I have to admit that my level of information overload is overflowing the e-mail domain and rising in my RSS world at the moment - this is mostly a symptom of being busy right now. I checked them all this morning and by the afternoon I was almost touching over 100 unread feeds again.
Time for some serious pruning I think.
However, there is no doubt that RSS is easier to manage than e-mail, but you still need to be a little ruthless. When I don't have time to read all my subscriptions the news and tag-based feeds are the first to go - I mark them as read without actually looking at them. But its harder to choose from the individual blog subscriptions. However, this cuts out over 75% of my unread items in just a few seconds - I don't think I could do this so easily with e-mail?
Will I miss anything interesting? Maybe, but I'm sure one of the other 22 unread posts will have picked up on it if it was something important. You have have to trust the collective :-)
What also makes this easier is that with a few exceptions none of feeds are directly work related and there is nothing mission critical. Having said that, there is also a percentage of e-mail passing through my 3 e-mail inboxes (1 @ work, 1 on a client's e-mail system and a personal account) that would be better as an RSS feed.
The next step of course is should I just blow away those unread subscription altogether? I'm considering it! I just need to be more ruthless...
UPDATE: I hadn't got to Matt's post when I posted this. Be ruthless and learn to say no.
This is something I've done several times and have never missed anything critical - after all who decides it's critical but me! Pruning is also necessary as we grow and some subjects become no longer relevant.
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