I’ve used Google Reader for many months now, and I’ve sorted feeds into tags in an attempt to keep up with them. I organized by how often I wanted to read each feed, so I had ‘daily’, ‘weekly’, and even ‘monthly’ or ‘whenever’ tags. I thought this was working well, but I kept pushing feeds toward the lower frequency tags because I could never quite keep up. Then one day I realized what a disgusting amount of time I was wasting and quit reading my 300+ feeds completely.

After 3 or 4 months, I missed that regular injection of whats-going-on, so I started to catch up a bit and pare down my subscription list (I didn’t cut all that much – I still have almost 300 subscriptions). Then a few days ago I read a post somewhere that mentioned using a ‘skim’ tag. Aha! I can categorize feeds by how much attention I want to give them! It’s so obvious now! Now I have three tags I read every day, and I get through all my reading in an hour or less, which is an amount of time I’m comfortable with (for now).

First, I read my ‘daily’ tag. This one takes the longest, since these are the feeds I’m most interested in. I read in list view (keyboard controls only), opening the interesting looking items (about 50-70%). Several items get opened in background browser tabs to get followed up on in some way.

Second, I read my ‘oskim’ tag. A clear example of my amazing naming skills, this tag holds feeds I skim in expanded (open) view, and I rip through these (hello, mouse wheel). Examples: Dilbert, xkcd, and other comics, FFFFound!, Overheard in New York. For this tag to work, the feeds have to be short and sweet. If I have to click to get the item, it doesn’t belong in this tag.

Third is the ‘skim’ tag. These are the feeds that I quickly skim just to get an overview of what’s going on. A very small percentage of these items get opened. Examples: Digg, reddit, del.icio.us. These are the feeds that I want to keep up on, but they just slow things down when they’re mixed with all the more specific feeds that I care more about. When I have them separated like this, I can skim 400 items in 5 minutes and get a useful snapshot.

So there we go. It takes me an hour or less to get through all three tags, including the background tabs I open along the way. At the end of the hour, I usually have less than five tabs left that I want to follow up on. This is a huge improvement over my previous efforts, so I’m happy for now.