Tackling Productivity Pitfalls of News Feeds

Tackling Productivity Pitfalls of News Feeds

First the newspaper web sites had RSS feeds. Then the bloggers got them. Corporate web sites sprouted them. Charities got them. Then sports teams, bands, venues, art galleries, shops and now pretty much every site and sometimes every page has a feed. And of course the allure of being kept bang up-to-date is irresistable to most of us.

Of course there's a problem. Like everyone else, you're on top of your email, right? No, thought not. And you probably only get a few dozen emails a day, whereas once you've set up the news feeds you need you could easily be getting hundreds of new articles per day. Just going through to check which ones aren't interesting, let alone reading the ones that are, could be a full-time job - but you've already got one of those.

So you certainly need some kind of filtering. Not all news readers have filters, so look out for one that does. Some, like Thunderbird, have straightforward rules so you can have everything mentioning the word "britney" automatically moved to the junk folder. This may take a bit of time to set up but it's quite precise. Others, like Google Reader, can learn your preferences by looking at the articles you mark as not interesting.

The other problem is that checking your news reader takes time. Some people recommend that you have a strict schedule for checking your email, say a couple of times in the morning and a couple of times in the afternoon, and you could apply this to checking your news feeds. But sometimes you do get a genuinely urgent email, and you know it'll probably be from your boss. And sometimes a genuinely important piece of news will hit a feed, and you don't want to be the last to know - after all that was the whole point of having news feeds in the first place.

One novel approach to this problem is NewsWeeder, which is a talking news reader. It doesn't just read out incoming news - apart from anything else that would take way too much time - it actually bundles new articles into bulletins and reads a short precis of each article. That means you don't even have to stop typing to get your news, and if anything important does come up you can follow it up immediately.

So, think twice next time you're about to click that RSS button, unless you have the tools to keep your feeds from taking over your life. A good reader can help you keep your productivity up without falling behind on the news.

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