It’s 4:30 AM right now. I’m bushed.

A few days ago, I started on a quest to make myself more efficient with respect to my RSS reading.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve had far in excess of 800 feeds a day I go through, and I generally spend at least three hours a day specifically devoted to clearing my reads (with light reading throughout the rest of the work-day).

I’m at a point where I want to be a lot more productive in terms of my writing output, and the biggest expendable chunk of my workload was made up of reading.

Previously, I had my feeds categorized basically in order of preference (an “A-List”, a “B-List,” etc…). It was somewhat helpful, because it’s a system I’ve used over the last year and a half with very little modification (occasionally I’d move someone from one list to another).

The problem was that it was too broad and I couldn’t glance at my tags and tell you what was important that day. I couldn’t say “hey, this was a big day for online video,” or “lots of corporate news today.”

That’s all changed. The first thing I did was go through and cut out a lot of useless feeds and removed and archived some categories I no longer monitor.  That brought my feed count down to 384 from 853.

Then I created a very detailed and descriptive tagging structure so that I can simply scroll through not my feed list or even a headline list but scroll through my category list to see what’s going on.

We’ll see how this helps. I have a feeling this will have a big impact on my workflow, but I’ll give you an update in a week or so just to be sure.