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.

If you blog a lot, especially if you do it professionally, a lot of your day will be spent writing and reading stories. An RSS feed is an integral part of this, both for finding stuff to write about and also to keep yourself up to date on news. I think Google Reader is an excellent tool to manage 90% of your workflow in terms of writing and reading, it ads a great deal to my productivity at least.

I used to send myself the stories I wanted to read or work on through Google Reader (take a look at the post here), but since I’ve switched to a tag and folder based approach. Here’s how I manage my blog workflow in 5 steps to maximize my productivity.

1. Organize your feeds by importance

Instead of organizing my feeds by category it is more effective from an organization point of view to doing this by importance. This is helpful because I may have 1000+ unread items from some news feeds, which is not a big deal, but just one post missed from a site like the official Google blog will make me quite unhappy indeed. Therefore to stop interesting, albeit less important news items clogging me up, I create three folders, “Important”, “To Watch”, “Other”. My important folder contains product blogs, like the Remember the Milk blog, or the Official Gmail Blog so I can get the latest development news quickly. It also contains some top blogs like Lifehacker. The “To Watch” folder contains other blogs which also have cool stories, but if I miss out on one, or read it a day later the world doesn’t collapse. “Other” contains general news blogs I read or fun stuff, like the Beaver and Steve RSS feed.

2. Create categories for your workflow

One feature that Google Reader introduced not long ago helped a lot in my productivity and is party the reason for making the change from email to a wholly Reader based solution. Apart from folders, you can now tag posts, and even view them later on as part of that tag. I have three types of tags, I call them resource tags, info tags and archive tags.

Info tags are tags which I add to regularly, but I also remove items every day. They could be compared to to-do lists because all items represent something to do. A tag like this would be my “To Read” tag. All posts go in here which I will not write about, but I want to read because it contains some info, usually regarding my blog, or blogging. Once I have read the item I will delete it from this tag and either remove it completely from Google Reader, or move it to an archive tag.

Resource tags contain items which have resource lists in them. A post about the top 10 to do lists on the net would be put in here for example. I will not cover this post as is, but it provides a list of services which I might want to cover. Resource articles don’t stay around forever either. I usually review items in this tag once a week and if I find services I like I record which ones they are somewhere and I delete the item.

Archive tags just serve to contain material which I delete from other tags. Posts which provided me with valuable info might be put here just in case I need to reference them again, you never know. I rarely delete something from an archive tag, but it may be a good idea to go through it every 3-4 months and clear it up a bit.

In reality I actually use three tags “Resource List”, “To Read” and “Archive”, these correspond to my three categories, but the reason I always talked about categories is that you can have more than one info tag, depending on the field you work in and the type of blog you write.

3. Record your ideas

Recording your ideas is very important, especially for me because I just have so many. About 50% of these turn out to be not so great, but since I take them all down, I’m left with the other 50% that is good. I use drafts to record everything, and by draft a simple title will do to quickly jot down a thought. I use Windows Live Writer to manage all the ideas and posts because I can write as many drafts as I want, going through them one by one, and once done publish them from right there.

I transfer all story ideas that come from my RSS feed to Live Writer as well as stuff that just pops up during the day. About 90% of the time I just come up with a quick title and put the source of the story (if any) in the body, and perhaps a few notes and pointers so I don’t forget. This way Writer works sort of like an ideas repository for me.

4. Create daily routines

I say routines because I don’t like it if my whole day is governed by one task list our one routine. I have 4-5 things I do each day and the reason I separated them is that if I skip one the system doesn’t fall apart. One of my favorite routines is the RSS scanning every morning. Basically I get up at around 6am and go through all my RSS items.

On my first go I star all items of interest, regardless of what category they will fall into. I then fire up Live Writer and transfer all stories I will write by creating a new post, coming up with the title and opening the link to the site of the item, copying the link into the body of the draft. I take down any additional notes I have, but I do not spend more than 30 seconds on one single post. I un-star all items that I have transferred, so I am left with only 3-4 starred ones which I will now review again.

On the second pass I decide what to do with the remaining items. I either send them to an info tag, for reading later, or send them to the resource list for future reference. More often than not, I also immediately delete some items because I realize I will not really need them anymore, you’d be surprised at the difference 5 minutes of settling in makes to your views on one piece of info.

While making two passes is a bit redundant, I find that it increases my productivity overall. I may read an item twice, but the organization and clarity of mind I gain makes the extra spent time quite worth it.

5. Set up fix review times

As I have already mentioned, it is important to set up some review times, just like you would in GTD. I review info tags daily (and weekly) and my resource tags weekly. I review info tags daily from the perspective of reading some, and every Friday I review them to purge the list, delete items I won’t really read. My resource tags get reviewed weekly for the same reason. I either take down some items from a resource list or I just delete it.

You also need to review your drafts often, since you may find that a story has been sitting on your “desk” unwritten for ages. I review my draft list just like my info tags, once a day to get a glimpse of what I need to write or what I missed out on, and weekly to purge the list and delete drafts that don’t seem like great ideas anymore.

About once a month I review my whole system as is. I take a look at the tags I’m using, my feed reading activity and so on. I remove feeds I don’t really read, or that I don’t find too interesting, I add tags and delete them if necessary (I advise as little change here as possible) and make tweaks and changes where needed.

The idea is to keep your system as static as possible, while making it flexible enough to make changes if needed. Ideally you should find things to tweak all the time, find new tools and so on, but your core system should stay in tact.

Over the weekend I had some serious fun, so I didn’t even write posts, and it seems I missed out on an important bit of news, Wordpress has secretly released 2.5 behind my back. I’m glad to say that it was released on my birthday, possibly as a present to me, I was waiting for the release for quite some time, so nice one Wordpress!

I will be installing it on the blog soon and will tell you guys what I think, from what I’ve seen it looks pretty awesome. From what I could tell without actually trying, version 2.5 mainly increases the admin’s ability to monitor and manage the blog by providing a better, more productive interface. It also makes the dashboard a widget page, much like you would see on Netvibes, I’m looking forward to taking it for a spin.