I use NewsGator as my aggregator – have been since version 1.0. Until about a month ago I took a “channels” view of the information. In other words, I would expand my “News” folder and see something like this:
Using it this way, I might see that A VC has a new post in it. So I would click on the folder and read the post. Repeat this process for every feed. This works fine for a couple dozen feeds, but it doesn’t scale into the scores or hundreds very well.
The problem is that most of the time a majority of the feeds don’t have any new posts, but in order to learn this I have to expand the News folder. (I could just leave it expanded, but that doesn’t work well for me because I have other folders that show up below it.)
A while back Dave Winer posted about the River of News approach to reading content. This is how the Userland aggregator works.
Initially I didn’t like that approach because I had some vague notion that blogs should be organized like the newspaper – a sports section, a business section, the arts etc – except that the “sections” are a 1:1 correspondence with blogs.
After reading Dave’s post, I decided to try something different. NewsGator actually comes with a “River of News” interface, but the early versions were buggy and slow. But the latest version is very nice. Here’s a screen shot of that it looks like in Outlook:
I much prefer this approach. It only shows me new posts, and I can quickly see whether a given post is likely to interest me. If so, I either open it up and read it or I move it to my Inbox to be later processed using Gettng Things Done (aff. link) techniques.
Addendum: And by the way, I always delete all posts when I’m done skimming them. If something is worth holding on to, it gets moved to my Inbox or a special folder called Reference. As a result I rarely feel overwhelmed by information.
Before Getting Things Done I had the tendency that most people have to hold on to messages and feed items with the vague notion that “someday I will respond to this.” Getting Things Done taught me to always ask “what’s the next physical action I should take with this item?”, decide what that action is, then get it out of my inbox.
The subtitle to Getting Things Done is The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I can’t emphasize enough how taking control of the river of information that flows into my life every day has lowered stress. The thing is, it’s less work than before, not more, so don’t take the attitude that you’re going to have to work to “maintain” the system. The system takes less work than you’re already doing.
Every now and then I fall off the wagon and don’t practice all the principles like I should, but even then I’m still way ahead of where I was before, and getting back into the groove is usually not hard at all.