I just finished reading “Mastering the Most Powerful Force in the Universe,” a great free ebook by Paul Piotrowski at Inspired Money Maker. I won’t give away what the “most powerful force in the universe” is, but I think I agree with Paul.

The ebook shows us how this force applies to money, diet, exercise, sales, blogging, the Law of Attraction, and even The Matrix, among other things. You’ll probably like the ebook if you liked my posts How To Create A Seven Figure Residual Income and Want To Dodge Bullets? Maybe You Don’t Have To!

While I found the beginning a bit slow because the math major in me was already well aware of what he was talking about, it got very interesting later on (and of course, not everyone was a math major, so the beginning will be useful to most people). It doesn’t take very long to read it, so why not check it out right now?

The ebook is free for anyone who subscribes to Inspired Money Maker’s RSS feed. You’ll see a link to the ebook at the bottom of each post in your feed reader. I’m not sure if you get the ebook if you subscribe via email, but subscribing via RSS is really much better, once you get used to using an RSS reader.

There’s no risk in subscribing to a blog, because you can simply unsubscribe if you don’t like it. But after checking out Inspired Money Maker, you very well might become a loyal reader. I just discovered it recently, and I’ve already read some amazing posts. This blog deserves a much larger audience than it currently has.

“My goal is to help others develop a more healthy relationship with money as something that liberates their souls to do what they love in life and make money doing it.” – Paul Piotrowski, Inspired Money Maker

Check out this video of Tim Nolan, a world record holding professional juggler and basketball entertainer. He does insane tricks like chucking a basketball, letting it bounce a few times off the walls, then off the backboard, into a trampoline, off the backboard again, and then through the hoop.

He can do the juggling stuff on demand because he’s put a lot of years into it (and you can clearly see that some of what he does is at the limit of his ability). And he can do some of the basketball tricks on demand, like the over the head shot (he wouldn’t do it in front of an audience if he couldn’t get it within a few attempts).

But I think many of his basketball tricks depend a lot on luck. Just a guess, but I don’t think he’s that much better at some of these tricks than you or I would be. The difference is that he was willing to make jillions of attempts before it worked. Have you ever given up on something because it didn’t work the first time, or the tenth time, or the hundredth time, or the thousandth time?

Photo by Sir Mildred Pierce

When buying plane tickets, you want to find cheap tickets on a convenient flight, without spending a lot of time searching for them. If you’re in a hurry, you can learn how to do this by skipping ahead to the Cliffs Notes at the end. Otherwise, you can read all the gory details.

The more complicated a trip is, the more it pays to check out your options. Flying from Washington, D.C. to New York is pretty straightforward. Just check out some travel sites, play around with different dates (and possibly different airports), and it’s not hard to choose the flight that gives you the best combination of price and convenience.

But flying from Washington, D.C. to Osaka, Japan is much more complicated. That’s why I enlisted some experts.

Back in January, I planned a trip to Japan that I’m taking next week. While I had found some reasonably priced one-stop flights on CheapTickets, Orbitz, and Expedia, I was curious to see if veteran travelers could do better. Since my mom works with someone who lived in Japan for five years, I asked her to see if he had any advice on finding a good flight. He had some specific airlines in mind, but he didn’t find anything cheaper than what I had already found, nor did he find a nonstop flight.

It turns out that my mom also works with someone who derives great enjoyment from looking for good deals on travel. He would never just look at a few options and consider his search done. He would consider every possibility under the sun, and he was actually willing to spend a lot of time helping me find a flight.

He considered that I could fly into Tokyo and take a train. Or fly to Los Angeles, then switch airlines. Or fly into Toronto, then get on a Canadian airline. But after spending several hours looking, he didn’t find anything better than what I already had. However, he did suggest that I try Priceline.

When all was said and done, the best deal came from Priceline, which had a flight with a layover in San Francisco, for $188 less than the cheapest flight on CheapTickets, Orbitz, and Expedia. In fact, it was $350 cheaper than the same flight on those sites! Another nice feature I discovered is that Priceline lets you know if alternate dates or airports will result in a cheaper flight.

The Priceline flight was on United, and I found the same price when I went to the airline directly. I always buy tickets directly from the airline to save the $5 or so charged by some sites. Priceline doesn’t charge a fee for any published flights, but I figure you might as well avoid the middleman and possibly have better service or fewer complications.

Priceline still has their “Name Your Own Price” system that lets you bid on flights, and claims you can save up to 40% that way. The major disadvantage of doing this is the risk and uncertainty. You submit a bid blindly, not knowing the airline, times, or routing in advance. And if they accept your bid, you can’t cancel or make any changes. Also, if your bid is rejected, you can’t submit another bid until after the waiting period has passed. Furthermore, you don’t get any frequent flyer miles. I don’t know what kind of success people have had doing this, and Priceline has been moving away from the “Name Your Own Price” model in recent years.

Incidentally, Travelocity found a flight on Asiana Airlines for $54 less than the Priceline/United flight, but it had stops in L.A. and Seoul, and I really wanted to avoid two stops.

Ultravagabond Tim Ferriss has said that instead of booking flights far in advance, he gets better deals by booking at the last minute, when the airline is afraid the seat will go unsold. I tested this back in January, searching for a last-minute Japan flight on United. There was only one flight available, for $3,000 more than the far-in-advance flights, and with a 5 hour layover in Doha, Qatar (which means flying around the world in the wrong direction).

I checked again a few days later and found several last-minute United flights for $3,000 more, with a stop in San Francisco. However, when I checked on Priceline, I actually found some last-minute flights for $118 less than my far-in-advance ticket ($3,118 less than the flights offered at the same time on United). Remember when I said that my mom’s coworker thought of flying into Toronto? That’s what these flights did. But they also stopped in Vancouver, and I wanted to avoid two layovers.

Cliffs Notes:

1. You’re perfectly capable of quickly finding as good a deal as a veteran traveler could find.

2. Check Priceline first, because it tells you whether changing dates or airports will give you a better deal, and you can use this information on later searches. Naming your own price might not be a good idea because of the risk of unchangeable tickets, inflexibility of having to accept whatever times and routes they give you, and time required to resubmit bids that aren’t accepted.

3. Check some of the travel sites such as CheapTickets, Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity. They’re likely to be very similar, so don’t feel like you have to check more than a few. Also check Kayak and SideStep, which offer the advantage of searching multiple sites, though I would still search directly on some of those sites (tip from Barbara Swafford and John).

4. If you have a particular airline in mind, search for flights on their website. The price could be different from what’s listed on the travel sites, or the airline might not be included in those sites.

5. Buy your ticket directly from the airline to save money and eliminate the middleman. If you have an ethical problem with this, then by all means pay the extra $5 if that lets you sleep better.

6. Although Tim Ferriss has traveled all over the world and says booking tickets at the last minute will save you money, I didn’t find that to be true in this case. It might depend on where and when you’re traveling.

See also:

How to Fly Without ID and Skip Lines (Tim Ferriss)

How to Score Free Airline Vouchers by Reserving Overbooked Flights (Clay Collins)

To be highly productive, you need a fancy system like David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), right?

Actually, I’ve never seen the point of making productivity complicated. While I haven’t read GTD, the summaries I’ve seen don’t impress me. I think most people are overdoing it. Spending countless hours learning and implementing elaborate productivity systems and reading so-called productivity blogs seems a lot less effective than just doing stuff.

Steve Pavlina is well known for being productive. He finished college in just 3 semesters, taking triple the normal course load while also working a full time job in his last semester. In the latest issue of his newsletter (sign up on his home page, a few issues a year, free), he described the productivity system that allowed him to do this.

He just used a notebook. When a new assignment came in, he added it to the end of the list, along with its deadline. He decided which one to do by scanning the list and quickly picking one that seemed like a good choice. Then he’d work on only that task until it was done, and cross it off.

If anything stayed on the list too long, it would eventually be the only thing left on its page, with everything else crossed out. When this happened, he’d either do it immediately, decide it wasn’t worth doing, or possibly move it to the end of the list and try again later.

I was glad to see Steve agreeing with me that productivity can be simple. My system is very similar to his, but I use Windows Notepad instead of a physical notebook. I like Notepad because I can easily reorder items, as well as copy and paste URLs. And unlike Steve, I don’t automatically add new tasks to the end. I sometimes add them near the front if I think I’ll want to do them soon.

I’ve tried reading some productivity blogs, but I haven’t been able to get into any of them. I couldn’t understand how reading a productivity blog that posts ten times a day was going to do anything other than destroy my effectiveness. Clay Collins had a good take on this, when he discussed the difference between the productivity habit and the productivity hobby.

Never forget that sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.

Scott Young was kind enough to give me a press copy of his ebook How To Change A Habit. Personally I don’t struggle with changing habits, but I was very interested in reading this ebook because I know that many people do. Some of the obvious habits that give people a hard time are quitting smoking and starting an exercise program. Scott says that people can change their habits far more easily when they adopt effective strategies for doing so.

You may remember that not long ago I reviewed Scott’s latest ebook Learn More, Study Less. He wrote How To Change A Habit last year, but obviously the principles still hold true. While I found Learn More, Study Less to be more original and more helpful to me personally, How To Change A Habit is good, and in fact better than I was expecting. How To Change A Habit is much cheaper at only $14.99, though it doesn’t have an affiliate program.

Scott uses 30-day trials as the foundation for changing habits, saying that simply following a trial is enough to solve 50-75% of the problems people face in changing their habits. The rest of his ebook is about refining that core process. By using certain strategies, Scott was able to change many habits that most people would have a very hard time with, such as becoming a vegetarian, waking up at 5:30 every morning, exercising every day, and giving up TV (though he later decided that a moderate amount of TV was the best option for him).

He gives us basic techniques to quickly begin changing habits, and then moves on to advanced techniques that are needed when the basic methods fail. While he acknowledges that some discipline is necessary, his focus is on developing a good strategy so that habits can be changed without extraordinary levels of discipline. His ideas are based on his own personal experiments, but also backed up by psychological research.

The ebook is visually pleasing, having a good number of illustrations and a nice layout optimized for on-screen reading. He takes a very detailed look at 30-day trials, and gives a lot of good information about advanced techniques.

I said at the beginning of this post that I don’t struggle with changing my habits. However, I’m currently going through a trial that’s proving to be a major exception to this (see my next post). Because it’s a trial of changing my thoughts, it’s much tougher than any other habit I’ve tried to change. If I slip up just once with my thoughts, I have to start all over, and that’s what keeps happening. So I was pleased to see that Scott has a section specifically about “Changing Habits of Thought,” which has given me some ideas.

If you’ve tried to change some habits but found it too difficult, I recommend How To Change A Habit. I’m adding it to the Resources page.

Does good content matter in the blogosphere? Recently there has been quite a bit of discussion suggesting that perhaps it doesn’t.

James at Men with Pens wrote about Getting Creative With Your Content, or rather, how people are not getting creative with their content:

“I scroll through my feed reader, my attention dulled by the similar headlines. They’re carbon-copy titles that make a desperate attempt to grasp my attention. Some – very few – do. But I’m often quickly disappointed. The headline may be mildly intriguing, but the content of the first paragraph is just the same old stuff. Nothing new, nothing entertaining, nothing interesting.”

Skellie wrote about Why Great Writing Doesn’t Matter Online. Considering how many people admire her writing, it surprised me a bit to see her say this:

“Good writing, clever writing, beautiful writing — all of these things are unnecessary in the creation of great web content…clever turns of phrase, immaculate grammar, flawless spelling and crisp sentences are relatively insignificant.”

(Her point was that “all great web writing must do is communicate great ideas without getting in their way,” but I’d contend that even great ideas don’t necessarily matter, as evidenced by the success of certain blogs).

These posts received a flood of comments from people on both sides of the issue. I felt that a lot of people were doing their best to resist admitting what deep down they know is true: maybe great content really doesn’t matter that much.

It occurred to me that perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way. Instead of lamenting the sad state of the blogosphere, maybe we should just give the people what they want: rehashed content. And I have a tool that will save you a lot of time in creating it: the Automatic Blog Post Rehasher.

Now you can easily rehash content from these blogs:

• 4-Hour Workweek
• IttyBiz
• Hunter Nuttall . com
• Men with Pens
• ProBlogger
• Seth Godin’s Blog
• Skelliewag.org
• Steve Pavlina . com
• Zen Habits

(I chose these blogs because they’re some of the well-known blogs I read. I’m not saying that they consist of rehashed content.)

Just fire up the Automatic Blog Post Rehasher and pick a blog. Adjust some parameters to fit your writing style, click “Rehash it,” and it spits out a brand new post for you, using word choice similar to the selected blog. It even gives you an image to use.

Some of you English majors may quibble with the grammar of what it spits out, but it really doesn’t matter. As you may know, people don’t read every word, they just scan. As long as your post contains a few buzzwords, it’s golden.

If you write (or read) content online or anywhere else good writing doesn’t matter, I’ve just saved you thousands of hours and given you a practically infinite number of free posts. I may have even improved the quality of your content.

Me Hunter. You read.

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“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really
understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on
how we’ve connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected
representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things
from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s
what we mean by thinking!”

-Marvin Minsk, Professor of E.E.C.S., MIT

If you’re an android, then maybe you’re able to learn anything by just plugging yourself into your computer and downloading information to your brain. But if you’re a human being, your brain works by forming many connections between neurons. Given that, doesn’t it make sense to adapt a style of learning that matches the way our brain works? That’s what holistic learning is all about.

Holistic learning is the opposite of rote memorization. Average people learn by cramming stuff into their brain until some of it sticks. But smart people don’t think better, they think differently. Instead of relying on brute force memorization to store unrelated facts, they integrate new information by forming connections to what they already know, resulting in deeper understanding.

Scott Young, author of Learn More, Study Less (now on the Resources page), is a 19 year old student at the University of Manitoba (a Canadian province). Despite what you may think of his age, he knows more about learning than 99% of us. For example, he:

• Won 1st place in an inter-provincial chemistry test and received a check for $400, despite not being familiar with the material, and only finding out that he was taking the test five minutes ahead of time.
• Read hundreds of books just in the last two years.
• Taught himself many disparate subjects such as computer programming, web design, business, writing, musical composition, world religions, and evolutionary psychology, all for fun (not for school).
• Aced his college finals with little or no studying.
• On top of being a full-time college student and a devoted self-learner, he runs his business, writes as much as 7000 words per week, exercises, runs a Toastmasters club, and still has free time.

His book teaches us the method of holistic learning, with techniques such as speed reading, active reading, flow-based notetaking, metaphor, visceralization, and diagraming. For the times when you need to learn arbitrary information that doesn’t lend itself well to forming connections, he describes linking, pegging, and information compression. There is also some information on productivity and self-education, including some great resources. Did you know you can take free college courses online?

I think Scott is selling himself a bit short with the title Learn More, Study Less, because it might make it sound like the book is only for students. I’m not a student and I don’t plan on becoming one, but it doesn’t matter. Anyone who cares about their personal development knows that you should never stop learning, whether you’re in a classroom setting or not. Let me give you an example of how I unknowingly used holistic principals recently on my blog.

In my post What Color Is Your Focusing Crystal?, I used a Star Wars metaphor to explore the idea of using self-assessment to find our true colors. RLD: Taekwondo Happiness left this comment:

“I saw your post on MwP and thought I’d drop by. I’d just like to say that a post on Star Wars is brilliant Not only do I love those movies, but now I’ll remember your advice because of the reference!”

From this comment, we can see that (1) RLD was a first time visitor, (2) he liked my post enough to leave a comment on his first visit, and (3) the information was presented in such a way that he enjoyed it and will remember it.

This was before I read Scott’s ebook, so to a small extent I was already using some of his principals (as I suspected I was). But I’ve certainly never studied holistic learning before. Scott has done extensive research and is actually using his techniques in his daily life (even showing us some of his class notes, though they’re hard to read). If I can get better at learning for myself as well as helping other people learn, why would I not take advantage of that?

You might also be interested in holistic learning to expand your mind, improve your communication skills, make boring subjects more interesting, and make sure you stay sharp in your golden years.

Download a Free Preview

You might be scared off by a 228-page ebook, but it’s not really that long. As you can see in the preview version, Scott has done a great job with the layout and avoids putting too much on each page. I’m not sure, but the document appears to be in landscape orientation and in a larger font, plus there are plenty of pictures to break up the text. So it’s not nearly as overwhelming as you might think a 228-page ebook would be, but you might want to read it in two sittings like I did.

You should be aware that Scott’s writing style might be different from what you’re used to. Most of the stuff I read online has a conversational tone, while Scott’s writing is more academic. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s something to be aware of, and the preview version will show you what I mean. While it required an adjustment, I quickly got used to Scott’s writing style, just like I got used to Steve Pavlina writing very long posts, and Seth Godin writing very short posts.

To fully implement his methods you’ll need to practice, and if you complete all of the included mind challenges, it will take nearly two years! Of course, you don’t really have to do all that, but you might want to formally practice the techniques that you think will help you the most. The preview version mentions 6 bonus documents, which are worksheets you can print out to help you practice your favorite methods.

Scott has taken a bit of heat about the price. At $39.95, it’s a bit more than the average ebook. But this is no average ebook. It should clearly be priced higher than all the $10 or $12 ebooks you see, because it contains a lot more information and a lot more value. I suppose I would have preferred to pay $30 or $35 instead of $39.95, but quibbling over a few dollars is a bit silly when you consider what the book will do for you. Can you honestly say that upgrading your brain is not worth $39.95?

Furthermore, you’re protected by a 120 day money-back guarantee. If that doesn’t ease your budgetary concerns, I don’t know what will. Actually, I do. Scott has an affiliate program that lets you sell the ebook and receive a generous 50% commission. The book is easily worth $39.95, but being paid to read it is even better!

Download a Free Preview

Photo by A_of_DooM

Let’s say you’re looking for a thrill, so you jump into a lake. What a rush! But now you want to swim to shore, so that’s what you’re going to do.

But first things first. You’re in the middle of the lake, and you have to keep your head up. So you start treading water, and you find that it’s not too hard to keep your head above the surface. You feel confident that you can keep going, and decide to take a little break and relax for a while.

After some time, you’ve started getting tired, and you remember that you originally wanted to swim to shore. But you’re feeling awfully cold now, and can’t motivate yourself to swim. You have enough to deal with just keeping your head above water while you’re so cold and tired. So you decide to wait for a better time.

Eventually, you start to resent your situation. How did you end up in the middle of the lake in the first place? What did you do to deserve that? This isn’t fair. You don’t want to be in the lake, you want to be on the shore. But you have to spend all your energy just to keep your head up and stop shivering. You can’t possibly be expected to swim now. That will have to wait until later.

But when later comes, you’re now so tired that you can no longer tread water. And so you drown.

Did you really not see that coming? When you stand back and look at the situation objectively, it’s perfectly obvious what was eventually going to happen. And yet when we’re the one in the lake, it looks very different to us.

After you race against a deadline at work, have an argument with your boss, fight traffic on the way home, pick up your dry cleaning, pick up the kids, and do whatever you have to do, do you feel in the mood to:

• Research a potential career change?
• Begin a new exercise program?
• Work on your novel?
• Study a foreign language?
• Take up yoga?
• Rethink your investment strategy?
• Look into starting your own business?
• Learn self defense?
• Plan a trip around the world?
• Start any of the projects you really want to do, but never find time for?

Of course not. You’ve put so much effort into just getting through the day that you don’t have much energy for anything else. If you manage to put any effort at all towards a new project, you probably won’t get very far.

If you want to write a novel, maybe one day you spend a few minutes of your free time thinking about it and even manage to write a whole paragraph. Then you decide you’ve done enough, so you relax for the rest of the day. The next day, you don’t have time to work on it. The next day after that, you try to remember where you were going, and eventually write another paragraph. Then you forget about it for two weeks. When you come back to it, you have no idea why you wrote what you did, and you start over with a new idea. And then you’re too busy to work on it the next day.

When you do this, you’re just treading water, and eventually you’ll give up and drown. If you don’t want to drown, either don’t jump in the lake in the first place, or start swimming to where you want to go.

This means that if you’re going to do something, you should really do it. If you only do it a little bit, you’re not going to get to where you want, and you’ll only waste time that could be better spent elsewhere, while deluding yourself into thinking that you’re actually getting something done.

We only have enough time to do so much, so before starting something new, decide if you really want to do it. If so, figure out how much time you need to devote to it, and come up with a schedule. Will you work on it every day? Five days a week? Will you work on it early in the morning, late at night, or some other time? Make a plan for getting the job done, and decide what you’ll need to sacrifice to make the time.

It’s really helpful if your new project is something that’s fun for you. It’s hard to motivate yourself to do something that’s not fun when you’re low on energy. But if it’s fun, it’s much easier to sacrifice other things to make the time.

You’re probably spending significant amounts of time on things like TV and pleasure reading because you need these things to recharge your batteries. But if you’ve decided to start a blog or learn to tango, then presumably these activities are fun enough that you’ll have no problem diverting some time from TV or reading. If your goal is to find a new job…well, the search is probably not going to be fun, and it will be hard to make time for it. Still, instead of just pretending to look for a job, it’s better to bite the bullet, make the time, and get it done.

There are many great productivity tips out there, but I think it all starts with making the decision that you want to swim instead of treading water. Realize that if you tread water for too long, there’s only one possible outcome. Keep that in mind, and you’ll be much more motivated to start swimming.

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.

Photo by sunrise100(deuce)

Shaun Boyd at LifeReboot.com has written about how he recently accepted that nothing he writes will ever be perfect. Falling into the common trap of obsessing over perfection, he scrapped a lot of posts that were probably excellent because he found something wrong with each one. Then he received this comment from a reader:

“well, after almost a month with no new posts, i’m forced to unsubscribe. it’s a shame – this blog had a lot of potential.”

Shaun acknowledged the comment, then responded by writing a post the next day, and another one four days later (which was yesterday). He says he’s given up on perfection.

I can’t say that I’ve kicked the perfectionist habit that cleanly, but I do make an effort to relax my inner editor to increase my output. I think of it as “doing it right vs. doing it right now.”

This is not specific to blogging, but it’s very common with any kind of writing. I notice it when I’m writing software programs, which is somewhat understandable, but I even do it with very simple emails. I always feel the urge to check the spelling one more time, make sure everything flows, that all the bases are covered, and that everything sounds right.

In a way, this is good. After all, if you look around it’s not hard to find plenty of cases where work has been done very sloppily. Paying attention to detail is a good thing.

But one of the problems with too much of a good thing is diminishing returns. When you write your first draft, it might be 85% perfect right off the bat. A small amount of effort is all that’s needed to get it to 95%. If you check it very carefully and pay a lot of attention to how it will sound to readers, you can eventually get it to 99%. But a perfectionist will spend exponentially more time getting it to 99.1%, then 99.101%, etc.

By spending all that time trying to make an already good thing marginally better, you’re depriving yourself of the chance to make many more good things. Which would you rather have: one post that’s 99.44% perfect, or five posts that are 95% perfect? And here’s the kicker: the world probably won’t appreciate your perfectionism. Show someone a 95% post against your 99.44% pure masterpiece, and they might not be able to tell which is which. They might even prefer the other one.

While this principle is commonly observed in writing, it can be seen everywhere. Anytime someone says it’s not a good time to have kids (year after year after year), or they’re not good enough to start competing in some sport or hobby (year after year after year), or they don’t have enough information to try a business idea they’ve been thinking about (year after year after year), they’re stuck in the trap of waiting for the time to be right. Guess what—the time will never be right, so you can’t let that paralyze you.

I’m not saying to be careless. I’m saying to be aware of the trade-offs and strike a balance between “right” and “right now.” People tend to err heavily on the side of doing things “right,” and then realize far too late that they haven’t done very many things. Relaxing your standards a bit can help you crank up the output and get far more done for the same effort.

On another note, can someone explain to me why a low posting frequency would force someone to unsubscribe?