How often do you lament the fact that you can’t get through all of the stuff in your reader? I know I’ve done it.
Do you feel guilty when you unsubscribe something or unfriend someone in your network? Why?
Consumption of content is not a democracy. Giving of attention is not a democracy. We each have to decide what we find value in, and leave the rest behind. If that’s one blog or no blogs or five Twitter followers or a hundred, it’s up to us. And there is no standard that’s fit for everyone.
Mark Schaefer and Tom Webster have been discussing whether the social web is an economy of favors, and to a certain extent in the content realm, it might just be. We look at people reading our blog or following us on Twitter as some kind of personal validation that we have something important to say, or simply that people like us enough to pay attention. And the quid pro quo – you comment on or share my post and I’ll share yours – simply isn’t doing us any favors to ensure that the content we’re reading makes a difference in our work, our lives, or our minds. (This goes for that silly “why aren’t you following me back” thing, too.)
The firehose we complain about is a monster of our own making.
We have this irrational fear that by not being up on everything, we’ll be connected to nothing. Which is outrageous. By merely participating online, we are immersed in a great sea of information, and from there we can choose what – or if – to consume. And the relative sameness or related nature of so many of the things we find and read means, very simply, that we just don’t need it all.
Justin Kownacki issued the Read It All Week challenge to get us to examine our reading habits more closely as well as what content we actually consume and get value from. I jumped the gun on Justin a bit and did something a bit extreme but cathartic: I nuked my reader. All of it. I unsubscribed from every single blog I had in there.
I kept a note about a few that I might want to revisit. But the rest? If it’s worthwhile, I’ll find it again. If it’s really valuable content that made a difference to me, I’ll notice its absence and perhaps seek it out again, on different terms. Â I might discover new content that fits my current state of mind. And at every turn, I consume the content. It does not consume me.
Our tastes change, as do our ideas, and the way we take in and use information. We need not be shackled to a wave of words, people, and information that doesn’t fit our lifestyle or our work. And it’s about time we evaluate our own motivations for this quicksand we’ve voluntarily walked into, and stop with the melodrama when we’re the victim our  own choices, or when our behaviors aren’t reflected in those of others.
The beauty of the web is that we can each bend it to our will. Won’t you join me in taking control of your own online universe, and ceasing to apologize for what that means for you?
I look forward to your comments.
And THIS is why, when cleaning up my Reader yesterday, I kept my subscription to this one. Thank you!
Well put Amber and why it is a good thing to always put aside some time to filter, refine, fine-tune your multiple touch-points on the social-web, no need to pull in noise if it is noise.
Cannot agree more. I haven't visited my Google reader in over two years. I believe that if something is important enough, it will find me. And I've consistently relied on my social networks (both online and offline) to deliver significant news/ information to me.
On another note – this fear also applies to the idea of online relationships.
It can get overwhelming. Esp. when I hear about the amount of time people invest not only in consuming information on the web, but also building relationships online. I've found myself needing to sacrifice offline friendships / bond building for online relationship building and sometimes, I wonder if that's ok?
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about it at some point.
Clay Shirky said it best for me, “…there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure….”
We're responsible for where we put our attention and where we draw our lines in the sand. That's always been true. I think as a collective we're just getting better at understanding we can't do everything, read everything, listen to everything, watch everything or say yes to everything. Nor should we.
Energy goes where attention flows. – Ken Savage (WinMartialArts.com)
I ignore my Google reader and read what I am led to organically — and it works out beautifully.
I ignore the lectures that I've been getting since 2007 about how I should/shouldn't follow/operate on Twitter, and enjoy a timeline I can manage and monitor (without having to create filters in Tweetdeck or Seesmic or whatever that winnow my thousands of follows to the few hundred I should have just followed in the first place.)
I don't accept every group or page invitation I get on Facebook, because I… don't want to. I do follow certain things to support friends, but if I have zero interest, I just opt out.
I have no guilt about not reading everything or knowing everyone or monitoring the entire universe because I don't see any of that as a path to successful growth, personally or professionally. Rather, I believe the choices we make about what we take in and how we connect should be unique to our personalities and our needs.
Not to mention that the discussions I see going by about unwieldy inboxes and overstuffed readers I find about as interesting as most people find my nightly menu tweets. 🙂
Amber,
From a simple guys perspective the barrage is enormous. Yep I get guilty when I've culled the fluff, whether I was emotionally attached or it not longer intellectually stimulates. But I get over it as soon as I read stuff like yours. We each, I believe, have an obligation to grow, up to the final curtain, and sometimes that means moving on to stuff more challenging. It's often perceived as a personal affront when we signal that we have outgrown old stimuli or relationships. This new web frontier is Darwinian to say the very least and perhaps the platypus are just evolving.
I started the week focused on the #ReadItAll challenge that Justin issued. The reading went well initially, as much because I was committed to the process as anything else. What I realized on Wednesday was that I did not need a full week to accept the utter folly of attempting to consume everything I'd deemed “important”.
So, I took your approach and nuked the whole thing. I'm pretty confident that if the content is good and deserves my attention, it will get surfaced through some other touchpoint in my network. Or, like you pointed out, if I'm really pining for it…I can always go out and hunt it down.
And at the end of it all. No apologies. My time. My perspective on what is important (temporally adjusted).
Great read, Amber. Thanks for continuing this interesting conversation and for the opportunity to contribute.
True story: a few weeks ago, when looking for new blogs to read, a friend asked what I kept in my google reader. When I said I don't have one, she asked “You don't? But how do you find all that great stuff?”
Curiosity and serendipity. That's all it takes. Let the creators create, and if it's right, I'll find it.
I consistently use my reader, but I read probably less than 50% of the posts that come through. If I miss something, I don't mind. If the headline doesn't catch me, no big deal. If it's that great, it'll find me or vice versa.
While I do find it validating when someone on whose blog I've commented comments on or recommends mine, I got to a point quite a while ago where I realized that, while I might find their content valuable, they might not feel the same about mine, and that's ok because I can comment on and interact in their posts, and that is as far as it needs to go.
A refreshing post – thank you! Yes, there are currently hundreds of unread items in my reader. I am easily talked into subscribing to someone's blog, but then don't always take the time to go back and read it. It might be time to tidy up my reader as well.
I'm definitely guilty of over-consuming. I think in my business it's good to know what the latest news and trends are, but the need to be in the know can consume you and take up too much time and energy.
It seems like the emptying of my RSS reader should be accompanied by self-flagellation. Or walking across hot coals. Or something. How can it be that the tool I used so religiously a few years ago has now become a burden and in essence useless? I'm finding it hard to release my Consumption Guilt, even though my RSS reader has grown dusty with lack of use.
Advice on smacking the guilt out?
This is VERY true.
Well, here's a solution I didn't expect. Instead of refining and curating our tools better, we just blow them up.
I guess for some people the consumption of information has become an all or nothing gambit, in which you either Read It All, or you only read what's in front of you in that moment. This means I suddenly find myself in the minority of wanting to find practical ways to use the available tools, rather than being a slave to, or oblivious to, them.
Whoever predicted I'd be the poster child for moderation gets a free Squeeze Pop from their local ice cream truck.
So let me be clear: I'm not advocating for blowing it up forever. And ignoring it completely. But that's my method. I do the same thing when I organize a closet, for example. Take everything out, then put it back in its proper order.
It's more about rebuilding then ignoring. It IS about finding practical ways to use the available tools, but starting from a place that's more manageable for me. Clean slate, as it were.
Ask yourself this: why are you feeling guilty in the first place?
Are you afraid you'll miss something? Do you feel like you're somehow insulting the writers by passing over their stuff? Are you feeling guilty perhaps because you created the mess and aren't sure how to clean it up?
Guilt is based in our feeling that we have a responsibility that we aren't fulfilling. But who are you responsible to first? And if your goal is to get something of value out of the content you're reading, don't you have a responsibility to yourself to make it manageable?
I anticipate that I'll end up rebuilding my reader, one bit at a time, but the lens through which I view useful content will change, and my criteria for what I want to subscribe to as well as how I read through it will change, too.
Those discussions are often less about being self important (as they're often interpreted) and more like just simple venting or cries for help. Same as saying you've had a tough day, or you're baffled by a project challenge. It's just folks seeking a bit of self assurance that they can and will tackle it all. Much like stating a weight loss or fitness goal aloud to the world can make you more accountable to it, sometimes airing the demons that plague you in an organizational sense can motivate you to pay attention to it.
It's great that you have these filters on, but not everyone does, and I want people to know that it's okay to Just Say No and take back control as you've done.
Fair enough. We all have our own method for reorganizing our minds.
I guess it takes different strokes for different oh my god I can't
even finish this sentence #GaryColemanWasPushed
Very good idea–I barely find time to go through my reader, and a lot of the folders I have set up are related to past jobs and mostly irrelevant to me know-however whenever I go to get rid of them I suddenly get almost sentimental about it (reminds me of cleaning out my closet, hah!) I'm so glad I categorized early on so it's at least easier to ignore the irrelevant ones though.
Likewise on Twitter: I think the normal evolution is when you first join you feel compelled to follow everyone who follows you and may even look at those who don't follow back as snotty-However the more you use it the more you realize that it's not feasible and you end up with a ton of noise. Then you stop following and even start unfollowing. I've been called out a few times but I definitely don't feel bad about it anymore. Who I follow = my decision and perogative and if someone doesn't like it, they can go ahead and unfollow me.
I'm going to deconstruct and reconstruct – good advice. But I wanted to push back with the idea that I think we already overfilter ourselves. One of your tweets this week asked for book/music recommendations that were outside the norm. I'll be more apt to toss some of those feed back into my mix to give a more well-rounded feel to the whole, rather than just setting up feeds in my own ghetto and missing out.
I know. 🙂 I'm overstating it, likely — but I'm partly reacting to criticism I've received for not having read every single blog post by every single person with something to say, or not accepting everything that everyone wants me to do or look at or “like”. And the Twitter following thing comes up all the time — I get called elitist and any number of random negative sorts of things because I have strong filters, which I don't think is fair, and buys into the notion that we're not aware enough and involved enough if we don't stand directly in front of the firehose.
I guess I'm coming at it from the other end of frustration, with people who don't like my boundaries too much. 🙂
Oh! And I realized I may have come off as saying I didn't find the post interesting because I made fun of the frequent tweets about overstuffed readers. I should have said I absolutely agree with you, and love that you're encouraging people to do this. Instead I just started swinging my comment bat wildly. Sorry, Amber. 🙂
Bold move, I like it! What I did in Google Reader is create a few “daily” folders devoted to certain topics. Those I scan every work day (I leave everything alone on the weekend). Everything else is kept in topical folders that I pretty much never check, but it's all there if I ever want to do some searching or scanning. I do my best to keep my daily folder to just stuff I really do want to check every day, and I cycle things in and out pretty often.
Thank you for this wonderful article. I have been struggling with this for about 4 months. I call it my love/hate relationship with technology. I love it b/c it keeps me connected to good people and very informed. I hate it b/c I feel that if I go any length of time not paying attention that I'm missing out on some form of awesomeness. Like, what if something great is happening and I didn't see it?
I'm struggling with living within this box of being connected via technology but missing out on the actual real world spinning around me as it has for the millions of years prior.
It's a terrible feeling to come back to my phone/computer and see that I've missed someone reaching out. But I try to tell myself that if it was soooooo important they'd have contacted me some other way. That if they don't have my cell number to call me right after they call 911 then it's OK if I live my life and spend time engaging in face-to-face interactions.
I think that we've put so much emphasis on connecting online that we've forgotten that we need, still, to be connected in the real world. And it's just not possible to do both all the time. I don't want to sit with my friends/family and be on my phone texting, IMing and tweeting because they are physically with me and deserve my attention. And I don't want to take my time to be with someone in person only to be second fiddle to the world on the other end of their smartphone.
Not at all. 😉 And fair enough on the other end of frustration, because I've been in that boat, too. I think that's the criticism many fear, and try to avoid by doing it all.
And, of course, I sit next to you every day with all my information filtered to a fare-thee-well. 😉 I envy your approach, but know that my own hangups keep me from being that free-flowing (I don't feel compelled to read every post everyone writes, but I do want to know when someone I care about or whose work I respect has something new to say).
I'm with you Dan–I approach culling my stream like I do my closet. If I haven't worn it (or read it…) in a year? It goes. If it doesn't fit? It goes. And, most importantly, if I don't love it? It goes.
My solution was to evolve categories. You've likely dealt with your feeds long enough to know which ones are never-miss (i.e., you'll read even days or weeks back in them before clicking “mark all as read” for everything else that's stacked up), which ones are consistently useful and worthy of scanning their headlines, which ones are “need to know” to stay abreast of what various people are currently interested in, etc. And then there's a pile of feeds you never read at all.
I recently set up folders that reflected that relative usefulness. Since the folders were based on the way I actually interact with various feeds, it was easy for me to drop out huge numbers of feed without guilt: they hadn't proved useful in months, so it was highly unlikely that they would anytime soon.
This statement holds true for me:
“We have this irrational fear that by not being up on everything, we’ll be connected to nothing.”
I just can't seem to shake it. I know that it's irrational. I know that millions of folks “miss” stuff every single day. My wife doesn't really read blogs, she's barely using Facebook, she deletes 95% of her email without replying, she's not on Twitter, etc etc and she does just fine.
I think I just need to be pushed. Literally. Pushed. (Or just jump). I know that I've created my own monster, but I don't have the courage to scale back.
Maybe a few days of R&R in Chicago will help…
Thanks for bringing me one step closer to changing my ways. Love that about you.
-dj
Wow, Read It All is certainly getting some thorough examination – which is so great.
Justin and I were intending for an examination of consumption habits, but it seems like people are really falling into two camps: those willing to push the button (like you) and those saying they're simply not ready to change.
Not ready.
No one has yet told me (or, far as I've heard yet, Justin) that the idea of curating our consumption is silly. Only that they're not ready “yet” to change their aggregation habits.
How interesting. Anything floating back to the radar yet, Amber?
I'm going to let you in a little deeper to my brain than I'm comfortable with, but here we go.
I follow (I use the term loosely) 3 peoples blogs semi-regularly. And even those I'm generally terrified of. Hell I barely read what the other columnist at Social Fresh write, and I'm one of them. I have this illogical hangup that believes if I start gorging my mind on too many others thoughts and ideas that I will cease to be able to generate new ones of my own, that I'll somehow become a mindless speaker re-purposing what everyone else has already said.
I'm the same way about business books, I rarely read them now, they scare me. My ego is large enough to believe that I have the ability to be original in thought, yet insecure enough to think that I couldn't still do that if I read tons of blogs regularly. Go figure.
But somewhere in there, I think there's a point to be made. There should be a balance between consumption and contemplation. If all you do is read then there is never time to process, never time to formulate a personal point of view, never time to think a concept through to its logical conclusions. Is that really learning? It's more like rote memorization to me.
Find your balance.
At some point I become more comfortable creating content than consuming it. At that moment, the guilt does not exist. Your focus shifts from learning to creating learning opportunities. When I consumer content these days, for the most part, I am in curate mode. Collecting info for my audience.
I think it is something each person has to learn for themselves. Everyone will hit a wall of there own making and have to come to their own solution.
The biggest thing anyone can do is to create filters that get them the information they care about most.
Great conversation Amber
After reading this, I'll be honest with you, I'm a Justin Kownacki fan. For my money, I don't know if it gets any better than when he sings “When a Man Loves a Woman”. 😉
Harold Bloom calls this the “anxiety of influence,” and it's definitely one I share with @techguerilla.
I filled a feed-reader with blog recommendations from people I follow on Twitter, most of whom were recommended to me by people I followed earlier on Twitter. Since I've been kind of directionless these past months, imagine my surprise when I realize my reader is dripping with marketers. And I don't even want to be a marketer! How'd that happen? So I also went to “inbox zero” on my reader (and changed readers to Feedly), and narrowed down my litmus test for getting onto it. I'm also unfollowing a lot on Twitter. (You're safe, Amber!) (I know, “whew!”, right?)
I think I needed the “firehose” at the beginning. In fact, Ralph Waldo Emerson ( a guy from the non-digital age!) felt that this kind of reading was important to the creative process – “A good head cannot read amiss”. I passed through the period of overwhelm and feel like a more sophisticated consumer. I do love the idea about “nuking” my Reader.
Thank you Amber for admitting what I've been thinking all along: too much content to keep up with. This post acts as the catalyst to decluttering my “'cyberlife”! I find bookmarking my favorite posts using Delicious is the most beneficial way to categorize material. ~Katelyn Mashburn
That closet thing – Great analogy – especially when there is stuff we all seem to hang on to that we 'hope' we will get to wear again for whatever reason. Thanks Tamsen
I think everyone who uses an RSS reader feels a little overwhelmed when they see 1000+ I know I do! I like your thinking of getting rid of all you feeds and finding the content you want to consume organically. I think for me I love having that huge resource of content that I'm interested in. I love spending time reading in depth into the topics I love and I'm a huge consumer of content. I think this blog will be another feed i'll be adding to my reader!
Great, great stuff and so true…wish I had something more profound to say – but you said it beautifully here, Amber. Cheers!
i couldn't agree more! If you feel the need to leave a comment or share a post b/c the other did the same for you and not because you liked what they wrote/had to say, the value of a comment or RT or whatever is lost.
I agree wholeheartedly. I stopped looking at my reader months ago – I find it more cumbersome for my brain to filter. I use hootsuite to organize my social streams and don't feel like I'm missing a thing. I also use delicious pretty diligently to store & categorize valuable information.
I remember reading Timothy Ferris's book a few years and immediately unsubscribing to 90% of the newsletters I received. I can't say I missed many of them.
In the last year, I have fallen into the same trap with my reader. I'm noticing that I have lost interest in many of the blogs I once enjoyed reading and I experience no shame or guilt in subscribing to any of those. Plus, I don't feel guilty if I don't open my reader every day.
GOOD FOR YOU for eliminating the clutter and starting fresh. I routinely unfriend people on Facebook, unfollow people on Twitter, and unsubscribe from blogs in my rss reader. And so forth. Sometimes I friend/follow/subscribe in a subsequent reverse decision. Sometimes I don't.
Fact is, unless the reason for my doing anything is the same as why I did it initially, I am wasting my time by keeping something around just because I once had a reason. It's why I follow this blog but don't follow either of the primary authors on other media. I am enriched reading what I read, and commenting what I comment. But if I stop reading this blog tomorrow, so be it. Social proof tells me if something is meant for me to read, it will find its way to me.
“If it’s worthwhile, I’ll find it again. […] I consume the content. It does not consume me.”
Reading that paragraph brought a tear to my eye. Very thought-provoking.