Reducing the content I consume for more simple living

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.

Twitter overload?

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a big twitter user. Previously, I’ve tried to find the perfect twitter client for me (worked only so well). However, recently I’ve started to feel the brunt of twitter (coupled with Google Reader) overload. I follow a good number of people and do try to read everything that comes across, which I feel is part of the problem I’m now facing. I’ve being coming around to the idea that twitter is a lot about stepping into the stream and then back out, consuming what you want while in the stream and ignoring what happens when not.

As a result, earlier this week I started to pair back on some of the people (in many cases bots) that I followed. For most of these twitter feeds I simply moved them from my twitter timeline and into Google reader as RSS feeds. So far, it’s been an enjoyable experience. Most of the users I transitioned were feeds or users who posted a lot of links; being able to consuming these links during my RSS time seems more efficient.

Now I’m left with one more issue to tackle, within my twitter stream there people I follow that I would prefer to see all tweets from, or at least the majority of them, even for the periods that I am “out of the stream”. Sure, I could add these to SMS notifications but I really hate twitter over SMS. The iPhone handles SMS poorly and I already get too many notifications on my iPhone. So I’m looking for an alternative to SMS for a subset of the people I follow.

I’ve considered hiring a programmer to modify the email twitter client that I had made to only email me tweets from select users in my feed. I like this idea; it allows me to continue to manage just one list of friends and the ability to read all the tweets no matter how long I am out of the stream. The downsides: 1) cost, hiring a programmer=$, 2) since I spend a lot of time in my main stream there’s the risk too many emails will pile up and go unmanaged from the time I’m in the stream and I’ll end up ignoring these emails during the times I anticipated using the system.

At this point I am going to try and setup an additional twitter account to follow this subset of people and launch that timeline when need be. The downside is maintaining two accounts and the potential confusion other people may have with the situation (so if you get followed by my second account you knows what’s up). The advantage being it should take quite a while for 200 tweets (the upper limit for most twitter clients to pull) to cycle through this timeline.

So I’m looking for alternative and am open to any suggestions, please let me know if you have any thoughts.

Google Reader Organization

I love Google Reader, its my primary source of news these day, in fact I’ve all but given up on reading blogs or sites that don’t provide RSS feeds. Anyway, i digress. Over time my reader has grown to over 270 feeds and haphazardly organized into 75 folders. Well as you might expect that many folders became quite unmanageable.