Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

For one reason or another, I neglected my feedreader between 1pm on Friday the 18th and around 7pm on Tuesday the 22nd. During this unintended vacation, nearly a thousand posts were published and were waiting for me in Google Reader.

I thought about that number for a second, then clicked "All Items" and then "Read." There was no way I was going to get through them. Why even try?

Up to this point, I've declared RSS bankruptcy a few times. Toss 'em out and move on. Blogs and news alerts find eyes other than mine.

But today I subscribed to another feed. It was different this time though. Normally, I categorize my subscriptions into the following categories:

• Arbitrarium - Wired , Kottke , Subtraction, Seed Mag, Anil Dash, Venture Beat, Bent Objects, etc.
  
• Design - New At Pentagram, Design Observer, I Love Typography, Ace Jet 170 etc.
  
• User Experience - Boxes and Arrows, A List Apart, Copyblogger, Findability, Good Experience, etc.
• Development - Ajaxian, Joel on Software, 456 Berea St, Y! User Interface, etc
  
• Clients - various client blogs and feeds
• Life Logistics - Meetup, Upcoming.org, Gen X Finance, Web Worker Daily, Del.icio.us tagged "toReview", etc.

This time, I added two new categories, bringing the total to eight.

• Daily
• Whenever

Now, each feed gets placed in one of the six above, and in on of the two below. If I get backed up, I click into "Whenever" and then click "Read". Dump the fluff. Since probably 95% of the feeds occupy the "Whenever" bucket, I feel better removing just these rather than all of them. 

Or, so I tell myself.