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Not-ifications
Merlin Mann | Mar 1 2006
And, yet these are all things that I used to monitor manually via my RSS reader. Refresh all. Refresh all. Refresh all. Refresh all. Refresh all. Madness. The whole purpose of an RSS feed, it seems to me, goes straight to the "trusted system" notion in Getting Things Done -- if I have a reliable way of knowing when something really important changes in my world, then I don't have to think about it when it's not actually changing, right? And, then, for the less than life-threatening deltas ("new kitty photo!"), it's probably even okay to just check in every few days or so (cf: "tickler file"). But, if, out of some bizarre compulsion, I find myself hitting "Refresh" every 5 minutes, then either a) I don't trust the system, or b) I'm deliberately defeating its purpose as a monitoring and notification system. But, in any case, it's no longer a "notification" if I am the one constantly generating the requests -- instead I become like a sad little pigeon, gamely tapping my lever in the hopes that a pellet (or a hug) will fall out. So, yeah, I'm thinking about adding a few feeds back to my reader, but you can bet I'm going to tweak the hell out of the refresh settings. Now that I've been away from it for a few weeks, I have to say: there are an astonishing number of things in the world that I don't need hourly updates about. Daily, weekly, even monthly status reports provide more than enough information about a lot of change. Take a week off, and see if you don't agree. Maybe even ask yourself: "What is it, precisely, that I'm keeping up with?" 27 Comments
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 In addition to the above...Submitted by Blair (not verified) on March 1, 2006 - 3:39pm.
In addition to the above suggestions, I've found that limiting NNW to only as many feeds as I can fit in the feed list pane without scrolling keeps me from gathering too much information and spending too much time going through it. If I want to add a new feed, I evaluate the ones I'm already subscribed to, and decide if any of them are less important than the new feed. That being said, I've found that with a full-blown RSS reader (like NNW), I tend to read each and every post from my subscribed feeds, especially if the feed contains the full content of the post. If I visit the same site in a browser, or the feed is headline and partial content only, I'm much more likely to skip over the stuff I'm not genuinely interested in. » POSTED IN:
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