By This is a guest post by Mike Marshall. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
If you are like me, you have accumulated dozens of blog subscriptions in your reader. Maybe, too many subscriptions. Hundreds of articles pour in everyday. Huffington Post, LifeHacker, and TechCrunch alone can bury you in new postings.0
You need a fast process for reviewing new postings and picking out the ones that interest you. Time is the one resource that you can’t increase, so everyone needs an attack plan to spend less time working their reading list.
Use the following steps in Google Reader to triage new items, read the interesting ones, and not waste time on the others.
1. Select All Items and show only the Unread
Your browser may not support display of this image. Select the “All Items” under the Home section of your Reader Navigation Pane. Click the “New Items” link in the title as shown here. The point is to create a list of unread article titles on your screen as a working set. If you’d rather work with a smaller set, pick a folder that has a backlog of articles.
2. Review the titles and STAR the ones that interest you
Your browser may not support display of this image. Bloggers should know they need to write great headlines. If not, this step should prove the point. As a consumer, you should ruthlessly cull articles from your reading list if the title does not immediately grab your attention. If the article has a magnetic headline that makes you want to read it — “STAR” it by toggling the star to the left of a title. This puts the article in your Starred Item list. Don’t worry about these cluttering up your Starred Item list. We will clean that up later. Resist the urge to actually read articles in this step. That will slow you down and hurt your productivity.
3. From the All Items list, Mark all items read
Your browser may not support display of this image. This will mark all articles in this view as read including your starred items, but don’t worry those starred items are neatly tucked away, safe and sound in the Starred Items list. We go there next.
4. Open the Starred Items List under your Home section
The starred items from step 2 now appear here as Unread articles. This is your real reading list. The efficiency that you have gained already is a nice boost, but we are not finished yet. We have a few more tricks to process this list efficiently.
5. Read articles faster with keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to efficiently work your way through your list marking each article appropriately and quickly moving to the next. So as you read through these articles, toggle the star off with the “S” keyboard shortcut. Google Reader will mark the item as read just as you expect. Un-starring the article will drop it from this folder. It is left in its original list as a read article.
Here’s a few useful keyboard shortcuts that can cut your reading time:
Key Description J/K Next/Prev Article S Star/Un-Star Article M Mark Read/Unread
? Show Keyboard Shortcuts
If an article is too long (or contains a video) and you really want to read it, but don’t have the time, just mark it as UNREAD and come back later to finish. If you want to keep the article, leave the star on, and it will remain in your Starred Items list as a read article so you can refer to it in the future.
Using this process, I cut my blog reading time down to only a few minutes a day. I don’t miss articles that are important to me, and don’t waste time on the ones that aren’t.
Mike Marshall is a software design professional and blogs at The Politics of Design.