I am Sheamus - Very Personal Development

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Quick: how many blogs do you subscribe to?

If you don’t remember an exact total, open your RSS reader and have a look.

I bet it’s a pretty big number, right?

Now, answer me this: how many of those blogs do you actually read?

All of them? I doubt it. Most of us maintain a large amount of subscriptions in our readers, many of which are to blogs that we don’t read more than on a very occasional basis.

Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it to you. And then you can find out for yourself.

If you use Google Reader, there’s a neat feature on there that I have found quite productive in deciding which blogs I should continue to subscribe too, and which I should not. It’s called ‘Trends’.

A couple of months ago, I was subscribing to so many feeds in my Reader that it became overwhelming. More often that not when I checked it, there were so many updates in there from so many blogs that it became easier to just click on ‘Mark All As Read’ and move on. Or, I’d find myself just fast-scrolling through pages and pages of posts trying to find something of interest.

And if you’ve got thousands of unread posts, it can be overwhelming to the point where you open your reader only to close it a few moments later.

This is obviously very counter-productive.

I decided I needed to filter out those blogs that I thought I read, but really did not, leaving me more time to enjoy the ones I did. This is where the Google Reader ‘Trends’ feature is worth its weight. Using that tool, I’ve cut my current RSS subscription rate down to 52 blogs. And as I’m writing this post, using the advice I provide I will cut this down even further!

(Other RSS readers may have a similar feature; consult the help guides.)

Open Google Reader, and click on ‘Trends’ (it’s in the top-left menu). You’ll now have access to a lot of useful information.

For example, when I click on mine, it tells me that from my 52 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I have read 1,255 items. This is an interesting stat in and of itself, because doing a quick bit of math it tells me that the blogs I read update an average of 24 times per month. That seems manageable enough. But because this is just an average, you will quickly see that some blogs update almost that many times a day, whilst others might only update a handful of times every four weeks. Both can potentially be on your ‘hit list’ when it comes to decluttering your RSS subscriptions.

Look further down the page and you’ll see two important tables - Reading Trends and Subscription Trends. You can modify this so it displays a top 10, top 20 or top 40.

Reading Trends ranks your feeds by the number of blog posts you have read. It also includes a percentage showing how many of those posts you have read against all the posts that blog has released to its feed.

Subscription Trends tells you how often each blog updates per day. It also provides a stat that lets you know how many of those updates you actually read.

For Reading Trends, here’s my current list:

And here is my Subscription Trends:

(I write for Peoplejam, incidentally, which is why it rates 100 per cent on both sides.)

If you compare these two tables, one thing becomes obvious very quickly - the more heavily a site updates, the more unlikely it is that I will read many of their posts!

I’m sure there are many of you who, like me, are subscribed to the really heavily updated blogs like Mashable and Techcrunch and keep subscribing even though you only read very few of the posts, most of the time just scrolling down the page in your Reader until something catches your eye. Maybe you give it 30 seconds before hitting the Mark All As Read button, or maybe you just let them build up indefinitely. Either way, it’s a psychological approach to clutter that is commonplace throughout our lives.

What’s the solution? It’s very simple - you should unsubscribe from those feeds.

I know what you’re thinking. You don’t want to. You like those blogs. It feels unloyal. You used to read them all the time, you know you did. What if you miss something?

The thing is, there’s a good chance that if your numbers are anything like mine you’re missing an awful lot already. Using Mashable as an example, what are the odds that in those 1 per cent of posts I have read - out of 18.9 updates per day, that’s one post every five days - that it was the single one that was the most important and beneficial to me? They can’t be good.

So Mashable must go. As I’m writing this, I deleted it from my feed.

This makes Lifehacker my number one most frequently updated blog. Now, even though I only read 17% of all the posts on Lifehacker, it still makes my top three in ‘Reading Trends’. This suggests to me that it’s worth maintaining a subscription because even though a reading rate of one in five isn’t particularly high, I’m still getting value there because I’ve read more posts on Lifehacker than 49 of the other blogs I subscribe to. Also, Lifehacker is also relevant to my own blog’s niche.

So Lifehacker stays.

What about Techcrunch? I like Techcrunch a lot, but I can see I’m only reading 10 per cent of all their posts (at a rate of 14.2 per day). It does make my ‘Reading Trends’ top ten, however, and it’s the only pure tech blog that I’m currently subscribed to, so it stays. For now.

Now let’s look at Geeks Are Sexy. It’s number one in my ‘Reading’ list, both in total posts read and overall percentage, and it’s number three in my ‘Subcriptions’ list, at 4.0 updates per day. This tells me two things - one, that this is probably my favourite blog (unknowingly), and two, that four updates per day is probably my absolute limit when it comes to whether I actually and properly read that blog, or not.

Indeed, most of my ‘100 per cent’ blogs, the ones where I read literally every post, update far less than that.

Examples:

• The Problogger Job Board (0.5 updates per day)
• The Positivity Blog (0.4 updates per day)
• The Blog Of Tim Ferriss (0.4 updates per day)
• Dean Karnazes Blog (0.4 updates per day)
• StevePavlina.com (0.2 updates per day)

And so on, down to a site like that of Bear Grylls, which hasn’t been updated in nearly a month!

What’s interesting about this is that even though I always recommend Geeks Are Sexy to other people, and like the content a lot, I’m not sure, if asked, I would have said it was my absolute favourite blog! The numbers, however, suggest it probably is.

Incidentally, Google Reader counts a blog post as ‘read’ when you scroll all the way through it within the Reader. Of course, this does not necessarily mean you have actually read it at all. But what it could well mean is that those blogs with a read rate of less than 20 per cent are the ones that, more often than not, you’re either ignoring or choosing to Mark All As Read, pretty much all of the time.

As I continue to work through my lists (also utilising the ‘Inactive’ and ‘Most Obscure’ tabs in the ‘Subscription Trends’ table), I observe and stick to the following rules:

1. If my reading rate of any blog is under 20 per cent, I really evaluate whether it’s worth maintaining my subscription.
2. Likewise, if the blog updates more than four times per day - which as above appears to be my comfort zone - and my reading rate is also low (say, less than 40 per cent), then I consider unsubscribing from that, too.

As a rule of thumb, give any blog 30 days from the day you subscribed before evaluating it this way.

Going through my top forty while writing this post, I’ve eliminated another ten blogs from my RSS feed, about half of which I didn’t even remember subscribing to, simply because they hadn’t been updated in weeks! A lack of updates isn’t always a good reason to subscribe - I’ve kept my Feedburner subscription because even though they update irregularly it’s usually important to me because I use their service - but when I checked out some of the inactive blogs I was subscribed to I didn’t even remember why I had subscribed in the first place!

It’s also worth observing that if you’re a regular on Twitter, and you have the authors of these blogs in your ‘follow’ list, there’s a good chance you’re getting duplicates of all this feed information, as most of the A-listers announce their latest posts on Twitter, too.

And remember, you can always re-subscribe. This isn’t for life. And using some of the examples I gave above, am I really going to forget to check out Techcrunch now and then, like maybe once or twice a week? I doubt it - Techcrunch is linked everywhere. I don’t think I could avoid its reach even if I tried! And even a once a week visit to their blog would probably mean I’d read as much, if not more of the posts than I’m look at it my RSS reader.

Clearing out your RSS reader is very refreshing. By doing it regularly you will know that each time you open it back up it will always contain several things you want to read, as opposed to lots of things you probably won’t.

So, don’t delay - open up Google Reader and its ‘Trends’ feature now, and declutter your RSS subscriptions today!

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