dummied

Paring Down

At a glance

This entry was written on January 7, 2006.

The entry prior to this is entitled 12 dead.

The entry following this is entitled Odds and ends.

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I've been in a bit of a motivation rut lately, despite spending an ungodly amount of time parked in front of a computer. I've also been drowning a bit in big projects and big ideas, so I procrastinate on those and fill up NetNewsWire with more RSS feeds and start worrying about smaller things, like coding a few little CSS additions for this site or coming up with a scheme for backing up what has suddenly become important data spread across two Macs and a PC.

Sure, backing up all those iTunes tracks, family photos and client work is an important endeavor, but that's not what's going to help me get some of those big ideas¹ off the ground—some of which could mean money in my pocket.

I ended up spending most my time in front of the computer sorting through nearly 300 RSS feeds and five different mailing lists. And the thing was, I wasn't even reading a third of everything I was subscribed to. Most items in NetNewsWire were just getting moved into read status with a glance and a down arrow; most of the mailing list messages weren't even getting a glance, just the down arrow.

Meanwhile, I have all those projects sitting around unfinished.

So, I broke out the machete and went to town.

No more css-discuss, WebDesign-L, Web Standards Group or Structured Blogging mailing lists. I wasn't reading any of those and the only mailing list to survive the purge was Six Apart's ProNet list, which I've found to be very helpful at times and generally pretty low traffic.

On the RSS front, I've cut that down to 85 subscriptions, almost all of which are low volume feeds. It was pretty easy to trim down, actually. The first step was to eliminate all the Craigslist feeds I had floating around (high volume, low quality ... and besides, I'm not really looking for anything right now), then came 90-percent of the sports feeds (I work in sports and sit in front of the unfiltered wire for eight hours a day ... I get enough sports at work), finally, I lobbed off a slew of research feeds (stuff from various blog networks that I subscribed to wily-nilly to try and get a grip on their role ... turns out, there isn't one) and any blog that mentioned the Bloggies (this went surprisingly easily ... the only two toughies to unsub to were the 9rules Network Blog and 456 Berea Street, but rules are rules).

The next step is to trim the amount of web services I find myself swimming in. I've got the del.icio.us list to shuttle links back and forth from home and work, Mint to check my stats, Basecamp to communicate with clients and Last.fm and Flickr for fun. Everything else (including the just-launched beta for Newsvine [want an invite?]) is going to have to earn its place over the next couple of days. Last.fm stays just because it requires zero effort on my part, unlike almost all the other web services I've gotten involved with (90-percent of which insist on tagging or labeling everything ... I find it especially annoying in del.icio.us, which I just use for getting bookmarks from work to home).

In the meantime, it's time to get started on some of those projects (and, hey I did one of the little CSS additions I wanted to add to the site as well ... look, Ma, footnotes ... )