Being a blogger means some pretty different work methods than other types of work. Just think of GTD contexts for example. If you are a blogger you have @computer and @computer and @computer, if you specialize in some area, you might also have @computer. All in all, in some cases you will need special methods, or use available options differently. Here are 5 tips for Google Reader productivity geared especially toward bloggers.
Using tags
My primary use for Google Reader is to find stories. About 60% of my posts are about things I haven’t read before, out of the top of my head, the other 40% is about interesting stuff I read about. I write for 5 blogs at the moment and all of them require special types of content. One requires longer stories, the other requires shorter stories, one requires posts about web development and css and so on and so forth. Tags are a great way for me to indicate which blog the story could go to later. This enables me to go through all new items quickly and categorize them.
The great thing about tags is that you can also use them for personal interest. If I come across a story about the new Gibson guitar, I will want to read it later, I can just label it “personal” or something similar.
Sharing is networking
Sharing is a great way to stay in touch with your readers, let them know what kind of person you are and show people what kind of stuff you like. For example, Hack Your Day is all about productivity right? Well, apart from writing the blog I also play guitar and sing, I like guitars and so on, so the best way for me to communicate that is to share these kinds of stories. I can’t really blog about them on Hack Your Day, but if someone likes the blog enough to look into the author, they’ll see what other stuff I like, they may discover that they like similar things. Due to that they may refer other people to me, they may want to work with me and so on.
The new note options also enable you to share your opinion with you shared item. Since in your notes only the post title and your notes are shown, in theory you could also cover the item like a blog post. If you’re a popular blogger your readers will be interested in anything you have to say, so giving them as much as you can will make you even more popular.
Using stars
Many people I know use stars very unproductively. They star a load of items to read later, only read about 30% of them, and then keep many starred until the end of time. If you are a blogger, Google Reader is a professional tool you can use, so use it productively, give those stars some meaning.
If you don’t use the tagging system I described or if you only have one blog the best use of stars is to indicate articles you want to cover in the future. Once you’ve covered it, be sure to remove the star though so you can get an accurate reading of how many sources you have left.
However if you do use the tag system, there really is no point to using the stars like this, since the tags serve the same purpose. Once you’ve covered the story, just remove the tag. You can still use stars pretty well though for a multitude of things. I use them to indicate upcoming applications. There are quite a few apps which I love and are either in closed beta, or are still in production and I want to wait some more with a review. In these cases I add a star so I know I need to come back and check up on them later.
Reading by importance
Many people have hundreds of subscriptions and complain that they need to go through thousands of rss items daily. You’re a blogger, going through items does not make you money and is not at all a productive use of your time! I would more accurately describe it as a total waste. I just missed about 3 days and I went through about 150 items, which means 50 a day, which I don’t see growing all that much.
The secret to productive reading is categorization by importance. I have a local news page in my RSS feed which produces around 50 items a day. These however are not important so if I have read my important onces and I feel tired, there is no need to read these.
I suggest creating three folders, “daily”, “important”, and “other”. This is the combination that works best for me, let me show you how I use them. Daily items are ones that I read every day obviously. This would be Lifehacker for example, Freewaregenious and so on. If I find that more than 50% of a site’s post are worth covering (extremely rare), they get into the daily folder.
The important folder is for sites who produce some great stories, and I do read daily, but I don’t mind if I skip some stories. These sites typically produce 20% - 30% cover worth stories. This of course doesn’t mean the rest aren’t good, they just wouldn’t fit on any blogs I write to.
The other folder all the other feeds I like, but I don’t necessarily read all the time. These could be news feeds, blogs of friends, twitter feeds and so on. These are the feeds that are very fun to read, but produce no extra worth for my blog(s).
If you use this tip you will find that you use your time much more productively. I understand that its fun to read a lot of blogs, thoughts, ideas, news, but when you really get down to it, the good old 80-20 rule applies. 20% of the items contribute to 80% of your blog, while the other 80% hardly contribute anything.
Using trends to establish what to read
Google Reader has some built-in statistics which may seem like a “just for fun” option, but you can use it to your advantage. As I’ve said above, it’s important to spend time with the truly important feeds, and usig the data in the trends page is a great way to establish importance.
The best way to establish what you need to read is to initially use stars to indicate items you want to cover for any of your blogs. In the trends section, you can then take a look at the number of stars from each subscription, the more stars, the more important.
Update frequency could also indicate the importance of a blog since this raises the chance of you giving something a star. It also enables you to take a look at how many posts you create on your own blog on average. Hack Your Day has 0.8 posts daily right now, which tells me I need to write more, I would like to raise that to 1.5 at least.
There are other types of data you can take a look at. If you email yourself (or others) all the stories you want to cover the emailed data is quite handy. You can also take a look at the most inactive feeds and simply remove them.
You can also take a look at when you read feeds most, by time of day, day of the week and last 30 days, which can give you a good overview of time management. I read the most items on Tuesday, don’t ask me why, and indeed this shows me that I am not using my time right. I want to work on blogging roughly the same amount each day, so a very flat graph would be my ideal data set, showing that I spend the same time every day. This urges me to take a look at how and when I work, so I can optimize my time usage.
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