Why and How I ditched my RSS Reader

For a long time I read blogs using Google Reader. Even before its unfortunate demise I found myself frequenting Google Reader less and less. And when I did go to it the feed list was so long I didn't end up reading much of it at all.

Once google Reader closed down I moved over with the rest of the world to Feedly. Then I had a thought - what if I just didn't bother? So I tried it out for awhile.

This choice coincided with my late adoption of Twitter. I decided to use others as funnels for interesting articles, rather than sifting it all through for myself. On Twitter I follow:

   * For leadership stuff I follow Michael Hyatt on Twitter
   * For productivity I follow Time Management Ninja on Twitter
   * For parenting and leadership I follow Tim Elmore on Twitter
   * For finance and debt stuff I follow Dave Ramsey and CanadianFinance
   * I follow others too, but these are some of the main funnel-type tweeters

In addition, lots of my Facebook friends are, naturally, interested in a lot of the same things I am. Plenty of my friends post good stuff on parenting. Lots of my students and colleagues share good posts on the Bible, Christianity, Biblical Studies, and Theology. And even my atheist brother posts good science and atheism stuff too :-) Because I am friends with numerous bloggers and scholars, my Facebook newsfeed keeps me well informed.

Moving to this type of method over an RSS reader also means that the better stuff is what I end up reading – the cream rises to the top, since at least one person has recommended it over the other stuff out there.

The last step in my system is using a Read Later service called Pocket. It saves articles for me to read later. It can waste a lot of time to read everything as soon as you come across it. Instead I batch it together at convenient times. Pocket is free and it is very simple to save articles (or anything else) directly from my browser or my twitter client of choice (Tweetbot for Mac and iOS).

This approach may not work well for you, but it has been great for me. About the only place I need to be careful is in the number of tweeters I follow. I try and be diligent to prune the people I follow if I'm not getting much good stuff from them but they post a lot.

I'm also careful to batch my Twitter scanning time. I've never had the temptation to check twitter more than once every day or so (not so with Facebook - I'll be posting about this in the future). Twitter, for me, is mainly about scanning through to find interesting stuff to throw into Pocket or to answer the occasional question that comes my way.

So there it is. Have you ditched your RSS Reader? If so, leave me a comment - and any suggestions for improving my system are welcome too.

andyi via photopin cc