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How to Drop an RSS Feed Like a Bad Habit

Every Wedneday is Simplicity Day on Zen Habits, and today’s post is part of a series called “Edit Your Life,” looking at ways to simplify different parts of your life.

I recently read an article about a blogger who reads more than 600 feeds a day. I thought I was bad, with nearly 100 feeds in my Google Reader. The truth is, either number is overload, as there is no way that you need to read that many feeds, or that going through so much information every day can bring you happiness.

So I made a conscious decision, within the last week, to brutally edit my RSS feeds — and now I’m down to 16.

It was a heart-wrenching process, I will admit. You get addicted to these feeds, and over time, you add one or three every day and they grow like a mountain of refuse. It gets to the point where going through all your feeds is a chore, and you can never keep up with all of them.

So I set out to eliminate all of those that weren’t bringing extremely useful or entertaining information into my Google Reader just about every day. The first day of editing, I cut down nearly 100 feeds to a little over 60. I took a deep breath, and told myself that was good enough for the day.

The next day, I cut it down to 44. That was good enough too, and I told myself that I didn’t have to do it all at once. The third day, I made it down to 28. On the fourth day, I was down to 16, and seeing my list of feeds whittled down to the essential ones was a liberating feeling. I decided to stop, and stay with those. I think I can cut them down to 10, but really, that’s an arbitrary number and I don’t think it will make that huge a difference. Of the remaining 16 feeds, there are maybe 1 or 2 that I could cut out if forced to, but I really enjoy all of them, so I think I’ll stick with where I’m at.

The result? Well, the time I spend reading my feeds has been cut down drastically. It used to take me an hour, all told (I would break that down to two sessions a day). Now I can do it in 15 minutes or less. It also saves me a lot of stress and a lot of filtering through stuff I never read anyway.

It’s probably useful to know how I read feeds before I get into the process of eliminating them. I’ve mentioned this before, but the way I go through my Google Reader is by using the keyboard to crank through my entire list of unread posts. I skim through the headline and content quickly, and if there’s something that interests me, I’ll hit a key and pop it open in a new tab. Once I’ve gone through my entire list, I’ll go to the opened tabs and read just the best articles in their entirety. If I don’t have time to read them all now, I’ll bookmark them for later.

So let’s look at the process for eliminating all but the essential feeds in y our life:

  1. Initial sweep. The first time you go through your list, if you’re like me, you can probably eliminate 10-15 right off the bat, just by looking at the name of the feed. You know which ones really shouldn’t be there. Unsubscribe to those immediately.
  2. Inactive. Next, use the “Trends” feature in Google Reader (or similar feature in other readers) to find your inactive feeds (it’s the tab right next to “Frequently Updated”). If they haven’t updated in the last week or so, you can probably safely drop them. If you’re like me, you can probably drop another 10-15 feeds. You’re done for today!
  3. Drill down. Here’s the next stage — discovering which feeds don’t give you much value on a daily basis. If there are feeds on the borderline, I would drill down into them for a couple of weeks to see if I actually read any of their posts. If you imagine your daily reading process as a horizontal scan — you’re scanning through all the day’s posts from all your feeds — then going into a single feed’s posts for two weeks or so is a vertical scan. Do a vertical scan of the borderline feeds, and see how many of their posts you have actually been interested in. If there hasn’t been a single one in the last two weeks, drop it. You can probably cut your current list in half through this step. Rest for today.
  4. Worst-case scenario. If there are a number of feeds that you are hesitant to get rid of, not because they give you value, but because you’re worried that you’ll miss something important, ask yourself, “What’s the worst case scenario if I drop this feed?” In most cases, it’s not that bad. And if there’s something really important that’s written about, in most cases one of your other feeds will mention it. Drop those “what if” feeds if your life wouldn’t be miserable without them.
  5. Test folder. You should be getting down to a much smaller number by this stage. You’re probably down to two groups — the really must-haves and the ones you still think you might need but that aren’t giving you value. If so, create a folder for this second group, and put them all in there for a week. Don’t read them. If nothing bad happens to you in that week because you didn’t read them, you’re OK. To give it a test, read through the test folder at the end of the week, and see if that little reading session gave you value. If not, drop those feeds.
  6. Friends. If you’re like me, the hardest ones to drop were those of some of my blogger friends. I really enjoy interacting with them, and they write interesting stuff, but for my purposes, reading them was absolutely essential. Still, it’s hard to unsubscribe from a friend’s blog. Then I realized: my friends usually email me with their best posts anyway. I end up learning about the post twice — once in my reader, and once in their email. So I dropped my friends’ feeds (well, most of them). I hope they don’t hate me for this, but I really needed to edit my feeds list, and I did what I had to do. I still love my friends and will drop whatever I’m doing for them.
  7. The final test. Once you’ve gotten your feeds list down to what you feel is minimal, go through each feed on your list once more, and ask yourself, “Is this feed absolutely essential? Does it give me value every day? Why do I need it?” If the answers to those questions is satisfactory, keep them. You may be able to get rid of a few more in this final test.
  8. Minimize reading. Now that you are down to the essential feeds, it should be highly satisfying to look at your feed reader. I know that it’s disproportionately pleasing for me to look at my small list. It shouldn’t take you long to go read through your feeds every day. Be sure to limit yourself now to one session per day, getting it done quickly and all at once. Don’t keep checking your feeds throughout the day, as it is a distraction from what really needs to get done.

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Brilliant comments (35)

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Jack Says:

June 7th, 2007, 5:34 am

I’m curious what you see as the need behind dropping an “inactive” feed — if the feed only produces a post once every week or two, is it really adding that much to the time spent on my feeds?

I use a much simpler question system when I periodically cut down my feeds: Is it enjoyable? and Is it useful? If both are yes, I keep it. If only the first is yes, and it’s not more than a post a day, I keep it. If it’s useful but not enjoyable, I trash it in favor of looking for something better-written in the same field.

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James Says:

June 7th, 2007, 5:43 am

So pray tell, which 16 made the cut?

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Leo Says:

June 7th, 2007, 5:44 am

Hi Jack … well, if an inactive feed gives you great joy or use when it does eventually post every couple weeks, I don’t see a problem with keeping it. However, let’s say you have 40 of those types of feeds — those posts can add up. I would suggest only keeping the most valuable of them, to keep your inbox count lower. And for me, it’s also satisfying to have a smaller number of feeds rather than a large number that includes many inactive feeds. But it’s really a personal choice — this is what worked for me.

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Leo Says:

June 7th, 2007, 5:45 am

@James: I would love to share them with you, but I don’t want to offend any of my blogger friends. Some I kept, and some I didn’t, and I still love all of my friends. :)

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Leo Says:

June 7th, 2007, 5:45 am

However, for others who’ve gone through a similar purge, I’d love to hear what few feeds made the cut.

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Jack Says:

June 7th, 2007, 5:50 am

That makes sense.

You may also want to consider “subject” feeds. Instead of reading six posts a day on lifehacker, for example, I subscribe to the highlights tag and only get one post a week, which lists all the interesting posts I didn’t read while I was ignoring lifehacker all week. A lot of blogs now offer the ability to subscribe to only one tag or subject, so you’re more likely to get only the posts that interest you.

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James Says:

June 7th, 2007, 6:04 am

Here are my “core” feeds. I have lots of others that come and go, as I change my mind about them back and forth.

The Daily Saint
Slow Down Now
zen habits
Unclutterer
Daily Blog Tips
Problogger
Copyblogger
Smashing Magazine
Wizard of Id
Verse of the Day
Versiontracker
iGTD

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todd Says:

June 7th, 2007, 6:58 am

The key for me is value. I subscribe to many bloggers that don’t post daily or even weekly, but when they do post, it’s valuable to me.

I read headlines of each label I have in Reader; if I notice I’m not clicking through to read many posts, that’s when I start pruning feeds.

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Balfour Says:

June 7th, 2007, 9:03 am

Please, don’t anyone post your essential lists.

Partway through reading this post, I went to my feeds and started weeding out. Then, came back here and looked at the comments and went to look at one of the blogs on the list above and got caught in never-never land of deep sea surfing and ended up with new feeds! Net: I went from 36 feeds to 37, even though I got rid of some! Gee thanks!

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Puneet Says:

June 7th, 2007, 9:53 am

A good way to do the “Initial Sweep” is look at the “Trends” metric in google reader which shows you which feeds get you information while which have been inactive for a long time. I had done this a few days ago and easily removed 10 -12 feeds as they were not getting me anything since last 6 months or more.

Ofc you will need to do this if you will have lots of feeds you subscribe to.

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Caitlin Says:

June 7th, 2007, 10:41 am

I’ve gotten rid of the high volume feeds or the ones that I never check even when I know there are new posts. Most of my feeds are the blogs of friends, the blogs of writers or literary agents, and there are a few productivity and career sites.

I’ve tried having news feeds or movie review feeds but it just mounts up too quickly so I prefer to search for this information when I want it, by actually going to the home page of sites. (Radical concept in the era of RSS feeds and search but it works for me).

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Shannon Says:

June 7th, 2007, 10:51 am

I recently went through a similar purge. I identified a handful of subjects that I felt really passionate about and purged everything that didn’t fit. Then I identified about 5 blogs in each subject that I really got a lot of value out of and enjoyed reading. So I got down to about 20 or so, and that’s been a lot easier to keep up with.

Every now and then I’ll add a new one, but I put it in a trial folder until I decide whether it’s something I really want to keep. Thanks for that tip! I think posting frequency is really a decider for me. I want about one post every day or every other day. The high-volume feeds are too much to keep up with, especially if I skip a couple of days, and the low-volume feeds lose my interest unless they’re really well written.

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Chris Says:

June 7th, 2007, 11:38 am

I would never drop this feed. I think it’s one of the most important ones I read, hands down. Too much of the news I get in a day is negative, and zenhabits is always a positive, life-building source of info. I’m not married, don’t have kids, in my early 20’s and live in an apartment still. What I read here always gives me that extra inspiration to reach those goals and reminds me of who that person is that I want to become. Enough gushy praise then, just wanted to say thanks zenhabits!

-Chris
Denver, CO

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Mark Shead Says:

June 7th, 2007, 11:52 am

I keep feeds in different folders. One folder has everything I will definitely read and the other has feeds that I’ll read if I have extra time. The extra feeds get marked as read every few days whether I read them or not, but they give me some extra reading material if I’m stuck waiting at a gas station or in line at the bank.

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Trent Says:

June 7th, 2007, 12:05 pm

I follow about a hundred feeds. I couldn’t do it without Google Reader, though.

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Edward Mills Says:

June 7th, 2007, 12:50 pm

It’s definitely the “friends” category that makes this one tough. Hearing about your purge will make it a bit easier to cut down on some of my friend feeds that provide content that is excellent but not within my core area of interest. Thanks!

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Dubber Says:

June 7th, 2007, 13:15 pm

There must be something in the air.

Just over a week ago, I went down from over 1000 feeds to just 35, including friends. I also asked my readers to think about their ‘Desert Island Feeds’ — the top 10 RSS feeds they could simply not do without.

http://newmusicstrategies.com/2007/05/31/desert-island-feeds/

I’d be interested to hear what the Zen Habits readers consider unmissable feedage when cutting right back.

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Shane Says:

June 7th, 2007, 13:26 pm

But the only reason I read this is because I have too many feeds!

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gabyu Says:

June 7th, 2007, 14:48 pm

i know that i subscribe to too many feeds, but there is one feed i’ll keep, it is yours ;)

It’s quite easy to remove feeds : find a way to evaluate each post you are reading, until there is a analyser which will help you get rid of the uninterested feeds. But there is no such technology yet..

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Karin Dalziel Says:

June 7th, 2007, 14:55 pm

I find cutting feeds especially hard because I am at the beginning of my career and a lot of the people in my reader are people I want to know. The information may not be 100% useful to me, but it has allowed for some serendipitous connections. I’ll also be able to introduce myself to these people at conferences when I see them, and say “hey, I read your post about…”

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AgentSully Says:

June 7th, 2007, 18:55 pm

Leo, You have a great knack for finding the big challenges we all face and helping us! Great stuff.

I’d like to add a suggesttion that I discovered from researching my recent post on cool Google apps.

It’s Google Alerts. If you’ve pared back your feeds but want to be able to still find some new gems out there, try this service.

Google Alerts allows you to track a subject in either blogs, news, web, groups or all. You can recieve your alert email either daily, weekly or as they occur.

Here’s the link: http://www.google.com/alerts

So for example, you could set up an alert that lets you know anytime someone posts about “GTD” in a blog or whatever subject that interests you. You can click on ones that look good, or juet delete the email that day if you don’t have time.

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RJR6305 Says:

June 7th, 2007, 22:25 pm

Okay - you say you are down to 16, but there are 23 on your blog roll - understood that you don’t want to insult your blogger friends - one question - are all 16 on your blog roll?

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Jesse Says:

June 7th, 2007, 22:53 pm

I just recently got into RSS and have found it great, i am actually using the internet again :)

One question though, what is your opinion about feeds that offer only a headline (like cnn.com). I use feedreader and find it annoying to have to go to the website every time an item seems interesting.

Keep up the good work, zenhabits will certainly make it to my ‘16 feeds’

Jesse, Shanghai

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Leo Says:

June 8th, 2007, 2:14 am

Great comments everyone! I love the ones where people shared what they’re doing — great insight. And thanks to everyone for the nice words about Zen Habits.

@RJR: There is a lot of overlap between my 16 feeds and the ones listed on the blogroll, but there are some on each that aren’t on the other. The blogroll isn’t updated as frequently as I’d like — I’d probably add a few to it. But every blog on the blogroll is one that I’d recommend, even if I’ve recently dropped the habit of reading them daily.

@Jesse: I hate headline-only feeds. I’ll generally click through to an article I want to read anyway, but I like to be able to scan it quickly to find out more than the headline can tell me before I decide if I want to read the entire post in more detail. I also don’t like partial feeds. I’ve unsubscribed from every partial feed in my RSS reader.

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Stephen Says:

June 8th, 2007, 5:45 am

My RSS feeds are a source of consternation, I want to get rid of some, but I feel like I need them. So I re-arranged them into new folders and just read the “important” ones daily, and catch up on the rest when I have down time.

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Leo Says:

June 8th, 2007, 6:04 am

Stephen … I know exactly how you feel. Here’s an idea: export your feeds to a file and save it on your computer. Now delete all but the ones in your “important” folder. Try going a week without the others. You won’t miss them!

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Sara Says:

June 8th, 2007, 13:28 pm

I struggle with the friends issue. Well, “struggle” might be a little dramatic. I organize my feeds by friends, work, news/culture, internet/blogging, and a “maybes” folder. The maybes are new ones I find or that others recommend. I watch them for a few weeks and if they haven’t been consistently helpful or enjoyable, I remove them. This gives me a little transition b/c I don’t like to make an instant decision on a blog. Some blogs have great content daily, while others are great only once in a while, but still worth keeping. Often when I’ve deleted quickly, a few weeks later I’ll stumble onto the same blog and it will have a great post and I end up adding it back anyway. ;)

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Peter Says:

June 9th, 2007, 18:06 pm

I read through your article and I found it to be very interesting. I had never taken the time to investigate what an RSS feed was, but thanks to the article I now have. Since I am just starting by using Google reader, I was wondering what are the 16 RSS feeds that you view daily. Keep up the great advice

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Rebecca Says:

June 13th, 2007, 7:44 am

I think Matt Cornell (maybe) made a statement once that it is important to make your blog headlines count. This is sort of my guiding principle in dealing with my feeds. I’m sure I’ve flushed some good ones without reading them, but I console myself with the knowledge that there is a ton of valuable information produced every day which I never see! ;-)

I don’t think bloggers are under mandate to post every day (one of the reasons rss feeds are useful), so I don’t think I could make level of activity one of my criteria.

I do have my blogs grouped in Google Reader, so if Im especially pressed for time, I will just “ignore” one Group until I’m ready for them. Given my profession, musicology blogs get prioritized, and then I work my way down. I’ll confess sometimes I wait until an opportune moment to read my “Organization” blogs (which now includes this one) because I figure the valuable information is not time-sensitive.

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Aleksey Gureev Says:

June 15th, 2007, 7:18 am

While you guys solve the problem radically by killing all the feeds and freeing the plate for something else, there’s a more gentle way for this, that above all scales much better.

Personally, I have lots of feeds and I know people who have more than 2K feeds to follow daily and it takes no more than 15-30 minutes them to skim through the most interesting (relevant) articles and mark everything else as read. So, how do they do this?

They organize their feeds in groups as most of us do, but they make the next step and create different sorts of search feeds to fetch all information they need in specialized virtual feeds. All they have to do when they allocate time for reading is to run through these several search feeds consolidating relevant information in one stream and read, read, read. Yes, many will worry about loosing something important, but if you worry then why delete a feed, right? You can combine the approach and read the feeds you care about fully, while search for the relevant information with search feeds.

When I discovered this method, I was deeply impressed. I don’t have to delete feeds to lower the amount of time necessary for reading, I can have virtually any number of feeds to fetch articles from etc. And when the cleanup time comes, it’s much easier to decide what to delete because you already know what could possibly be interesting, and what is junk.

Now, here’s a little ad. I’m sure there are several blog readers supporting this feature, but as a developer of BlogBridge — feed reader and processor, I would definitely recommend it. It’s an information processing system that lets you read only what you want and when you want. It has search feeds, query feeds, flexible feed rating system, it watches you move around your feeds and updates ratings to show your favorites first. What’s more important you can build your feed lists and let your friends subscribe to them (they are in OPML form), or place the code in the sidebar of a site / blog that will show your blogroll generated dynamically. This is just a very tip of the iceberg, but I think you got the idea.

Have fun!

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sindhu Says:

June 15th, 2007, 21:14 pm

“From your 237 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 7,346 items, starred 104 items, and shared 72 items.”

wew, google reader trends has quite a lot to say about me.

first off, this is indeed a wonderful post, ive been my friend always complains that am insane about feed reading but ive never really thought i could sit down and get to deal with it.

i always have this tiny voice saying oh what if i missed something important ?!?!? and i hit subscribe.

personally i hate it when i see a 100+ mark of unread feeds in any of my folders, its simply humanely impossible to scroll through them all !

after reading this post, i feel so much better. am very encouraged. thank you so much , i will report my cut down on feeds back here ;)

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norvo Says:

July 1st, 2007, 9:28 am

If you want to cut the number of feeds and you still do not want to miss important news, than first try to filter out all the high-volume feeds … if you get a 100 posts per day less just because you cut out two high-volume feeds that will save you a lot of time already … another thing is to filter out certain posts in certain feeds. it is okay to have many feeds as long as they are low-volume feeds and of course once in while you need to re-asses the value of a feed versus the time it takes to read all the posts.

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Monica Ricci Says:

July 18th, 2007, 11:08 am

I LOVE my Google Reader. I have 15 feeds (including my own) on my list and I am really good at not adding new ones to the list, but now and again, I will run across a good one that deserves to be added. At that time, I re-evaluate the others to see if there is anything I can drop and in fact, I’m on the verge of breaking up with one feed (who shall remain nameless).

No worries Leo, I’d never drop you! I just hope your readers aren’t dropping ME off their lists. Eek! Just kiddin’… I have no delusions of grandeur and I know not every blog is right for every reader. Good insights today Leo, as always.
~Monica

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Nishkanu Says:

August 3rd, 2007, 12:34 pm

I was surprised to read this post. I have a bajillion feeds into google reader (loosely sorted by subject) They make me no stress or work whatsoever. Why not? Because I feel no obligation to read them. I think of it as like my bookmarks list - things that are interesting that I might want to go back to, but not something where there is any kind of requirement that I regularly pay attention to what is happening. The feeds are there so I can use them if I want to, there is no need for me to be a slave to them and force myself to keep up. I read them when I’m in the mood and have time (usu. over lunch at work if I don’t have anyone to eat with) and that’s it. I have a favorites folder that I am more likely to read but I still don’t feel like I *must* read them. I think if you start with this kind of attitude, it is much simpler than implementing more routines to stay on top of things, when, in the end, it really does *not* matter whether you are on top of them or not. Well, in any case, that’s what works for me.

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free divorce papers Says:

June 12th, 2009, 16:49 pm

Cutting out on RSS feeds is another means of saving time and simplifying work. There could be feeds on our list that does not really work. The best thing to do is eliminate them.

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