How to manage your daily reading through RSS feeds

They fill my email inbox all day long. They boast names of interesting people. They jostle for my attention all day long. They promise to absorb and distract me. They are email subscriptions to leading bloggers’ daily posts or great news services and I have cancelled the lot!

Don’t worry, I am not that mad.  I need to read. I have just subscribed to their RSS feeds instead. I am no longer distracted by my email inbox and can now choose when to catch up with my reading, at my time and pace. I can now skim headlines and first paragraphs, particularly useful with daily aggregators rather than personal blogs.

Should you? You need take only a few steps.

• Set up a Google account.
• Insert a Google Reader box into your iGoogle homepage. And you are ready.
• From which blog are you most consistently benefiting? Look for the small orange icon with the RSS beside it.
• Click on that and follow the instructions. You want to find them again?
• Go to your iGoogle homepage, spot the headlines as they change through the day and browse.
• Or, better still, why not choose a specific time of the day, every day, to go into your Google Reader.
• At your convenience, at your most focused, at your leisure.

Don’t stop there, though. You have gone off one of your former favourites? Cut him or her out! Your interest is narrowing  on one subject. Cut more out! Reassess how you are doing occasionally, review your reading and, you’ve guessed it, cut some of those RSS feeds out!

Only through focus is wisdom assured.