rethink(ip) - Controlling RSS Overload...Animal House Style

Good idea for managing the RSS feeds you think you might be able to live without:

Most aggregators allow you to create "groups" for your blogs. I have groups for "blawgs," "bored," "technology," etc. (see a picture below). The most important group of all is called "Probation." Into the Probation group goes every new blog I add to my aggregator. EVERY one. Consider it a quarantine tank for your RSS aquarium. Once a month, go through your Probation group and cull the herd, promoting some to the big leagues, while giving others the boot.

At a more byzantine stage, I did something kind of similar to this--but in less-effective reverse.

Here’s a quick sampling of Ask Metafilter threads on productivity, procrastination, and just getting it together. (You have to love a question on alcohol and procrastination.)

As my media collection grows and my downloads get larger and more frequent, my poor PowerBook is almost always this close to being completely full. Having an overstuffed drive can hammer your performance as well as take you off-task (“You Startup Disk is almost full…”), so regular deletion of crufty files is a part of most folks' regular Mac maintenance.

Although OmniDiskSweeper is my favorite way to exhaustively comb a drive for fat-assed files, it can be time-consuming on a large drive. So I often do a surgical strike with a few simple Spotlight Smart Folders to identify the most likely candidates for fast deletion. A few very basic suggestions:

the Scarlet Letters: Notes on Making Art

This is a terrific bunch of notes on hacking your creative process, especially as it applies to visual art.

I really love the idea of not getting hung up on your failures and trying always to make rather than judge as the process is underway. It reminds me favorably of what Anne Lamott says about fearlessly producing your “shitty first draft.”

A few of the points I especially enjoyed:

As we've seen before, getting your inbound email under control will give you a huge productivity boost, but what about all the emails you send? If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you're looking for, you'll need to craft messages that are concise and easy to deal with.

Top 10 Things To Do During Nesting Month - Great tips from Apartment Therapy on reclaiming your fetid little nest for Autumn.

Tracking delegated emails + invoking Lazy Web for an Entourage Applescript

Learning to stand up for what you want without either being trampled or disrespecting others.

Over on DIYPlanner.com, SusanBeth outlines how she’s created a writer’s version of the Hipster PDA.