(If you clicked on “what is this?” from the sidebar, you’ve come to the right place!  This post will tell you all about how feeds and feed readers work.  But if you’re just interested in getting email updates when Refocuser is updated, you can do that too!)

The idea of reading over 200 blogs and other sites every single day sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?  In order to do this, you’d have to spend at least 60 seconds on each site assuming there haven’t been many updates, and if there’s anything new it could easily take 5-10 minutes each!  Once you add this up you could end up spending more than 3 hours each day just scanning and reading stuff – which is the exact opposite of focus.  For most people, this is just pure procrastination city!

There’s definitely a better way to do it, but it’s surprising how few people utilize it when you look at the stats.  It’s called subscribing – so instead of you going out to all those sites and waiting for new information, the information comes to you in the form of a subscription.

Before I learned about RSS and Atom feeds, I was clicking around to dozens of sites multiple times per day like a crack addict in search of a hit.  I would scan the entire page to see if anything had changed before moving on, and if something had changed I would spend a little extra time on that site.  But in the 5 years since discovering feeds and feed readers, my routine is… well, it’s routine.  I “read the paper” in the morning by scanning/reading through the overnight updates, I check-in during the afternoon to see what’s up, and then sometimes (but not always) I do another session in the early evening.  Total time spent: 30-45 minutes maximum.  And I subscribe to 227 different sites!

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