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Reducing the content I consume for more simple living

Google Reader Study: Reading and Publishing Ha...
Image by Zach Seward via Flickr

Lately through my “personal metadata experiment” I have been noticing I am spending a lot of time-consuming content that I feel I have a NEED to consume. The majority of this content is news (via google reader and email alerts), twitter, and podcasts. While I really do love consuming this content it take a lot of time out of my day, furthermore, it is a never-ending fire hose of data. As a result, I’m always left feeling like there is more data that I NEED to consume and it ends up taking time away from other tasks and interactions I would rather be doing.

So this weekend I have been going through my google reader list, newsletters, and people I am following on Twitter and unsubscribing from everything that feel I don’t NEED to read or follow. I’m going to keep a list of the feeds and people who I have unsubscribed from in case I find myself needing to add these sources back. Taking an approach of extreme cutting, and then adding back as need be. This is one step I am taking in an effort to simplify parts of my life and provide more time for productive tasks and to spend less time trying to “keep current”.

One thing that I am looking for are suggestions of highly refined, high quality, and low volume RSS feeds you enjoy consuming.

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Posted in Technology, Tumblelog on February 21st, 2010 Taged with , , ,

Comments

  • edwardmatheson
    I have have been playing with personal meta data for a while and just generally 'sorting out' and refining my digital life. I feel it is coming together but still a few things that I need to consolidate e.g. tag lists (I have different tags in delicious, blog, my wiki, and everywhere else.

    You might like to look at http://feedafever.com/
  • I'll have to check out Fever, do you use it? I'm pretty happy with google
    reader mostly due to the number of apps that sync with it. In fact, i almost
    never read from the reader web site, I'm almost always using Reeder on the
    iPhone or NetNewsWire on the Mac.

    'sorting out' is still in the stage I'm in and I haven't even begun to
    consider harmonizing all the sources of information i consume (ie, tags, and
    info services). That actually seems to be one of my biggest hurdles, my Zeo
    wont talk to my diet and exercise tracking (MyNetDiary) which doesn't talk
    to my pedometer (FitBit) and on and on. In order for these services to
    become more wildly used and useful they need to start implementing API's to
    allow these services to talk with each other.

    Let me know how sorting out your digital life goes.
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