I spend on average, 3-4 hours on day, if not more on Google Reader, Twitter, various blogs and other news reader applications. It was much higher during my unemployment. What really sucked is that I’d come across a great new blog or website and want to add it immediately to my Google Reader subscription list and this meant my bloated list of 150+ websites generated a 1000+ articles before I had got my morning cuppa tea. I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that there is no silver bullet to solve the information overload problem. But along the way I’ve developed some useful tips and strategies that I’m happy to share to help reduce the stress. Here they are in no order of importance

1. I now resist the urge to add a new blog/website to Google Reader unless it’s truly exception. Instead I subscribe to their Twitter feed, where I don’t feel so compelled to read every Tweet. If for some reason more than 12 hours has passed since I’ve been on Twitter, I just scroll to the top (*wince*) and try not to to think about what I’ve missed. I also resist “liking” brands on Facebook as this pollutes my Facebook stream, which I try to keep to only personal contacts.

2. I trust the long list of people I follow on Twitter, who are mostly in tech/public policy/govt/news, will throw up or retweet anything that I shouldn’t be missing. The hardest part was getting over the feeling that I’m “missing” something on Twitter just because I skipped a few hours worth of Tweets, but now that I have, there is much less remorse.

3. A few weeks ago I ruthlessly culled my Google Reader feeds to the ones that I really read or care about. One fantastic thing about Google is that their tools have great statistics. Buried within your feeds somewhere is a Trends page that shows what articles for a particular feed you read, how many you clicked, etc. Very useful to help trim the wild growth. I also deleted feeds that don’t publish full text RSS, unless the site is something I care about. The extra click to go to the page, and wait for all the articles and ads to load was too time consuming. Additionally, I removed all news sites from my RSS feeds. NYTimes, Guardian, Cricinfo etc. sometimes published hundreds of articles a day that left my unread count very high. Finally, I stopped being afraid to click the “Mark all as read” button.

4. I bookmarked Techmeme.com (a news aggregator for tech news that has the latest, popular, and breaking news on its front page) and visit it before I go to Google reader. This gives my a very quick update on tech news and helps me skim my Google Reader articles faster.

5. For longer articles, like on the New Yorker or the Atlantic website, I save them to Instapaper and then read them from my phone when I’m on the tube or have some down time. This ensures I don’t forget about them but I’m not spending ages reading them when I’m on my computer and could be more productive. I’ve also started using Pulse on my iPad more, it’s a very well designed news reader and I use it for websites that tend to produce more in-depth, or longer articles. I generally get to Pulse in the night, just before falling asleep.

6. Finally, this morning (before I got your email, I swear) I was surfing Quora (another website that I’m now addicted to), I saw a question about RSS overload, and the answer recommend Feedly. It’s a very light Chrome extension that integrates with Google Reader and is supposed to do a good job of recommending what is popular in your feeds. I don’t know how it does this, and I’ve only used it once this morning, so the jury is still out.

Bottom line, there is no one way to reduce the RSS overload. This has what has worked for me, and I continue to refine my methods. If you find something better, do let me know!