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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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 After listening to This Week...Submitted by Paul (not verified) on March 2, 2006 - 2:43am.
After listening to This Week in Tech, and hearing Leo Laporte say that he had a bandwidth bill for several hundred dollars, just for his RSS feed, and that his logs showed that some people were checking the feed every hour (even though it's a weekly podcast), I decided to sort my feeds by the refresh schedule that I want to follow. (Like Daniel NIcolas suggests). Not only is it saving me time, but it's saving the authors money. » POSTED IN:
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