On Aggregating and productivity

So now we have all sorts of programs automatically grabbing the latest information for us. Everything is sitting right on our computer, happily waiting to be processed. This should help us get more information and boost productivity, no?

no.
Take a look at my aggregating situation: 138 unread posts on netnewswire, 96 unread emails from the mailing list I subscribe to, all that with just one day of not checking emails / posts.

Aggregators do not boost productivity if it feels like an obligation to check new blog posts. By placing a large number in red circle in their icons that is exactly what our aggregators do. It's telling us that "hey, you have to check out these posts" much in the same way email clients do to us subconciously.

So here are some productivity tips for those with aggregators:

1. Turn it off when you're not prepared to spend half an hour going through blog posts. you subscribe to these because these blogs may be interesting to you, but they are rarely time-critical. And we all know that interesting things get us distracted from real work real easily
2. Tell your email client to check for mail every half an hour, not every 5 minutes. It's hard gain contentration, but they're easily lost with one amusing, off-topic email
3. Set aside a time, say half an hour, everyday to clean everything up. Treat it as leisure reading. You'll feel less obligated to turn your aggregator on all the time.

I think RSS is a wonderful thing, but it's main purpose is to have information more easily accessible. Its the job beautifully, and now we have information overload.