Managing the Reading List Avalanche

by Kristi Willis

I read everything. If you took away all my blogs, magazines and newspapers, I would read the cereal or tissue box. I have even been known to read Golf Digest while waiting in the doctor’s office if I have forgotten my own reading material.

Because of my voracious reading habit, tracking key readings for our office has become part of my job. Like many of our clients, I’m expected to keep up with current trends in the fields of Productivity and Learning and Development. Also, like most of my clients, I struggle to stay up with the reading when my schedule gets busy.

Keeping up with the stack of magazines and books is challenging, but there is a physical stack on the desk, so I know when I’m getting backlogged. Blogs are a different problem. I follow quite a few and some of the writers post daily. Trying to keep up with them on my own was completely overwhelming.

I tried checking weekly using an Outlook Task to keep up with the blogs I wanted to monitor. I would land on a site and realize I’d missed 10 articles and two were information I really needed. It would take ½ a day to get through all the blogs. Next, I tried checking daily, but I would waste time visiting sites that hadn’t posted recently. I almost gave up.

Then, I found Google Reader; a free application that allows you to manage your blog and RSS feed subscriptions. You can easily view all of your unread articles or articles specific to a particular subscription. You can share articles with others, tag articles or, in my case, easily clip them to your database (for me, Evernote – see separate blog article on it).

You can also organize your subscriptions using Folders. For example, I use Google Reader for both work and personal blogs and have created Folders to organize the blogs for each. I can easily access the work-related blogs when I’m in the office and focus on the personal blogs at home.

My favorite part of Google Reader is the search feature. Let’s say that I want to find the recent blog articles on Information Overload. I can enter the term in the search box and it will pull any article with that term from any of the blogs I follow. I have saved hours of time in product development research using this feature alone. I no longer have to search the entire web for key articles and wade through useless websites. Instead, I can search the sites I know to be reliable and reputable with ease.

The Effective Edge doesn’t endorse products, but I have found Google Reader to be invaluable in staying current with information and finding it again quickly. I highly recommend that you work with it or a similar tool to maximize your productive time and tame the blog avalanche.