Photo by Torchondo

One of the hallmarks of successful people is fantastic time management. With so much information on the internet, the way you manage your information flow will make or break your productivity. RSS is a great technology for helping you make the most of every minute online.

Those of you who are already using RSS readers may want to scroll down to “What are the benefits of subscribing via RSS?” to see my opinions on the benefits and costs of subscribing to blogs. First, I’m going to give a detailed explanation of RSS for the many people who aren’t familiar with this technology (which included me until a couple of months ago).

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a mechanism for publishing feeds for frequently updated websites, such as blogs. If you like a blog and want to be sure not to miss any posts, you would subscribe to the blog’s feed in order to keep up with new content. This way, you don’t need to remember to come back every day to see if there are any new posts. In effect, you have a virtual assistant who monitors your favorite blogs to let you know of any updates.

Most blogs let you subscribe via RSS or via email. The email option is great for people who see a blog they like, but who aren’t familiar with RSS and don’t want to bother with it right now. Subscribing via email is very simple. You just enter your email address, click a button, and then you’re signed up to receive all future posts by email. You can unsubscribe at any time, and at least on this blog your email address is kept private and not used for any other purpose (although I can’t say for sure if that’s universally true).

Subscribing to one blog via email is fine. The problem is that when you start subscribing to more blogs, you start getting more emails. When you get too many, they clog up your inbox and become a huge distraction. This is where RSS comes in handy.

To subscribe to an RSS feed, you need an application called an RSS reader (also known as a feed reader or an aggregator). This application manages all your subscriptions in one place. I use Google Reader because I saw that many people were recommending it, and I already had a Google account. There are also many other RSS readers available, and most of them are free (like Google).

When I come across a new blog, I often make a judgment in a fraction of a second. If it’s totally unappealing, I leave. Otherwise, I’ll take a few seconds to check it out, and if I like it, I subscribe. If I’m not sure, then I read the About page to get a better idea of whether I might like it if I got to know it better.

When I started out, I was pretty liberal about subscribing to blogs. By subscribing to any blog that looked interesting, I quickly got up to more than 50 blogs in my reader (including my own, because I want to be sure that my feed is working). Subscribing to a blog is a very small commitment because you can always unsubscribe later if you decide you don’t like it. So if I’m not sure about a blog, I always give it the benefit of the doubt and take it for a trial run. I do try to quickly decide if I want to subscribe, because if I don’t like a blog then I don’t want to waste time, but if I do like it then I want to subscribe before I forget about it.

You can subscribe to a blog by clicking on the familiar RSS icon you see on most blogs (the image at the top of this post is an enormous example of the icon). You’ll be presented with a choice of readers, but because I’ve already told my browser to use Google by default, I go straight to Google’s subscription page. It gives me the choice of “Add to Google homepage” or “Add to Google Reader,” but Google Reader is the only reasonable choice for managing many subscriptions. You can also subscribe to a blog by clicking the “Add subscription” link in Google Reader and pasting in the URL, but that doesn’t always work.

Some blogs publish a feed for their comments, so if you want to be sure to catch all the comments on a blog, you can subscribe to the comments feed. I never do this myself, because I’d go crazy reading hundreds of comments every day. However, when I leave a comment on someone else’s blog, I often check the box saying “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail,” if there is one. This way, I can see if someone replies to my comment. However, I don’t do this on very popular blogs, because I don’t want all the emails.

When I’m at a point in my day when I’m ready to catch up on my favorite blogs, I log into Google Reader and see which of the blogs I’m subscribed to have been updated since I last read them. Where it says “Show: updated – all,” I select “updated” so the screen isn’t cluttered with blogs that don’t have any new posts.

Most people who use an RSS reader will read the posts right there in the reader. Many people are annoyed with what they call “partial feeds,” where only part of the post appears in the reader, and you have to click the link to visit the blog and read the full post. However, I find that I always want to click the link and read the post on the blog instead of in my reader. I prefer to see the variety of blog themes instead of the same old Google Reader screen, and I want to at least scan the comments that other readers have left (comments aren’t shown in the reader unless you subscribe to the comments feed, which I never do, and most blogs don’t even have a comments feed). I offer a “full feed” on this blog, so you can choose whether you want to read the posts in your reader, or click the links in your reader to read the posts on my site.

What are the benefits of subscribing via RSS? (Some of these benefits apply to email subscriptions as well.)

1. You have a steady flow of good information coming in from blogs you like, so you don’t have to waste any time trying to find things to read that may or may not be any good.

2. You save a lot of time by not having to manually check all your favorite blogs to see if there are any updates.

3. You have a one-stop shop for checking all your blogs, and you can access it from any computer.

4. You don’t miss any updates to your favorite blogs.

5. If you only check your reader once in a while, you only get updates when you’re ready to read them. It eliminates the constant distractions of email notifications.

6. If you leave your reader open, you can get updates sooner. This lets you be one of the early commenters, which means more people will read your comment.

What are the costs of subscribing via RSS?

Just time. But time is a precious commodity. My opinion, although it’s not a terribly popular one, is that most bloggers post way, way too much. A few bloggers report the news and have to post frequently. But other than those people, I think bloggers should generally write no more than 2 long, detailed posts or 4 quick and easy posts per week. I don’t think there should be any minimum posting frequency. Some of my favorite bloggers only post once every couple of months.

I previously said “When I started out, I was pretty liberal about subscribing to blogs.” That’s when I was trying to build up my subscriptions, starting from nothing. Now that I have 50 feeds, I’m much more selective about which blogs I’ll subscribe to. I’m still somewhat liberal about giving new blogs a trial run, but I also need to make room for them by unsubscribing from other blogs. If a blog isn’t consistently good, I have to drop it. That doesn’t mean I think it’s not worth reading, but the reality is that I can’t read everything I’d like to. At some point, I’ll have to unsubscribe from every blog that isn’t consistently great.

50 feeds is pretty much my limit, and the only reason I could keep up with this many is because my situation at work gave me lots of downtime during the day. But that changed today, and now I’ll only have short breaks at work. Regrettably, this means that I’ll probably only be able to keep up with 15 blogs or so, as I don’t have a ton of free time at home either. I wish I understood how people can keep up with 50, 100, 500+ blogs.

As my time for blogs becomes more limited, I’m forced to unsubscribe from some blogs that I would otherwise read. A great way for someone to get me to unsubscribe is to post too much. Post once a week, and I’m likely to stay subscribed if the posts are at least somewhat interesting. Post four times a day, and I’ll unsubscribe the instant I decide that I don’t absolutely need that blog.

I’m actually not following my own advice here. I think I’m going to write a post tomorrow, which will make four posts in four consecutive days. And this post you’re reading now is not exactly a quick read. This is unusual for me, and I’m doing it only because I’ve had a small flurry of time-sensitive post ideas. (In this case, it’s because we’re currently discussing RSS on Are You Part of This Bungling Band of Bloggers? by Catherine Lawson and Spikey Traffic Distorts Visitor Statistics by Barbara at Blogging Without A Blog.)

If you’re not using an RSS reader because you’re not familiar with the concept, I certainly understand, as I was in that boat not long ago. But if you read more than a couple of blogs, you’ll want to start using an RSS reader to better manage your information flow, and greatly improve your productivity.

• 36 Secrets The Productivity Gurus Won’t Tell You (But Our Heretics Will)
• I’ll Get Around To It Someday
• PhotoReading: Become A Superhuman Reader
• Big Discounts On Marketing And Productivity Stuff
• What’s Holding You Back?
• Todoodlist Review: Technology Is Great, Pencils Are Better
• More Bang For The Buck: High ROI Opportunities
• A Simple Productivity System
• Automatic Blog Post Rehasher
• Treading Water Only Delays Drowning