With more information moving from Email to RSS, these feeds can now consume as much time as an overflowing Inbox.

After embracing the excellent Inbox Zero techniques Merlin Mann has helped spread, I realized that my RSS feeds had become the new bottleneck and a major time commitment each day.

Funny how removing one obstacle, can reveal a new one?

So, I fired up NetNewsWire and started looking for patterns that made sense.

The original organization, was a mix of folders that had unrelated meaning. Such as Mac news, Cool, Technology, etc.

Useless for any real purpose.

I decided to sort the feeds into groups that helped me prioritize my reading.

I chose not to apply action-based labels to the feeds since it is likely that the feeds will not lead to any actions for me to perform.

The feeds now look like this:

Essential are feeds that I should to keep an eye on.

Profitable are feeds that lead directly to business opportunities.

Casual are feeds that I enjoy from time to time, but are easily marked as read and ignored when I don’t have time.

Internal are feeds that run within my business and are not public.

Technical are for security and technical information that I migrated from email lists to RSS feeds.

Cleaning up my feeds has reduced the time it takes to digest the news from a couple hours to about 20-30 minutes.

Putting the feeds into prioritized groups helped, but there is another level of management you can automate.

NetNewsWire lets you set custom refresh settings for each group or feed.

The Casual group is set to only check every 24 hours and never do it when the feeds are manually refreshed.

This customization reduces distractions during a busy day when the feeds refresh and you want to check for important updates considerably.

Moving to this system has allowed me to capture more value from RSS feeds in far less time than ever before.