How to optimize your Google Reader experience May 10, 2007
Posted by Mario Sundar in Miscellaneous.Tags: google-reader
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I’ve said this before and I’m going to repeat myself. It’s becoming more and more difficult to steer clear off google apps when it comes to my day-to-day functioning. What started off as mild Gmail love has now turned into a full-fledged case of Googlaria!
Apps I’m addicted to: Gmail, Gcal, Google Reader, Google Docs and it looks like my homepage is slowly shifting to iGoogle.
Why Google Reader enhances my productivity: First off, one of the basic tenets of Getting Things Done is the centrality of data and any tool that can facilitate collection of data is awesome. Now, as a community evangelist at LinkedIn, I find a need to monitor streams of data from disparate sources of chatter: Discussion Forums, Yahoo! groups, LinkedIn Answers, Gmail, news feeds (search terms related to area of interest), events (upcoming.org) etc…
Since all of the above can be subscribed to as a RSS feed, it makes it SO MUCH easier to be able to just check my Google Reader rather than go from one app to another. Now, the problem doesn’t end there. The fact that I’ve subscribed to nearly 175 feeds and the fact that all my feeds are sorted by time means I can’t get to the appropriate feed on time since there’s so much to read.
Taking another page from the philosophy of GTD, all I had to do is actually process the appropriate information at the right time. So, I created three tags according to the priority and/or time I wished to access specific kinds of content. So, let’s call the three tags: tier 1 – morning, tier 2 – evening and tier 3 – weekend.
Tier 1 feeds (Frequency – often; through the workday): This is where I tag all my time-sensitive work related feeds: Discussion Forums, LinkedIn Answers, Google alerts, News, Blog Search feeds, Email, etc… What is really cool about Google Reader is their new email function, so if I see a post that I need to forward I can do that very easily now.
Tier 2 feeds (Frequency: once/day): This is where I moved the feeds I love to read but that are are NOT time sensitive. This is also a good tag for feeds that have numerous posts a day and therefore you don’t have time to get to during the day like TechCrunch, Mashable, Scoble, etc… I also add various utilitarian productivity related feeds like lifehacker to this tag! Also, posts related to my blogging such as marketing and advertising related posts.
Tier 3 feeds (Frequency: once/week): All the rest of the feeds — go here. No exceptions. Be disciplined in matching your feeds to one of the above three tags since it’ll help you become more productive during the day.
How do YOU manage your RSS reading through the day? And, how many RSS feeds have you subscribed to?
[...] community marketer to follow a central system to monitor chatter about your company. Here’s how I do it via Google Reader. I monitor discussion forums, yahoo! groups, google alerts (news and blogs), [...]
[...] How to optimize your Google Reader experience « Marketing Nirvana So, I created three tags according to the priority and/or time I wished to access specific kinds of content. So, let’s call the three tags: tier 1 – morning, tier 2 – evening and tier 3 – weekend. [...]
[...] originally heard about the idea to organize feeds via a tiered structure where Tier 1 through Tier x are folders containing feeds in order of importance. I loved this idea [...]
[...] originally heard about the idea to organize feeds via a tiered structure where Tier 1 through Tier x are folders containing feeds in order of importance. I loved this idea [...]
Love the concept, Will try to use it soon, Thanks for sharing