NathanBowers.com

“Inbox Zero” is hard for most people, presumably because they’re forced to use Outlook (the horror!), Entourage (also horror!), or pretty much any mail client except Gmail. It was hard for me too until Gmail’s “archive” button and its excellent search allowed me to banish clutter from my sight without negative consequences. I suspect that people have trouble with other mail clients because the act of archiving is just slightly more laborious and untrustworthy than it is in Gmail.

Getting to “RSS zero” is not as easy. Now that I’m writing instead of just reading, I don’t check Google Reader for days. When I do check in, it greets me with the intimidating 1000+ count and a giant list of unread items that all look alike (Note to G Reader developers: We need favicons in our feed list. Without them it would be better to have no RSS icons at all because today we have to scan down the list, and then expend mental energy to pass over the icon and read the feed title).

This is why I gave up named categories in favor of prioritized folders. Here are my folder names: “1” = daily reads, “2” = if I’m not busy, “3” = I keep you around for sentimental reasons, and “probation” = new feeds that might not make the cut. There’s more on this at 43Folders. Now I can easily read the 10 feeds I really care about and nuke the rest with Shift+A.

Important: It’s much easier to “nuke all” when you’re mindful about your feed habits. Here are some tips for deciding which feeds you can’t live without and which ones are just habitual residue:

• If your feedreader forgot all your feeds, which ones would you be able to remember and visit manually?
• Heard of Muxtape? Its strength comes from its constraints: You can only choose 12 songs, so the songs you choose are not only your favorites, but songs you’d recommend. If you were limited to 12 RSS feeds, what would they be?
• Which feeds exist just to generate pageviews? (I’m looking at you Lifehacker et al.) Drop them.
• Have some of your favorites lost their voice? I love 43Folders and have based my life on Merlin’s teachings about the power of 3×5 cards, but something was lost when he redesigned 43F and became more of a “network” than a blog… *sniffle*.
• Trade RSS readers for social networks. Now that you’re spending 6 hours a day on Twitter your friends’ Tweets will make sure you never miss a good YouTube video and… crap. Now I have to write a post about recovering from Twitter addiction.