Tag: tips

Simple categories in Feedly

Screenshot of Feedly, showing categories in left-hand sidebar
Screenshot of Feedly, showing categories in left-hand sidebar

There’s something about this time of year that makes me look back on the past twelve months, reorganise things and generally try to simplify life for the year ahead. This evening I turned my attention to my RSS feed reader Feedly.

When Google closed down its Google Reader service in July 2013 I moved over to Feedly. Their migration process was flawless:

  1. Log in to Feedly using your Google account.
  2. Give Feedly permission to read your Google Reader subscriptions.
  3. Er…
  4. That’s it!

In the last five months I’ve been using Feedly on both a desktop browser and the Android app. It’s been a really useful way of keeping up with the sites I want to follow, and it also confirms recent research about how people are using the web these days: on multiple devices.

The old way

I have a problem with the way I categorise my feeds. Until this evening I’ve grouped them by topic:

  • People
  • Web
  • Web tools
  • Browsers
  • Music

The problem

The problem is: there are some feeds that I read more than others and this way of organising the feeds doesn’t allow me to find those feeds quickly.

A few feeds I try to read every post, such as A List Apart and Zenhabits. I take my time with these articles.

Some feeds I subscribe to simply to keep up with what certain people are saying, such as Steve Lawson, Robert Wright and Tom G Fischer. I try to read most posts.

Other feeds I follow to look out for important updates. These are mostly software or web development blogs such as jQuery, Google Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera, etc. I tend to glance at the headlines and read only those posts that I think will impact me.

The new way

So, after understanding my own user behaviour, I now have simplified this to three categories:

  1. Must read
  2. Regular
  3. Occasional

I’ve also removed quite a few feeds this evening. Some feeds I realised I wasn’t reading anyway; others were a distraction.

I’m going to run with this way of organising things for the next few months to see if it helps.

Update: After a few months of trying this, I’m finding it really helpful to have my feeds organised this way. The only change I’ve made is to rename the first category from “Favourites” to “Must read”. I found that I was questioning whether “Favourites” was my own category or an auto-generated one by Feedly.

Ironically, Feedly does have an auto-generated category called “Must reads” but I’m finding this much less confusing. Your mileage may vary.

Leaving answerphone messages

Something that I’ve learned fairly recently is how to leave good answerphone messages.

In the past I’ve always left messages like this:

Hi, it’s Gareth Saunders here … blah blah blah … interesting message here … please ring me back on 01234 567890

The problem with this is that my telephone number is at the end. So if the person listening to the message doesn’t manage to write it down in time he or she has to listen all the way through the message again just to get that important string of numbers.

I now leave messages like this:

 Hi, it’s Gareth Saunders here on 01234 567890 … I’m telephoning about blah blah blah … interesting message here … please ring me back on 01234 567890

I’ve stated clearly:

  • who I am
  • my contact telephone number
  • what the message is regarding
  • the actual message
  • my contact telephone number again

It’s taken me a while to get into this new habit but it seems to work for folks.