I posted earlier this month about the problems of having too much data going at me at once, and literally thought “I feel like I’m drinking kool-aid” from a fire hose.

There are a lot of information sources on the web. I’m sure you’ve figured that part out by now. Blogs like Lifehacker and BoingBoing are extremely prolific, to the tune of about 20 articles daily. However, there are less prolific blogs, like Self-Made Minds, that put out rather useful content that I’d really regret missing.

Unfortunately, value in content is extremely subjective. Literally, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Some blogs are going to put out posts that you’d hate yourself, in hindsight, for missing; yet there are blogs out there that you could really care less if you missed a week of articles.

Efficient & Lazy Strategy:

The best way I found to do this is to use two major categories for every single blog I read: Junk and Value. I ended up re-categorizing all 86 (and growing) of my RSS feeds into the two categories. Interestingly enough, the Value category only has 24 feeds in it, and they are definitely not the prolific ones. Since I use Google Reader, I set it up to load the Value category by default when I open my RSS reader.

Result:

When I open my RSS reader for my fix of feeds now, I usually look at the text of the 10 or so truly valuable posts. If I have another fifteen minutes to kill, I might occasionally open the Junk folder and scroll through the titles of the 100+ articles, open one or two, and star the ones I want to read later when I’ve got the time to dive into a pile of articles.

In a nutshell, I get the maximum return on my time after the 30 minute investment in categorizing my feeds in a way that is extremely functional.