Jacob Sam-La Rose

Downes.ca ~ RSS Zero isn’t the path to RSS Joy

Your RSS feeds represent subscriptions to things you’re ostensibly interested in. You opt in to those subscriptions, perhaps even more so than email; each one is a statement of “Yes! I aspire to read these things (or at least some of them)!” They may not be urgent, actionable items, but they still represent things you wanted to engage with. So it’s easy to see why having those unread items pile up can be a bit anxiety inducing, or feel like you’re letting yourself down.

It’s another case of present-self making promises for future-self to keep, while failing to account for the cumulative cost accrued from each decision. I’m not naturally inclined to do that kind of forward thinking cost-benefit analysis. I admire the notion of restricting myself to a tightly curated set of subscriptions that represent the best of what’s published within my interest spheres (think: the Warren Buffett approach to RSS subscriptions— focus on the high yield, remove all the “interesting” distractions). In this reality, however, I subscribe to 598 feeds, with 202 inactive and 45 unreachable (so sayeth Feedly). My excuse/rationale is that I’m a writer; any chance discovery could be fuel, and who knows where my next idea might come from?

I take the info-grazer’s approach: browse/prune the feeds regularly (usually daily unless I’m burning hard against a deadline), no pressure to get to the bottom of the pile, just pick the items that look most interesting or discard the things I definitely don’t want to read; queue more attention-intensive items for later, focused reading; do a deep dive, monthly clear-down of the incoming backlog. I treat my feed reader (Reeder) as a lazy inbox; my read-it-later app (currently also Reeder, but I’m back to trialling Omnivore which is particularly good for text-to-speech and Osbidian integration) is the bottomless pool of deep interest.

This works for me. Mostly. At some point, you just have to acknowledge that there’ll always be more to read than you have time for, and make peace with that.