…which has put me ahead in some ways. Coming back to a pile of email, snail mail, and feeds made me realize how much time I spend absorbing information that is either useless or redundant. Do I really need to know that Mike Arrington is burned out or that he’s thin-skinned? Is it absolutely necessary to read in six different places that Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton are bickering over whether Netscape is a dismal failure or burgeoning success (Loren Feldman at 1938 Media has some commentary, though)? Did I really gain anything by scrolling through over 400 Digg posts that were, for the most part, repeats of what I’d already read elsewhere or just silly nonsense? The answers to all of those questions was “No.”
I had well over 2,000 unread blog posts in a bunch of different categories and it was overwhelming. This was after sorting through 400 emails for the biz, the job, personal, and advertising that wasn’t spam. ADHD overload. That’s what I was feeling. Moreover, a week away from it all proved that the world kept turning even if I didn’t read the very latest news in the zillion areas of interest that I have.
Still, there were some posts in that 2,000 that were extremely important to me, that I would have been worse for not reading. Denise’s post on her ClubMom blog about how she felt about the Walmart contribution to Out & Equal: Workplace Advocates Summit really hit home with me. Amy Gahran had a great post on blog popularity, influence, and the Technorati formula for “authority”. Doc Searls wrote a terrific post about having a relationship with Flickr, but not Yahoo! in relation to the value of the Flickr brand (Amen, Doc!).
Other posts that were worth reading: Pam’s post on Blogher singing the praises of train travel, though her posts focuses more on European trains — we really have to get Amtrak some positive blog buzz going! Dave Slusher, on the other hand, has had an abysmal airline experience, including lost luggage, delayed and cancelled flights, and killing time in airports. They made me glad we opted for the train. Lee’s wonderful elves, Robert Scoble’s newest Photowalking videos, 4AlterEgo’s post discussing the recent bizarre report about abortion being to blame for worker shortages (some of the most bizarre logic I’ve ever seen is in that weird report), Liz’ admonition to parents contemplating divorce, and Maryam’s hysterical post on husbands, laundry and household chores. I even found a new blog to ADD to my feeds (SIGH) — design fckr (make what you will of the name — it’s a great resource for design ideas).
Reading Lea Hernandez’ blog “Dangerous Beauty” is humbling. I cannot imagine losing my home in a fire, having my kids in a school where the principal is a bully who not only bullies kids but parents, dealing with trying to recover years of art I created along with memories and the horrible memory of losing beloved pets in the fire, yet still having a heart of thanksgiving.
Are you seeing a trend to the blogs I’ve mentioned? I did. And identifying the trend called for a feed housecleaning. The first thing I did was to delete every single mainstream news feed except two: the first is our local newspaper, the second is a feed from my employer. All of the other news feeds went — Washington Post, CNet, NYTimes — all gone. I did this because this is fact: I am NOT a newsbreaker. That’s not what I do here. What I do here is write about stuff that interests me, and if it is reported on the mainstream feeds, I’m blogging it because it showed up on one of my favorite bloggers’ feeds and I find myself having something to say about it or just want to bring attention to it.
The second thing I did was to arrange my feeds into Bloglines Playlists according to categories. My major categories are: Friends, Design, Tech, ADHD/Education/Parenting, Internet (Web 2.0), Photography, Politics, Health and Local News. Using their new Glimpse feature, I can peek at the first 5 posts per feed and scan the posts I want to read quickly.
Hopefully doing this will help to deliver the blog content that is most important to me, that carries the most authority (regardless of how many blogs link to it) without reading through a bunch of repetitive news that I don’t need to have in the first place.
Any suggestions on how to do even more streamlining? Oh, and if you haven’t visited some of the posts I linked to, they’re all highly recommended and carry a LOT of authority with me no matter what Technorati or Techmeme have to say. (Techmeme went out the window, too, by the way)
Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, bloglines, authority, organization, time management, adhd
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