How to Organize Your RSS Feeds

Typically, I am all about grouping and organizing things. But about a year ago I decided to test whether, when it came to my RSS feeds, it might actually save time not to organize them into folders.

My reasoning was that simply having them kept in a straight list would make them directly visible and accessible.

And there is something to that. I found it most useful back when I used Internet Explorer as my reader (I actually found it very handy to use IE for my RSS reader).

When I switched to a Mac, I didn’t find Firefox’s Live Bookmarks very convenient, so I switched to NetNewsWire–which I really love. It also has a very good interface for easily allowing you to organize your feeds into folders if you want.

I concluded that it makes things simpler and saves times to organize my feeds into folders, for two reasons:

It allows me to more easily read my feeds by topic
It makes the number of feeds less overwhelming

I find that it is more efficient, at least for me, to review my feeds by topic because I can go faster when I can roughly keep my mind on the same subject and proceed in chunks.

And when I didn’t use folders to group my feeds, I came to have a mental resistence to them because the list was so long.

Grouping them in folders also makes it easier to prioritize. Basically, my first folder is called “Priority.” This folder contains the feeds from any topic that are most important to me. So I can easily skip all the other folders if I am short on time, and focus in on these.

Then, if I have a bit more time it is easy to determine which topic is of greatest interest to me at the time, and I can just scan those folders quickly.

Compared to my experience of keeping my feeds in a straight list, I’ve fond that I save time by organizing them into folders.

Here is the list of categories I use: