How to take control of your RSS feed reader…

“And it’s like, why can’t I be a good enough person to know things about anything? Why am I so pathetic that I can’t even read, like, 100 words a day? And then I have to hit the ‘pretend everything is read’ button, which is basically like hitting the ‘lie to yourself’ button. It’s embarrassing. I hate myself when I do it. It’s like the biggest possible failure you could have in your entire life, basically.”

When I read this article in The New York Observer about obsessive RSS completists, I definitely recognized myself. Yeah, I used to subscribe to 100+ blogs and websites in Google Reader. Yeah, I used to have to get that bold number of unread posts down to 0 whenever I opened Reader. And I couldn’t just mark all as read, either. I had to skim every post — the title, at least! It felt like cheating, otherwise.

And then I had an epiphany. I was spending so much time on Reader that other things were being neglected. That was okay when I had a job, but now I have more important things to do than work. Like read real books. And take care of my child. Something had to change.

But before change can happen, there must be an ah-ha moment, when you say to yourself, as I did, “This is my tool. It does not own me. It works for me. I am the boss around here.”

The first thing I did was clean out all of my subscriptions. I unsubscribed to everything. I only kept a handful of feeds that I cherished and absolutely knew I wanted to read (almost) every post. These went into a folder labeled “Blogs I Like” and there they will remain permanently.

Next, I went on Twitter and subscribed to the Twitter feeds for the blogs I had unsubscribed from. Twitter has much different — and significantly lower — expectations than RSS. (I have written about this before.) There is no bold number of unread items. Eventually, what you haven’t read falls off the screen into oblivion. Twitter is not your ever-growing pile of homework; it is the water cooler, the fun place you drop in during work breaks.

(Eventually, I had to weed down the number of Twitter feeds I was following too, but more on that at another time.)

Gradually, I started adding blogs back to my Google Reader. It is, after all, not easy to really get to know someone on Twitter. If I want to dive in-depth into a subject or learn more about a particular writer, than I need to read their blog for a while. Only for a while. All of these new blogs go into a folder labeled “Trial.”

Here are my rules:

• When I subscribe to a new trial blog, I mark everything as read right off the bat. After all, I don’t want to start off with a backlog and handicap myself.
• If I log in to Google Reader and there are more than 100 unread items, I immediately mark everything in the Trial folder as “read.” No guilt, no mercy. I am just reading these sites on a trial basis, so I’m not missing anything. This is what I tell myself, and it works.
• If at the end of the month or so, I haven’t shared or starred a post from a particular feed, then I unsubscribe. (I use Google Reader’s Trends to find this info.) So at the beginning of every month, it’s like I’m starting with a fresh slate. What a good feeling.

If I really like a “trial” blog, I may start following the Twitter feed. But if it moves from the Trial folder to the Blogs I Like folder — which currently contains only 3 subscriptions, by the way — then we know it’s love.

And in the meantime, I can get back to the book I’m reading. Right after I check Twitter.

Feed Me, I’m Hungry! New Yorkers Skim, Freak, Purge as RSS Reading Mounts (New York Observer)