I’ve written little on this topic since November 26, when I proclaimed that “Ever since I realized my compulsion for free information, I’ve been pretty good about controlling myself.” Although it’s true that I haven’t been signing up for newsletters or teleclasses, I have been hoarding other types of information. When looking for an email about an affiliate program for Scott yesterday, he pointed out that I had emails in that particular folder dating back to more than two years ago. These were all emails I’d kept to look into “when I had the time.” Scott helped me to realize the folly of my ways, and I deleted everything that fell under the “someday maybe” category. As a result, the 40+ emails in that folder are now down to 11.
I’ve also come to the realization that I have way too many blogs in my RSS reader, as you can see if you click on the Blogroll tab at the top of this page. Although I had a chance to get caught up over the Christmas season when business was quiet, I’ve had little free time since, and I now have hundreds of unread blog posts in my reader. I think my next task will be to pare my list down to a select few favourites. This will not only allow me to actually stay on top of them, but when I do have extra reading time, I can spend it surfing new blogs on specific topics of interest at that particular moment.
Lesson learned: Just because you’ve made progress, doesn’t mean you’ve gone as far as you can go.
Janet, Janet, Janet. *head shake*
I was so sure that you had rid yourself of that awful addiction once and for all! But, I’m glad that I still have an infomaniac partner in crime
I’ve fought long and hard, but it’s such a slippery slope! How do you say “NO!” to that tidbit of information that could change your life forever??
Good luck on your journey of recovery. Do what you must – just don’t delete my blog’s RSS feed
Perhaps you have an information obsession because you’re a “question mark”.
BTW, so am I
Melodee – no worries, I could never delete my “partner in crime!”
Jacki – you could be right! Unfortunately, I didn’t keep the link explaining what that means, just the What Punctuation Mark Are You? quiz itself.
Scott is now changing all the affilate accounts to his name so I won’t have to face that particular challenge anymore!
Boy, do I know how you feel. I found last year that I had to set up my DELETE to dump everyday. For some reason, the 7,000 emails in my deleted was slowing down my pc.
Best of luck to you on the revamp…
Megan, I empty my deleted items at the end of each week. I used to have Outlook set to empty it when I exited, but occasionally I want to take another look at something, so that gives me a bit of extra time “just in case.”
Janet, I can’t believe you ever thought you’d keep up with so many blogs! But what you’ve described sounds less like a relapse and more like taking control of your info obsession to a new level. Congratulations! (But like Melodee, I hope my blog stays a keeper.
)
Kathy, I never really expected to read every post in every blog. Even when I got “caught up” it just meant I scanned through the RSS feeds (I will have to show you how that works some time) for anything of interest, but with so many, it was more of a burden than a pleasure.
And I think you’re safe…
I have about 125 blogs in my reader, but each day I’m ruthless about what I’ll read. It might be a great post, but if it doesn’t grasp my attention with the first few sentences, it’s marked as read and I move on. Out of each day’s 70-100 that come up as new, I generally read 20 and comment on 10.
Alex, that sounds like a good system. My problem is that many days I just don’t seem to have time to read any blogs, so when I do, instead of 70-100 new posts, I have hundreds. I think that knowing that’s what I’m facing may be keeping me from even going there.
Out of curiosity, what reader do you use?
I use a plug-in for Firefox called Brief. You can create subfolders to sort your feeds.
It’s a great tool and I even use it when I have like 400 unread feeds. But then I don’t do it by the unread feed option. I go into each group and see which feeds are highlight. Sometimes I mark “read” whole feeds without looking, others I scroll through quickly to see which articles catch my eye.
Basically I give myself an hour of solid blog reading a day and if I have time later on and I’m not too tired I’ll do some more. I tend to average about 50 comments a week this way.
Thanks, Alex. I looked at Brief but have decided to use the RSS reader in Outlook 2007 for my “top picks” – mainly people I know, where I don’t want to miss a single post – and am trying Google Reader for my more “casual” reads. I have imported all my feeds from Bloglines and will probably mark all as read and see what happens going forward.
So much great information, and so little time to stay on top of it all!!