Daily Driver Apps: Feedly — Cure for Information Overload

Feedly is a daily driver app for me (one I use every day and spend a fair chunk of time with every day) and my best tool for handling the massive information overload we face every day.

It’s described like so by its creators:

With Feedly, you can easily organize all your publications, blogs, YouTube channels, and more in one place and consume and share more efficiently. No more zig zagging. All the content comes to you in one place, in a clean and easy-to-read format.

People use Feedly to read blogs, learn new topics, and track keywords, brands and companies

I think one of the best ways to stay well-informed and increase my knowledge on any given subject is to find great sources of information for the topic. Feedly is where I discover, add, organize and manage all the great sources I find.

Here are a few of the reasons I value and enjoy Feedly so much:

Single Source: I currently follow around 70 sources in Feedly, and most days I can scan any new/unread content in most or all of those sources with a couple visits to the app per day — and read a number of articles that grab my attention most. I can take in far more information, from just brief headlines to full articles, than I ever could hope to do by visiting individual sites, YouTube channels, or similar.

Available Everywhere: This is a big requirement for me for any essential app. Feedly looks and works great in a browser and on my mobile devices, both iOS and Android.

Easy to Use and Highly Customizable: It’s simple to add content (sources) to Feedly. You can paste in a URL for a favorite site, search by site name, and search by keywords. You can organize your sources in folders, decide which view appears when you launch the mobile app, select how articles are presented (title only, summary etc), choose your theme, adjust font preferences, create topic-specific boards to highlight a set of items, and lots more.

Impressive and Growing Feature Set: Feedly also offers a wealth of useful features, most of which are just one or two taps or clicks to use. These include things like starring an item to mark it to read later, a wide range of options for saving articles to other apps (like Evernote and Pocket) or sharing them to Twitter, Facebook and other popular sites. You can even easily share an entire collection of content easily with a colleague or friend.

I work in cybersecurity, and have worked in ‘techie’ roles for 20+ years now, but I think Feedly is a great resource for following the latest news in any area and pumping up your knowledge no matter what sort of work you do.

You can find Feedly on the web on any mainstream browser and in the iOS and Android app stores.