted by bluestar - 04/17/2009

    Anyone have a good tip for how to deal with things in your reader that you really want to hang on to for future reference? I subscribe to a lot of design blog feeds and I often want to save something for a future project or whatever. Right now I’m just starring the items, but I have a RIDICULOUS amount of starred items. I tried using tags instead, but was annoyed that the tags were all listed (and you couldn’t collapse them) under the “Subscriptions” heading on the left hand side. Any tips would be appreciated!

  12. Posted by Mike Harris - 04/17/2009

    I use Read It Later. I use it not to serve me pages to read one at a time, but it adapts Google Reader so that by merely hitting ‘i’, you bookmark the true URL of the item … and you can have it automatically remove the page from the folder once you do read it. It’s a great Firefox extension.

  13. Posted by E Duff - 04/17/2009

    I use NetVibes as an RSS reader, having found Google Reader too much like my already-overburdened inbox. NetVibes lets you organize your feeds in tabs. For each tab, a page displays with portlets showing the titles of the most recent posts from each feed. You set a number of posts to display for each feed. Mousing over a headline displays a snippet of content, so you don’t have to open anything unless you’re really interested. And new content pushes old content out of the viewer. I find this a nice way to have a general sense of developments from the feeds I follow just by scanning the headlines on each of my tabs a few times a day and clicking only on the content which appears important.

  14. Posted by NEENZ - 04/17/2009

    Seeing the number of unread items begins the first domino of feeling overwhelmed, besides ‘knowing’ you haven’t tackled your reader in awhile.

    Check out: http://my.alltop.com — allows you to set up a webpage of your favorite feeds, displays the titles of the last 5 posts, and hover provides a summary of each post. And, there’s no ‘unread’ number :)

    Disclosure: I am the Chief Evangelist of Alltop

  15. Posted by Organizing Your Way | Surfin’ the Net: 4/12-4/18 - 04/18/2009

    [...] shares tips for managing your RSS feeds, as well as an old Unclutterer post with some tough questions to ask yourself about stuff. This is [...]

  16. Posted by Knitwych - 04/18/2009

    Bluestar, have you tried Google Notebook? I use this quite a lot, for work-related and hobby-related things. It’s very easy to organize. I have a To Sort notebook, where I’ll save everything I think I’m interested in. About once a week, I sort that folder, putting things into their appropriate notebooks.

  17. Posted by brandy - 04/18/2009

    Thanks for this post. I just finished following your advice and it feels so much cleaner in my GR. I had made some categories, but they were too specific. I like your prioritization method better. We’ll see how it works.

  18. Posted by Trevor Bramble - 04/19/2009

    I’ve found that processing feeds to zero is not as important as it is with email. I have around 550 unread items in Google Reader right now, and while some way of partitioning the items would be useful, I find I manage well enough by keeping the subscription count low (83, currently) and by immediately processing whatever I can in bursts.

    That is, I’ll go down the list of new arrivals and mark read anything that’s not interesting at all, read or bring up in a new tab anything that might be worth reading, and ignoring the items I plainly don’t have time to read at the moment but I might want to read later.

    Once every day or more I’ll pull up a few things from the most and least recent ends of the list to read, but I don’t set any artificial limits on it as my (limited) attention span makes that unnecessary. =^)

    So it’s a revolving queue of about 500&ldash;600 items and I feel it takes up a comfortably-sized amount of my time and attention.

  19. Posted by „Karrierebibel-Newsletter vom 20. April“ auf karrierebibel.de – Jeden Tag mehr Erfolg! - 04/20/2009

    [...] (Unclutterer): Wie lassen sich über 1000 RSS-Feeds managen und lesen? Im Prinzip: gar nicht. Allerdings lässt [...]

  20. Posted by Melanie Baker - 04/22/2009

    Actually, we can do much better than that. No bankruptcy! :)

    (This is self-promotion-y, but intended to help, so hopefully that’s okay.)

    We have a Firefox plugin for Google Reader that works with all your existing feeds, and enables you to filter them to whatever volume level you like: http://gr.aiderss.com/

    The technology behind it is PostRank, which analyzes audience engagement with posts and assigns a score. Audience engagement consists of various metrics for how people read, interact with, organize, and share posts — comments, delicious bookmarks, tweets, etc. (http://www.postrank.com/postrank/).

    There’s a drop-down field that enables you to select a filtering level, from “All” to “Best”. Or, if you prefer filtering numerically, you can press Ctrl and Z and change it to a text box and filter by “7″, for example (which will then display all the posts in a feed that have scored a PostRank of 7 or above.

    A broader solution outside of Google Reader or Firefox is our website (http://postrank.com), where you can analyze feeds and filter subscriptions by PostRank score or topic keywords (so if you wanted to subscribe to Unclutterer, but only get posts about “office” uncluttering, for example). You can then export those filtered feeds to any reader of your choice.

    (More on those options here: http://blog.postrank.com/getting-started/)

    Or, if you’re looking for pre-vetted content, we’ve added PostRank Discovery, which enables you to discover, share, and add feeds according to specific topic areas (so you can create a reading list of tips ‘n’ tricks sites, for example, and share it, or discover someone else’s).

    You can also request topics be added to the PostRank NewsRoom (http://postrank.com/twitter), which tweets great articles by topic to followers of that topic.

    Hope that helps!

  21. Posted by Engadget or Gizmodo? Which do you hit up first? - MacTalk Forums - 09/10/2009

    [...] over 2700 unread items after a couple of days. o.O This tweet by Google Reader alerted me to this blog post. Summary: *Turn off the item count and LET YOUR FEEDS GROW WILD! *Just make a "- must [...]

  22. Posted by Pruning blog posts from syndication feeds :: Interactive Llama :: Interactive media tutorials and tips - 09/17/2009

    [...] don’t regularly get to read your feeds you have too many in your feed reader that you should declare RSS bankruptcy (similar to email bankruptcy). Another option is to create categories so that one category is for [...]

  23. Posted by Rachelskirts - 10/24/2009

    Someone may have already mentioned this, but I once saw a great recommendation of four categories to implement in your Google Reader:

    1. Daily Reads
    2. Weekly Reads
    3. Occasional Reads
    4. Probation

    Feeds that stay in that last folder too long without getting read should be trashed, and the rest of the feeds should be moved around until you’re comfortable with the flow of things. This might not work for everyone, but it’s worth trying if you’re desperate for a Google Reader makeover.

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