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August 2, 2007 / Filed under: Efficiency, Organization, RSS

I've decided my current approach at organizing my RSS feeds in Google Reader is not productive in a world of information overload.

Whereas it's helpful to use tags to "group" similar feeds, the grouping should be based on priority and frequency, rather than purpose or relation.

In other words, feeds should be organized by how "important" they are to you - rather than simply grouping them together because they discuss the same topics, which is how I used to do it.

Instead of creating tags such as "news," "web development," "tech," etc - I've deleted all tags, and re-created only five: "1", "2", "3", "4", and "5".

These five tags indicate priority and frequency. There is a fine balance between the importance of the feed to me, and the frequency of updates. If importance is high, but frequency is also high, that may "collectively" decrease the feed's importance on the 1-5 scale. Typically my most "important" feeds have minimal updates. That's the nice balance I'm looking for.

To me, a "frequently updated feed" means five or more updates per day. This usually only happens with news sites that have content generated by machines. It also occurs on sites with multiple authors. The content can soon become overwhelming to keep up with.

Here is what each tag means:

1. Possible time-sensitive information. I'd like to be alerted as soon as possible. (Frequency of updates: very light.)

2. I'd like to know relatively soon, but it's not terribly urgent. (Frequency of updates: light.)

3. I don't need to know this stuff, but it may be informative or insightful. (Frequency of updates: light to moderate.)

4. There may be interesting content here, but not very urgent or necessary in my daily awareness. (Frequency of updates: moderate to heavy.)

5. I'm just keeping on eye on these feeds. I should probably unsubscribe to these feeds. (Frequency of updates: heavy.)

Using these "rules," you should be able to re-group your feeds based on priority and frequency. I find it much more helpful when deciding which feeds to read first, and which ones I can safely ignore.