Google Reader Hacks for Time Effectiveness
Reading feeds can be one of your longest tasks of the day especially if you have upwards of 100 (or many, many more) feeds that are being constantly added every hour. The task of reading can be overwhelming, especially without proper management and hacks to increase you time effectiveness:
- Learn the ins and outs of your feeds. By knowing each of your feeds and the content it provides you can wade through your feeds and get to the ones that are a must read. Your best bet is to choose 10-20feeds that have to be read and make all the others optional. You can even assign these a must read tag and go right to the folder when you’re pressed for time.
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Know your shortcuts. Believe it or not there are shortcuts for Google Reader. I personally didn’t know about them until recently and still don’t utilize them enough but they are a must. Here’s a partial list of my favorites:
- j/k - up and down
- s -star on/off
- m - mark a story (un)read
- t - tag selected item
- Tagging is your friend. Whether you tag by topic, website, or whatever suits you tagging is a must. I use a mashup system of feeds for content ideas and topics and it works although I am constantly refining tags to suit my needs.
- Stars (they’re better than bookmarks). I previously bookmarked evey post I wanted to blog about an, quite predictively, by bookmarks were unorganized and overflowing. The star system allows you to “star” good posts for future reference. They are sorted by date so when it comes time to wade through them start from the bottom and work up.
- Trim the fat. Your feeds list will grow exponentially if you don’t limit yourself by a number or estimated daily updates. Subscribing to 100 blogs is manageable if they are each updated 1-2 times daily resulting in 100-200 items but imaging 100 blogs that publish 10 or more posts a day. You are then wading through 1000 or more items each and every day. Unsubscribe to blogs you often pass over anyways and you will find you never even miss them.
Look for part 2 of hacks tomorrow.
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