I use the Feed Sidebar extension for Mozilla Firefox, which makes it easy to follow all the web feeds you’re subscribed to. It uses the built-in Live Bookmarks feature of Mozilla Firefox, but presents it better by displaying all feeds in a sidebar, so you can quickly see all new content in the blink of an eye. I like this extension because it saves me so much time, no longer do I need to visit every website individually to read news, but I can simply view the sidebar.
However, this convenience also has it’s shadow side. I find myself spending way too much time on reading web feeds. I’m subscribed to the following websites, in the Dutch language as well as in English:
- One news website, the NOS.nl “Nieuws” feed.
- Two generic technical news websites, the Tweakers.net “Mixed” feed and Fudzilla.com‘s feed.
- Three hardware news websites, Hardware.Info‘s feed including all content, NotebookReview.com and silentpcreview.com‘s feed.
- Two weblog aggregators, Planet KDE and Planet GNOME.
- The feed of KDE.news, KDE’s news website.
- One car news website, all feeds of Autoweek.nl except for the “weblog” feed.
All those websites produce quite a of lot new content each day, but to satisfy my curiosity I read most of it. Sometimes I can spend many hours a day just reading web feeds, especially if I want to catch up because I didn’t read my feeds the day before.
I want to spend my time more productively, procrastinate less and prioritize the tasks I should execute better. Reading less web feeds immediately crossed my mind. I think I should take certain measures to reach this goal.
- Check web feeds only once a day, not multiple times.
- Stop being too curious, only decide to read content if it’s really interesting.
- Consider to cancel some subscriptions, there seems to be quite some overlap between the three hardware news websites and the two generic technical news websites I’m subscribed to.
I was wondering if others recognize this behavior? Do you think you waste too much time on web feeds as well?