How Do RSS Feed Readers Help You Become More Organized and Productive?

Having spent the majority of the pandemic at home, I’m worse for wear not just when it comes to physical activity, but also mental focus.

You’ll find not one article on the subject of difficulty getting things done. After all, brain fog is one of the most nefarious symptoms. You’re physically fine, but feel like swimming through a pool of water and can’t fully figure out the direction of where you’re going.

RSS feed readers are one way to reclaim your focus, bring order and increase productivity.

What is an RSS Feed Reader?

RSS is one of the oldest protocols on the Internet. It was practical during the era when more and more households got the Internet and people were trying out the role of being a creator. Blogs were everywhere and readers had the most difficult time trying to keep up with the content being made. That’s where RSS comes from – a need to optimize one’s time on the Internet.

Each new blog and website would come with an RSS feed in its source code, which is accessible only via an RSS feed reader. Once a user subscribes to an RSS feed, they’d be able to read each new post from their reader as soon as it’s published. Whereas when you’re on sites you only read the site’s content, when you’re using an RSS feed reader you get the latest content from as many sites and other sources as you want.

It’s that simple.

How To Properly Use It?

RSS readers back then had this one main function – read in a more focused way. It makes it easy to follow the news and keep up with friends’ blogs. That was then.

Advanced RSS feed readers have made quite a few jumps. They’re the perfect tool to get into deep research whether it’s for the job or a school project. They’re well integrated into other services and tools through services like IFTTT and Zapier. Depending on the RSS reader, you’ve access to very special features. Inoreader has introduced a Teams feature.

How Can An RSS Feed Reader Help You Become More Organized and Productive?

For all the talk about superpowers, the most radical thing about RSS feed readers is the way they change your relationship to the Internet. They add structure and remove distractions. They change your whole approach to work and the results speak for themselves.

Saves Your Timе 

I’m caught up in a race to get the most out of the time I spend online because I don’t want to spend too much time in front of a screen. Yet, the first thing that I do in the morning is cycle through a list of news sites, blogs, magazines, and forums online. I can honestly say, it’s so easy to get lost in cycling through apps and web addresses.

RSS reduces this time through the miracle of automation. You don’t have to cycle through every site multiple times or refresh the pages or even have multiple tabs on your browser. It’s distracting as all hell. You can check for updates with a click. Install Inoreader’s browser extension and you can check for updates without having to leave what you’re doing on the tab.

You Have Everything At One Place

Part of the appeal is that everything is neatly collected in one place. One app (one browser tab) is all you need in this life. You have all your sites and newsletters gathered together and you receive updates in chronological order. But that’s just the baseline. Here is what else you can add to your RSS subscriptions:

·       Podcasts. Why would you do that? For one, you can save the post with the show notes and description. For another, it’s a handy way to see when a new episode arrives without the need to check your Spotify or Apple Music account.

·       YouTube. I have a weakness for YouTube, so I tend to migrate to a channel that’s relevant to my work without distracting myself with TikTok compilations and true crime.

·       Social Media Feeds. Any public feed on a social media platform can be turned into an RSS feed from Twitter hashtags and lists through Facebook pages to LinkedIn Groups to Reddit subreddits.

Personalized Content

Now that we have curated our dashboard with essential, relevant reading, it’s time to exert further control. One thing I’ve to do when visiting a site is scroll through the latest headlines to find what I want to read. RSS feed readers can help you with curation and filtering further.

Inoreader can do so much in this arena. You can exclude a certain category of content-based solely on the keywords you want. Tired of reading about pandemic news? You can have Inoreader weed out articles that mention the words virus, pandemic or COVID. Or maybe you’re interested in just one author on a site? Through Inoreader, you can subscribe to only their content through the entire feed. Those are only a few of the automatic features that you can set up and forget about.  

Only Topics You Care About

The biggest drawback to social media is that your timeline is not really under your control. I’m far from the only one who doesn’t see posts from their favorite pages but is subjected to the same baby pictures day after day after day even though you’ve seen them already. It’s not much better when it comes to articles your friends and acquaintances post…

RSS readers operate on the principle that you get out of whatever you put in the reader. The posts that pop up are there by choice and what’s more, appear in chronological order. There’s some risk of remaining in a tight bubble, but RSS readers have ways to help you discover new content. On Inoreader there’s the discovery zone, which boasts the reader’s most subscribed to RSS feeds in different topics.

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