Officially Lucky

About a month ago I decided to initiate an experiment. I would switch over to Google Reader and reboot my feed reading tactics. I had read posts by Matt Wood and Jason Kottke (who had expanded on Matt’s system). I had accumulated a very hodge-podge organization system which had grown quite wooly over the past four years or so. At one point I was reading up to 500 subscriptions daily when I was writing for Ars on a regular basis, and with a poor organization system it was get quite overwhelming. My previous system looked like this:

• Ars
  • Ars Projects
• Django Tags

• People I Know (not accurate)

  • Online
  • Wichita
  • Chicago
  • Purdue

• Development

  • Webdev
  • Django
  • Misc

• Miscellaneous

  • Emerging (what does this even mean?)
  • Personalities (people like Winer, Scoble, et cetera)
  • Consumerism
  • Technology
  • Others

• Status Messages

As you can see, this got quite out of hand. There were feeds not necessarily in a sub folder, and it was quite daunting to attack the things I wanted to read when I’d let it sit for even a single day. Once I reduced the amount of writing I did for Ars, I cut myself back to around 215 feeds I enjoyed and it helped, but prioritizing my reading during my new job and freelance work was still difficult. Out of that list above, where do you start when you just want to spend 30 minutes catching up on things? There could be important, really enjoyable feeds in any number of folders.

So with this situation, it was with much glee that I decided to give Matt and Jason’s techniques a whirl. After about a month’s worth of use, I can proudly say that I feel much more happy about my reading and, with the help of Google Reader’s suggestion system, I’ve been adding lots of really interesting feeds. The great thing about this system is that you can throw on 100 new feeds for evaluation purposes and not have your “required reading” bogged down in the process.

I started with four core folders, or tags as Google Reader uses them.

• Always
• Often
• Sometimes
• Pending

I added a few more areas to fit my personal reading style:

• Adult. Stuff like Violet Blue, Fleshbot, some photoblogs. Basically stuff you don’t want to accidentally read at work! ;)
• Advertising
• Blog Aggregators (mostly for the Ars Lounge Feedjack)
• Fashion + Decoratiing
• Food Blogs
• High volume (Gizmodo, Ars Technica, GigaOM, io9, TechCrunch, TechMeme, things of that sort)
• Music Blogs
• My Sites (to make sure my own feeds are behaving nicely)
• News + Updates
• Links
• Tumble (for the few tumblelogs I follow, I find most of them to be pretty annoying)

That last selection of tags should not draw you away from the fast that by-and-large, I tend mostly to stick to the first four when I’m down for some quick reading. The long list is to draw out items I’m definitely interested, but those that can wait for later when I’m in a hurry.

As you might expect, when I just need to get to the best stuff, I read the Always group, if I have a little bit more time, the Often group, and so forth. When I’m super bored and brain dead I’ll start digging through the long list.

I can now prioritize my reading based on my current availability and add new blogs I think I might find interesting to the Pending group so I can evaluate them on my own time. This is the part I particularly like the most. With my previous system I dreaded adding new feeds because I know that it would just add more of a load to that which was already crushing down on me. Now I can add things with abandon because they’re separated out. I currently have 90 subscriptions in my Pending folder which I will be going through today and culling out. Depending on how much each subscription has captivated me, it will be placed into one of those four main groups. I’ll be sure to make a post on the interesting new blogs I’ve picked up over the past month.

Happy reading!