Surfing the Digital Tsunami Part II: Going broad with RSS

Ok, so it took you, what, a few months or years to build up your RSS feed to it’s current beastliness?

You should not expect to get the RSS beast under control by just snapping your fingers.

Although finger snapping works too…

Snap fingers. RSS all gone

The fastest way to reduce your RSS load is to unsubscribe from everything, all at once. Takes a few minutes, it’s done.

That was easy!

Maybe too easy?

Let’s try keeping the baby and just throwing out the bathwater.

“Unbuilding” takes time too

Just as it took time build your current monstrous list, it’s going to take some time to “unbuild” it.

Here is how to do it in Google Reader.

First, go to “Subscriptions” and select “Show All” instead of “Show Unread.”

Now go through and “Unsubscribe” to each feed that isn’t relevant to your life, right now.

I’m doing this simultaneously with writing this post.

I’m finding stuff that hasn’t been updated in years! Unsubscribe.

Blogs and websites that are useful, but not relevant: Unsubscribe. Here’s one of mine: http://www.careerealism.com/. Very useful and interesting, excellent really, but not relevant for me. Works great, but I’m not looking for a career anymore, so no need to read.

Now, here’s the really tricky part: feeds that are interesting, useful AND relevant… you probably have a dozen or more of these in each category. I know I do. But a dozen feeds in copy writing, a dozen in sales, a dozen in entreprenuership, that’s just Too Much Information to take action on.

That is, when a feed is too useful, but you don’t have time to take action on the information, seriously consider unsubscribing from that feed until you have enough time to implement the excellent ideas you always read about.

Because taking action — right now — is necessary.

For example, I am removing all of my copy writing and sales feeds except for just one two. The one two I’m saving provide information I can rapidly act on daily, across my entire portfolio of blogs.

More criteria:

• Unsubscribe: Any blog that gives you useful information, but when you implement their recommendation, it doesn’t work, delete that feed.
• Unsubscribe: Websites with material you want to learn about in the future, delete those feeds too. They aren’t relevant right now, get them out of your head.
• Unsubscribe: Overly distracting feeds (Smashing Magazine *cough*) got to go. I know where to find these anyway, and will visit such sites even without having them in my feed.
• You probably don’t need more than one “strategy” blog. That is, find a “guru” you resonate with, follow him or her for a while. Unsubscribe from the rest. At the moment I’m reading all the Gary Halbert letters. You can look them up. It’s what Gary would tell you to do if he were still alive. (Yes, I am reading all of them.)
• Keep: Blogs from service providers such as http://aweber.com, http://37signals.com (disclaimer: I’m an affiliate of both and totally recommend these services, but just copy and paste the URLs above to find out more information). I’m keeping these feeds as long as the traffic is low and confined to news. Otherwise I unsubscribe if it’s high traffic information not immediately relevant. You probably get most of these in email anyway (topic of a future post), so having them in RSS is redundant and attention robbing.

You know you have the right size feed when:

1. you can check it once per day and the number of articles is not emotionally overwhelming, and
2. you can take action now on the one or at most a few useful feeds.

Now, take action!

Now that you have everything cleaned up, you have a very small number of highly informative feeds giving you exactly what you need to take action, right now.

As promised, here’s how: When I get a post from either of the two feeds I am following for information (Copy Blogger or from Total Package) I immediately read the post thoroughly, take notes, and implement everything relevant right away on every single one of my blogs and websites.

“But… I only have one blog!”

My current web strategy is having a broad portfolio of web sites on many different subjects. This works because I’m a modern polymath (which is really just a fancy way to say I’m smart but easily bored). As a result, I never run out of material to post, and whatever I am working on, there is more often than not a blog post lurking very close by!

You, on the other hand, may only have one web site… and blasting all those feeds away doesn’t leave you with enough meat to hang on your bony web site.

This is not a problem, and I’ll tell you why in the next article in this series, which changes focus of your RSS feed from “broad” to “deep” while working on a single website.

Tagged as: Immediate execution, RSS, Speed of Implementation