This week, I’m detailing all the things I’m doing to streamline my business after getting my hands on a book called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss.
Since I started podcasting, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with RSS feeds. While the act of subscribing to a feed makes alot of sense, the feed readers I found seemed so complicated to use.
But now, I use Google Reader. I signed up for the service and whenever I visit a blog that I like, I click on the orange RSS button. Now here’s the easy peasy part. My browser refreshes to a page that asks if I want to add the feed to Google Reader. I click on yes and the page refreshes to my Google Reader login page. I login and voila - the feed is added.
Instead of spending an hour or more visiting my favourite blogs on a daily basis, I now spend 10-minutes each morning going through 50 blogs and podcasts using Google Reader. For the posts I find interesting, I visit the blogsite and leave a comment.
Google Reader has severely improved my productivity. I highly recommend that if you want to create your own online TV Guide of blogs and podcasts you like, sign up for Google Reader.
So, my questions to you:
- Which feed reader are you using and why do you like it?
- What intimidates you about feed readers?
- What analogy do you use to get people to understand what a feed reader is?
- How many feeds do you subscribe to?