Are you one of those people who feels compelled to read every story that comes through your RSS reader? Do you find yourself spending more time in Google Reader, Feedly, or some other RSS tool than you should.  It occurred to me recently that I might be able to apply the GTD concept of “processing to zero” to my RSS reader inbox.  So I thought I would share some of the initial ideas that I’ve been using for the past few weeks to mitigate wasted time and see if they reverberated with anyone else.

Since I have a full time job, I don’t have a lot of time to spend sifting through the barrage of RSS articles that come in on a daily basis.  I find it’s more information than I care to deal with on a daily basis.  Sometimes it seems downright futile to try and get the unread count to zero.  But I think that recognizing subtle differences between an email inbox and an RSS inbox might help better manage the amount of information you’re actually processing in full.

The RSS inbox: how is it different from an email inbox?

For starters, the more RSS feeds you subscribe to the more posts you will get.  So make sure that you’re subscribed to feeds that give relevant information for you.  If not, unsubscribe.  The type of sources you subscribe to can also affect the amount of information that lands in your RSS inbox.  Blogs or news sources can churn out magnitudes more content per day than a private blog with a single author.   Subscribing to too many of the high-volume feeds can fill up your RSS inbox very quickly.  So limit the number of high volume feeds to 1 or 2 if possible.  Let’s take a look at what we can do to process all of the information more efficiently

1. Determine your goal

The relevance of these methods depends on who you are and what you’re trying to get out of the information flowing into your RSS reader.  If you’re just casually trying to keep up to date with the latest technology trends or news then you may want to easy back on the throttle of a clockwork system like I’ve described.  However, if you’re a blogger or reading information relevant to your job you may want to take it very seriously so that you get a good return on your investment (i.e. that previous time we never have enough of).   If you’re in the first group then you may take these tips more lightly than if you’re in the second group.  Decide what type of RSS user you are.

2. Take it or leave it

For the sake of this article, let’s suppose you’re an average developer who uses an RSS reader.  There are probably more new posts coming into your RSS reader than your email inbox.  Chances are that a good chunk of the information flowing in has less bearing on your success from day to day as a developer.  So you could potentially ignore quite a bit of it and save your time for only the articles that you know will be of interest.  This means that you are not obligated to read everything. I know, this can be hard!  But just like GTD has a maximum of 2 minutes to process each task we should set a fixed amount of time per post or article.  30 seconds or less should be sufficient to read the title and the description or first few paragraphs to get an idea for whether or not the article meets our internal definition definition of “interesting” or “relevant”.  If it doesn’t pass, move on.

3. Set your limits

Now how do we process what we think is potentially relevant?  Give yourself a set amount of time per day to process through actionables. To keep yourself from falling into the black hole of reading articles all day use a timer or some reminder to let you know when time is up and move on to whatever else you do.  It may also be a good idea to schedule the time you process the same every day.  Put it on your calendar.  Whatever.  Just be consistent and you will reinforce the habit.

4. Process once per day

While you’re processing or reading through actionables more stuff is going to keep pouring in.  Avoid the temptation to try and keep up with the constant flow of information.  Process through your feeds one by one and once you’re done, stop.  Don’t go back and try to catch up on what happened in the last 3-5 minutes.  That’s what tomorrow is for.

5. Use keyboard shortcuts

I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts and use them whenever I can.  In fact, I’ve been known to choose applications based on whether they support keyboard shortcuts or not.  Find a reader that supports keyboard shortcuts and you’ll find you can process quicker and more efficiently.

As someone who practices GTD for email and other tasks daily (I try my best anyways), this type of system maps well onto RSS readers.  Others may think it’s overkill.  I’m still working it out myself but I’ve definitely noticed improvements in the last several months from staying within the guidelines I’ve described.  Do you find this system may be useful for you as well? Are already practicing a similar approach?  Or do you think it’s overkill?  Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Related Posts:

• 3 ways to improve GTD implementations

Lately I’ve been ramping my Web design skills back up in order to get a couple of websites up and running for my wife’s businesses. Color schemes are one thing that are not one of my stronger suites.  I always find it difficult to put together a group of colors that I’m happy with. There are plenty of free color pickers and even some color scheme tools.  However, none of them seem to be an all-encompassing tool that does it all.

That is, until I read a recent post over at devloung.net that mentions a tool called Color Scheme Designer.  This tool has it all from the rich, user-friendly interface (including super-helpful tooltips) to the example web pages that let you see your color scheme in action. Add to that the ability to enable different color models (e.g. mono, compliment, triad, and others) as well as “undo/redo” multiple times.  It even has “vision simulations” that let you test your scheme for different levels of color blindness.  I could waste hours playing with Color Scheme Designer!

Do you use any color tools that you can’t live without?

Firefox search bar

I think the search bar is fantastic feature of Firefox.  However, I have found that pointing and clicking to change search engines is a real pain.  I’ll show you how you can switch search engines with lightning speed using some simple keyboard shortcuts.

Highlight the search bar

You can highlight the search bar by pressing Cmd-K (Mac)  or Ctrl-K (Win).  Once it’s highlighted type your search terms and hit Enter to perform the search with the selected search engine.

Change search engines

A simple way to change the search engine is to press Cmd-Up/Cmd-Down (Mac) or Ctrl-Up/Ctrl-Down (Win).  This will change the search engine icon to the left of the search field.  It’s quick but it’s sometimes hard to tell what the search engine is just by the icon.  Sure, after a while you’ll remember which is which but I’m not a huge fan.  This is where the next shortcut comes in handy.

Change search engines the lazy and efficient way

If you’d rather do a find-as-you-type style search over the search engines you can press Opt-Up/Opt-Down (Mac) or  Alt-Up/Alt-Down (Win).  This will pop up the list of search engines as if you’d clicked on the search engine icon with the mouse.  Now type the first letter of the search engine you want to change to and it will automatically be highlighted.  If you have more than one search engine that begins with the same first letter just keep pressing the same letter key until you’ve highlighted the one you want.  Press Enter to select and engine.

Search bar with engine list expanded

Reordering search engines. keep most used at the top and least used at the bottom.

It might be helpful to keep your most used search engines at the top of the list for easier navigation.  To reorder the search engine list, click on the search engine icon to expose the drop-down list (or use one of the keyboard shortcuts described above).  Click on Manage Search Engines.  Drag the engines around to arrange them as you like.

Wordpress note

I’m using the Advanced TinyMCE editor in Wordpress and Cmd-K is either bound to some action inside the editor or simply doesn’t work when your cursor is inside the editor field.  Press Tab to change the focus and then press Cmd-K to activate the search bar field.

As a corollary to the recent post I made about trying to recursively moving or copying directories with Ant, this post shows you how to do so without the use of the third-party ant-contrib library. The trick is understanding Ant’s wildcard syntax used in the type, which can be rather confusing.

Previously, I was trying to move a directory and all of its contents recursively to another directory using the following target

 
<target name="move.dirs">
 
    <move todir="backups">
        <fileset dir="." includes="*incremental*"/>
    </move>
 
</target>

The result was a non-recursive copy of the first level of directories with ‘incremental’ in the directory name. The only way I could accomplish a deep copy or move at the time was to use ant-contrib’s task to iterate over all files recursively. As I discovered after playing with my original script (above) a bit more, this is unnecessary.

By modifying the wildcard syntax in my original target I am able get what I want.

 
<target name="move.dir">
 
        <move todir="backups">
            <fileset dir="." includes="**/*incremental*/"/>
        </move>
 
</target>

So, the additional ‘**/’ at the beginning and a trailing ‘/’ at the end of the includes attribute value is all that is necessary. All directories (and their contents) with ‘incremental’ in the name will be moved to a directory called ‘backups/’. The same will work for the task. I won’t go into the details about how this syntax works but you can read about it here.

Related Post: Move or copy a set of directories using Ant

Gmail drag-and-drop labels

Today the Gmail team quietly made a minor change in its interface with respect to labels.  The label panel moved to a more permanent position below the Inbox and Sent Mail “folders” and above Contacts and Tasks.  The list of labels has also been shortened, allowing a user to drag and drop more frequently used labels in and out of the list.  Emails can now be dragged and dropped on top of labels like a more traditional thick client email system such as Outlook or Thunderbird.

I first noticed something suspicious today when my label list, normally on the right side of the interface thanks to a Gmail Labs tweak, moved to the left side.  After trying several times to move it back to the right side I gave up.  I figured there was a glitch or a bug or they simply disabled the tweak.  When I checked my mail tonight I got a very helpful bubble that explained the changes.  This may give some insight into how the team phased the change in to the interface, disabling the tweak first, then rolling out the update.  I’m intrigued by their update model.