reflections on using Google Reader (the rest of Thing 5a)

As I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to get lost in the blogosphere when reading my RSS feeds - I open links in new tabs as I come to something that seems interesting, and before I know it I have 20+ tabs opened - and in each of those tabs are more links that I open ... etc. etc. etc. ADD is not my friend when reading blogs :-)

When I first started using Google Reader, I would literally stay up all night reading through blogs in each of the categories I have set (political, friends/family, education, ADD, productivity/lifehacks, autism, and humor/fun). Now I just have a set hour each night - I actually have to set a timer - devoted to it. I've become much more adept at skimming and skipping posts, which helped a ton ... When the hour is up, any tabs I have opened from links, I just bookmark to read later. Then when I have free time (like during that 6.5 hour class I'm taking every Monday this summer) I surf through them. It's much less information overload and I'm better able to process what I'm reading.

I've found that the personal blogs of friends and family are the quickest - they're usually just updates, pictures of kids, etc. - so I do that first. Then I skim through the autism blogs (blogs of parents of kids with autism) - again, mainly updates, stories, anectdotes. Those two plus the humor/fun things take about 15 minutes and not a lot of brain power lol. I've weeded out my political blogs because most of them link to each other and say similar things, so those plus the ADD and productivity blogs take me about another 15 minutes, which leaves 30 minutes for the education blogs - the ones that lead to linky-ville and churning brain gears :-)

I used to have lot of news feeds in my RSS reader as well, but I now only have one for autism-related news. Anything else I will either find out in my political blogs or rely on my husband to fill me in on (and the big stuff shows up all over plurk and facebook too - like Michael Jackson's death).