Staying Industry-Aware with Feedly

Automate your daily reading for good

If you’re like me, you need to stay well-informed on what’s going on in your industry. Or maybe, you’re just an avid reader of many blogs and online magazines. Either way, there’s really nothing worse than having to sift through a pile of daily digest emails for an hour or two in the morning, attempting to find the content that’s relevant. If this sounds like a painful ritual you endure, you need to seriously consider one of the most archaic forms of content aggregation… RSS feeds.

Yes, they still exist and, yes, they’re still extremely useful. Now, you may have even used RSS feeds or an RSS reader such as Google Reader (RIP) in the past and stopped using them at one point. However, I urge you to revisit RSS and reconsider your daily reading habits if you spend more time combing the content than actually reading it. Google Reader has been put to rest by Google (to many people’s dismay). However, I’m glad they did.

At one point, many years ago, I was RSS crazy. I started subscribing to every RSS feed I could think of, any blog I had ever read. I started to think of them as collections rather than focusing on how to properly organize and orchestrate my daily reading. My Google Reader became unwieldy and, quite frankly, it gave me anxiety just to open it up. I went back to subscribing to email digest and did the morning-time bookmark bar dance. This was not ideal.

I recently decided to give RSS another go. Now, with Google Reader gone, I had to start anew. I chose to use Feedly, an ultra-clean and relatively powerful feed reader. Arguably, I think it is better than Google Reader based solely on its simplicity. This time I carefully scrutinized which feeds I subscribed to and how I organized them. I kept efficiency and convenience in mind as I created categories for feeds, careful not to overstuff them with irrelevant content just because I could.

You can see above that only a couple categories carry large unread numbers, but those are my “in my free time only” categories. The categories I read daily, the ones I must keep up on are filled only with pertinent and useful content, making sure I don’t miss anything.

I have cut down my morning reading rituals by over 50 percent. If I have time after lunch, I may refresh the feeds to see if anything interesting had popped up throughout the day. No longer am I riddled with anxiety when I open my feed reader, nor do I peruse countless email digests.

The one downside of Feedly that I’ve discovered thus far is that it lacks the ability to do a global or intra-category search for specific content. However, I would not be surprised if this feature came soon.

Oh, and Medium… what’s up with no RSS? Pfft.