This might come as some surprise to those who know me well, but it had to be done.
Ever since December (and maybe longer), I’ve been having a really hard time keeping up with it all. You’ve probably noticed that my post frequency is way down. I’ve been trying to spend more time IRL. This has been at the expense of time blogging, reading blogs, social networking, and the like. If I haven’t thrown a sheep at you recently, I apologize.
All the while, my feed reader kept on doing its thing: always harvesting blog posts by the dozen from association types, Realtors, social media experts, etc. Only I didn’t come by to partake in the harvest very often. Many times over the past few months, I have been greeted by 1000+ unread items in my Google reader.
This brought on a dreadful guilty feeling. How the heck would I ever get through them all? There’s no way I could. So, I’d skim through some of my absolute favorites, read a few more in depth, and then leave, knowing that there were (at least) hundreds more posts to be scanned.
Then I got practical: On at least two occasions, I utilized what I considered the nuclear option: Mark all as read. But alas, I’d return a week or so later to the same quadruple digit menace: 1000+ unread items.
Same damn problem: Come back after a week or two to find it all filled up again. That was it. I accepted defeat.
I think it was Helen Mosher who first gave me the idea to just unsubscribe from everything. So I went looking for the real nuclear option. If I’ve inspired you to try it, here’s where to find it in Google Reader:
Settings >> Subscriptions >> Select all feeds >> Click “unsubscribe” button.
I have to tell you, it’s a pretty liberating feeling. I figure if the blog post is important enough, it’ll find me.
Apparently one of my Twitter followers was incredulous at first but now has followed suit and unsubscribed from all feeds too.
Eventually I’ll start adding feeds back, but in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the guilt-free feeling of having no feeds to read.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Great advice and I may take you up on it, but are you just replacing one feed (RSS) with another (twitter)? Eliminate 129 Google Reader feeds by following over 700 people on twitter. Either way it’s still hard for information addicts to keep up with everything.
Jeremy, for some reason I feel much less guilt about not reading tweets than not reading blog posts.
Wow. I too have thought about it. Right now I am just reading a few here and there. And to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have even seen this post if I hadn’t seen it on Twitter.
I just a Twitter purge for the same reason – I like having a life and the nonstop posts made it tough to keep up with those that mattered…
I lost all my RSS subs once on accident (no backup to recover from). I found it pretty freeing as well. Of course, I’m back to over a hundred now.
This reminds me of that e-mail bankruptcy meme from last year.
I personally ave never subscribed to any RSS feeds (Not counting Podcasts), and my personal blog has over 3500 followers and 100,000 page views a month. You are absolutely right, if it is important enough you will find it. Plus if you follow the right people on twitter they will filter out what is worth reading for you.
And I thought it was glorious just to mark all as “read” without reading them when I came back from vacation. Can’t imagine (gulp) deleting them all. You’re a brave man. Now you have planted the seed…maybe I could not delete them all, but at least weed out the ones that sounded good but don’t offer much after all?
Baby steps.
hmm. will I make the “resubscribe” cut, I wonder?
There is a less drastic measure, which is just to cull your google reader every few weeks and unsubscribe from a few blogs at a time. Or, every time you subscribe to something new, unsubscribe to something old. I actually unsubscribed from all the individual blogs in the a-list bloggers list and just read the aggregate – but after the fact, I realized that I’ve now lowered everyone’s subscriber count by one. That’s not very link-loving, is it. Not sure what to do about that. Not sure that was a good idea.
I feel like things are definitely changing. Brian Solis has seen it, of course, per his post about blogs losing their authority in the statusphere. Maybe we’re all moving towards really truly lifestreaming, not just checking tools out.
Hi Maddie,
You bring up something that I have been thinking about for a long time. I don’t have nearly as many feeds as many of you but I still find myself overwhelmed some times and I do feel guilty when I hit the “mark as all read” button because I just don’t have time to read the feeds and comments that bloglines is notifying me about. I have wondered if just subscribing to a few of the key aggregators (a-list bloggers network, comment-o-matic, etc) would be enough since the majority of blogs I subscribe to at this point are covered here. What does everyone think? Would I be missing out or saving myself time and guilt when I don’t get to everything?
Have a nice weekend.
Scott – At least with Google Reader I see my subscription groups as my own aggregates where I can then filter down by individual feed if I want to. Yet, I’m still suffering the blog fatigue.
I think some times people are producing too much content and that’s why it can get a little overwhelming. I find myself skipping over these feeds the most, which then I ask myself why don’t I just unsubscribe? Of course then I’ll stumble upon a morsel that keeps my pallet wet.
I too look to Twitter to figure out what posts my colleagues find valuable. I think the blog is losing it’s power as a destination, but now the content is what makes it rise to the top of the Twitter stream. It is no longer the whole blog itself that has value, but how shareable the individual post is and who and where it’s exported to.
I would look at creating a listing of no more that 10-12 that you MUST see. No matter the subject matter and figure them out and keep them. I’ m going to do this now…