Tools for Thought

Like work, information has its own Parkinson’s Law. As one example, Google Reader will fill whatever time we have available. Without a strategic approach to processing RSS feeds, the tendency is to keep adding new feeds until we stop just short of overwhelm. This “Thanksgiving dinner” method of managing information intake is not sustaintable.

Notice I mentioned “processing” feeds, not reading them. We need to triage items first, then read. The fastest way to read any feed item is to decide that it’s not worth reading in the first place. Hopefully, the concept of eliminating as many feeds as possible is obvious, so I won’t belabor the point. It’s worth pointing out that what follows seems more involved that it actually is in practice, just like a written desciption of tying shoes is more convoluted than the actual act.

Here’s a protocol for processing feeds in Google Reader:

1. Use List View. List View compresses the feed to display the headline and the first one or two sentences. Often, a single glance at once of these line items makes it obvious that it should be deleted without further consideration. The 2 key is the shortcut for List View (1 is the shortcut key for Expanded View).

2. Toggle Full Screen. In addition to expanding the margin for each line item in List View and reducing the scrolling required in Expanded View, Full Screen mode (toggled on or off with the u key) has the benefit of blocking out the names of the feeds you’re not reading at the moment (i.e. every one but the one you are reading). Concentrate of one feed at a time. Think of List View as a set of vertical blinders, Full Screen as a set of lateral blinders.

3. Use Item Scan to highlight each item. If you’re in List View, using the standard j/k keys to move the item view down/up expands the current item, which is precisely what we don’t want. It’s too easy to get sucked into reading the item. The goal is to rapidly scan each feed, one item at a time, before reading. Using the shortcut keys for scanning items, n and p for next and previous highlights the current item without opening it, allowing you decide whether or not it should be marked as read — the closest gReader comes to a mark-for-deletion command.

4. Process each highlighted item from top to botton, one at a time. For now, forget the p key. Don’t allow yourself the luxury of backskipping. For each item, spend 1 to 5 seconds deciding to either mark the item as read using m, or continue on to the next item. Unfortunately Google has no delete shortcut for an article; the best we can do for the moment is mark it as read. Once you reach the end of the list, refresh the feed (r), and the marked-as-read items will be deleted.

Wouldn’t it be more efficient to mark all items as read (<Shift>-a), then unmark the ones we want to read? That makes too much sense. Globally marking a feed automatically refreshes it, deleting all items at once. And since there’s no delete command, per se, there’s also no undo to recover the items.

5. Process each remaining item in Expanded View. With the j command, go down each item, one at a time. If you need to collapse back to List View for any reason, <Enter> toggles a highlighted item between Expanded and List View. If the article takes less than two minutes to read, read it now. If the article takes longer than two minutes to read, tag it (t) with the label Action. If the article is not worth reading during this session, but may be valuable as reference later, star it (s) for generic reference or tag it with a specific label other than Action (e.g. Recipes).

Now you’ve processed (not read) the entire feed. You’ve deleted the ones not worth reading, read the ones that took less than two minutes to read, archived potentially interesting or relevant articles. Hold your horses—it’s not time to read the remaining items in the feed yet. We need to repeat the entire process with the next feed, and so on, until we’ve processed all of our feeds.

6. Toggle off Full Screen to see the next feed. Navigate down to the next feed title. The shortcut keys are <Shift>-n and <Shift>-p. Open the feed using <Shift>-o. Then toggle back to Full Screen.

7. Repeat steps 3 to 6 for each feed until all feeds are processed. Now you’ve eliminated and archived all feeds that aren’t imminently worth reading, and have already read the short ones.

8. Read the remaining items. If any item that seemed worth reading during processing starts to seem less than worthwhile as you’re reading it, mark it as read (m) and move on (j).

Try this procedure for a couple of sessions until the logic of feed processing starts to sink in. If you still find that it creates more work that it relieves, which is unlikely, go back to your original routine.