Russell Beattie

That's a screenshot from my Gregarious news reader right now. Waking up in the morning and seeing 400+ unread news items pretty much every day (though Wednesday and Thursday usually have the most unread) is probably not the most efficient way to bootstrap my day. I keep reading online how everyone says not to check your email first thing in the morning, but since I only get a few emails a day now (having successfully been such a horrible email correspondent that people have mostly given up), feeds are the thing for me that I should probably avoid. But I don't...

I'm *such* an information junkie. 188 feeds is up there near the limit again, but it's not only that, it's just the bad habits I have of reading news first thing. It puts me on a path to info gathering rather than productivity, which for me seem mutually exclusive. But the urge to read all that news before I get on with my day is so strong... but it's just a very bad habit. I should 1) set my feed updates to be double what they are now (which is 15 minutes I think), and 2) start culling some of the more noisy feeds again, so I can get through them faster or 3) just go "cold turkey" and learn how to use the "mark all read" button... (Actually, I know for a fact number 3 isn't going to happen, so I'm going to have to resign myself to being a functional infoholic instead.)

Reading blogs is a pain, but writing them is nothing - even after taking an 18 month break... which is surprising to me. It's like writing an email or having an extended IM conversation with someone (except that I get to write actual sentences with punctuation, and put them into paragraphs), I don't even think about it. I saw something online (which I didn't actually read) about GTD for blogging to take the 'stress' out of it?!? I'm not sure which is more insane, me or the people who are actually stressed by blogging.

-Russ