If You Could Only Have 3 Feeds…

If you’re like me, you’re constantly battling two conflicting urges — the urge to add more RSS feeds (and hence supposedly gain more knowledge), and the urge to trim them down so you can be more GTD-like, i.e. “reduce the inputs”.

In addition to taking my news in more efficiently, one thing that’s helped me do both at the same time is electing to go with what I call “meta-feeds”. Metafeeds I describe as feeds that collect content from multiple high-quality, semi-diverse sources. That’s pretty loose, but it’s different enough from a standard, single-source feed (like for CNN) to be a useful term.

If you truly care about your time you’ll try to find as many of these feeds as possible. Doing so will decrease the amount of time you spend reading and simultaneously increase the amount of good content you get from the time you do spend.

The way this works is simple — you don’t need to read every single story on the Internet in order to digest a full day of news. Instead, rely on people who do read every single story. Here are 5 RSS feeds that could (if you were to take the leap of faith required) likely allow you to dump a good portion of your other feeds:

1. Populicio.us
2. Digg
3. Reddit

Here we have the most bookmarked sites by the geek elite with Populicio.us and Digg, and an absolutely astounding list of diverse content via Reddit. The key here is that someone else already did the work for you. You reap the benefits by seeing pre-filtered goodness. If something makes an impression on Slashdot or Lifehacker, or Boing Boing, it’s probably going to make it to one of the sites above.

Ultimately, one of the best approaches to being more efficient online is learning to “let go”. It’s realizing that you don’t have to get everything. Tools like the sites above allow you to spend more time hacking on your projects rather than obsessing over which big story you missed. If the story was that important someone’s going to talk about it and it’ll probably hit one of the sites above.

Trim the 15 sites down to 3, relax, and get back to what’s important.: