If you have more than one website that you check on a daily or weekly basis, this tip will help you. You probably don’t realize how much time is spent checking a website only to discover that nothing has been updated. You can reclaim this time with a feed reader.
Most website (including Productivity501) publish something called RSS feeds. These contain the text (or sometimes just summaries) of each article in a special format that is easy for another computer program to read. Programs that read these feeds are called RSS readers.
There are two types of feed readers. One is a program that actually runs on your computer. The other are web based programs like Google Reader.
The feed reader will periodically check for updates and download the new articles. You can look at a glance and see how many new articles you have to read and where they are from. Once you mark it as read the article disappears from the new section (it usually stays in an archive if you want to find it later). You can also mark feeds or all of your feeds as read so they don’t show up as new.
If you read more than one website on a consistent basis, you owe it to yourself to try out a feed reader for at least a week and see if it helps save you time and make you more productive.
Feed readers make information much easier to manage and read. Personally, I use Mozilla Thunderbird. I tried the speedyfeed website and some others but found the websites to be cumbersome. I am much happier synching my eMail and news/feeds at the same time. Not to mention the ease of clicking on a link to go and comment.
I know you use a Mac but for those on Windows, if you have Outlook 2007 it has a feed reader built right in which I have really liked. It helps me limit my feed reading because I limit my email usage as much as possible so if my email isn’t up I am not constantly checking feeds either.
@Jeff – My email mailbox has the ability to subscribe to rss feeds in their own imap folder. This is pretty nice, but I found it distracted me from my email, so I stopped using it and switched to Google Reader.
Having the RSS reader in the email client is a very good idea, but it just didn’t work very well for me.
@Mike – I didn’t realize that Thunderbird had a feed reader built in. I’ll have to look at it more closely some time.