ShareThis1 |
Turn off all RSS feeds for a week while I get some other reading done (of the old fashioned cellulose-based kind). A possible precursor to deleting most feeds for a seven month experiment. |
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They've all been moved into a folder marked "On Hiatus" Either this folder gets opened or it doesn't. |
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7 days from Monday, 9/14. |
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A book and a cup of coffee each morning at 5am. |
Created Sep 13, 2009
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Comments & Observations
Brock Tice I actually do this using a script called rss2email. I have it scheduled on my server using a cron job, and every Saturday morning it sends my image-heavy stuff to an email folder. My text-heavy stuff I have delivered to my Kindle every Saturday by kindlefeeder. It's really nice to batch it like that.
Sep 14, 2009
Matthew Cornell I love it. As long as you keep mine, of course ;-)
How will you measure the impact? I've found that it's hard to determine direct value for some feeds. I wrote about it here, with the point being (IIRC) that tracking is important:
Information Provenance - The Missing Link Between Attention, RSS Feeds, And Value-based Filtering http://matthewcornell.org/blog/2007/01/information-provenance-missing-link.html
I'm curious to know your results!
Sep 16, 2009
Dan Owen I liked this so much that I kept it going past the one-week deadline.
I kept 8 blogs in a folder called "Real Favorites:" Matt's, Get Fit Slowly, Brazen Careerist, Colin Marshall, Ben Casnocha, Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, and 43 Folders. Last week I added Seth Godin back in.
In 3 1/2 weeks, there was only one day when I wished I had a bigger menu. On that day, I went into my "On Hiatus" folder and caught up, in batch mode, on Get Rich Slowly and Jim Fallows' blog. That was it, though.
Although I continue to check my feeds a few times a day (when "taking a break" -- sheesh, what a misnomer that is), I definitely don't get sucked in to them like before, and the amount of time-wasting is vastly reduced. It's amazing the difference that making as small a change as simply moving them into a separate folder that I just don't open can make.
Among the books I'm reading instead of feeds is Nudge, and I'm greatly under its influence. In particular, the whole discussion of the Status Quo bias. I'm definitely a lifelong victim of my own Status Quo bias, and am trying to cultivate a countervailing bias: the Change First/Ask Questions Later bias. This sometimes feel uncomfortably impulsive for a basically conservative (some would say fearful) decision-maker like me, but I'm endlessly surprised at how little inclined I am to look back after I've made the change.
Oct 11, 2009
Dan Owen One of the observations I've made about the whole process of experimenting is what I think of as the Cascade of Changes: when you change one variable in a system, you destabilize the whole system, and part of the experiment is to observe how the whole system changes. Part of the requirement of fearlessness is to be prepared for the unanticipated consequences -- I've mentioned before my mother's experience: she went into therapy in order to stop smoking, and ended up divorcing my father.
Matt's newsletter post this month about how many of his clients are Idea Pack Rats made me realize that shifting my attention from feeds to books and magazine articles has triggered a latent urge to write about what I'm reading. I've been trying to cultivate a 1 hr/day writing commitment, and having been trying to find a local accountability partner for this through Craig's List (three solid strike-outs so far), and get back into a writing group. All of this is gaining momentum and moving powerfully up past lesser commitments. My focus is being further refined by the kind of reading I'm doing.
I love this stuff.
Oct 11, 2009
Matthew Cornell Great stuff, Dan. I always come away richer after reading your insights. Controlling for changes is tough - I really know nothing about doing "real" science this way. Fortunately, I have a brilliant scientist on board ;-)
Oct 15, 2009