Today’s task: culling the clutter
Posted by Michael | Filed under Site
Bolstered by the confidence instilled by a few cups of coffee, today seems to be a good day to cull some accumulated blogs, bookmarks, etc. from over the last few months.
For the blogs, Google Reader Trends is tremendously helpful, as it shows me at-a-glance what I’m reading and, more importantly, what I’m not. Normally I’m pretty good about keeping my subscriptions list to a minimum, but sometimes, such as recently, it gets away from me. According to me reading trends, I’m subscribed to 35 blogs. This is on my high end, which why I’ve chosen today to tend to my “garden o’ feeds.”
For percentage read, there’s a distinct cutoff at about 50%, with the next highest being 27%. Without mercy, I’m dropping all those from this point down — 25 blogs total. This list includes a few I used to follow when I had a PC, but now that I have a Mac, there’s not much point in keeping them. Some others were suggested as “must reads,” but they’re still at 0% read, so the choice is easy.
In terms of simplicity, this periodic culling helps keep me focused on keeping only what I actually read and find value in including as part of my daily blog reading. The rest I “liberate” from my subscription feeds; for as much as I may think “oh, I’ll read that someday” I know — and so does Google Reader — that I won’t and so I need to let go.
Now that the self-imposed pressure of trying to keep up with so many blogs is reduced, I can now focus more of my attention on the ones that remain.
Ahhh…time for another cup o’ joe…
-Michael
I’m addicated to productivity hacks, but I can stop whenever I want to
Posted by Michael | Filed under Site
This morning I asked myself the question “Are we addicted to productivity hacks? Do we know when to say when?” As the addict always pushing for the next fix, do we, in our constant quest to find our next “productivity high” simultaneously take away from what really matters?
