A Three-Dimensional Approach to Organizing Your Feeds Using Google Reader
By Daniel Miessler on December 21st, 2007: Tagged as GTD | Google | Productivity
I’m constantly optimizing how I do things, and nowhere is this more important to me than with my feed reader. I happen to use (and highly recommend) Google Reader, and what follows is a multi-tiered approach to classifying and reading your feeds using an often ignored feature of the application.
The Problem
The fundamental problem is input management. Most of us simply have too many feeds to read in a single sitting. How can we be sure we’re reading the right content at the right time? Are we reading too much? Too little? The goal is to avoid the anti-GTD state of not being sure - a state that consumes valuable brain resources and keeps you from functioning at your best.
That’s what this system helps you do: it lets you instantly choose which feeds to read at any given time - allowing you to feel fully satisfied when you’re done with a session.
The System
The first thing we’re going to do is make three categories of tags/labels within Google Reader (think folders for old-schoolers). These are:
- Priority
- Subject
- Location
Mine look like this:
- Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
- Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
- Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.
This breakdown gives us three choices for how to attack feeds. You can go by a general ranking of importance of the feed (priority), by the specific type of content that you want to read at a given moment (subject), or based on where you are (location).
So if you’re at work during regular hours you can read your “work” feeds, which include important information pertaining to your profession, key world events, and perhaps some other tidbits that may be useful during work-related conversation. And during lunch you can read your “lunch” feeds, which include your feeds that are still work appropriate during lunch but perhaps aren’t completely work related, e.g. Dilbert, XKCD, Reddit, etc.
The key to the whole system is that each individual feed can have multiple tags assigned to it. This feature is there for a reason.
What this allows us to do is put our feeds in all three categories simultaneously. This gives us the simplicity of knowing what to read at any given moment, but at the same time it links all three categories together. So if you read TechCrunch from one view it gets marked as read in the others as well.
Examples
Let’s take my Information Security News feed. It’s a Yahoo! Pipe I built that combines news from around the industry, removes duplicates, etc. It’s a fast way to get the top stories I’d find in my “security-news” tag that contains multiple individual feeds.
For my infosec pipe feed I have the following tags applied in the three dimensions (PSL):
- Primary (priority)
- Security-News (subject)
- Work (location)
The trick is that I can decide to read from any one of those categories and I’ll still cover this very important aggregation feed. But if you take my Design Observer feed it’s more likely to break down like this:
- Tertiary
- Design
- (no location because it defaults to home)
Assigning the multiple tags makes it possible to cover the same content during various types of reading sessions - whether you browsed based on time available, where you were, or a particular interest such as design or programming.
This system helps me greatly in getting through my feeds with less stress and allows me to feel confident that I’ve read precisely what I should have during my session. I hope you find it useful as well.:
--
Very cool! I’ll give it a try. Anything to keep the boss from catching me reading Dilbert. :-)
Comment by Caustic Dave — 12/22/2007 @ 4:34 pm
[...] Original, longer version here [...]
Pingback by A Three-Dimensional Approach to Organizing Feeds in Google Reader [v2] — 12/24/2007 @ 6:05 pm
Wow, great , thanks so much. My Greader’s inbox is complex and I’m making it better now with your great tips. Thanks so much :). Ah I see that You’ve a lot of feeds, I consider that When are you going to read Tertiary’s feeds and another Tags because you’ve a lot of feeds :p
Comment by Dung Nguyen — 12/31/2007 @ 11:50 am
There’s a name for this way of organizing a collection of things. It’s called ‘faceted classification’. It’s a fascinating area of research made more popular in recent years by the flamenco project. A librarian called Ranganathan is touted to be the father of the technique.
Comment by David Legg — 12/31/2007 @ 12:28 pm
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Pingback by Dwell Time » Google Reader Hacks — 1/1/2008 @ 11:10 pm
[...] A Three-Dimensional Approach to Organizing Your Feeds Using Google Reader a multi-tiered approach to classifying and reading your feeds using an often ignored feature of Google Reader (tags: Googlereader GTD lifehacks productivity) Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
Pingback by Dwell Time » links for 2008-01-02 — 1/2/2008 @ 5:20 am
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Pingback by links for 2008-01-04 « David Black — 1/4/2008 @ 2:26 am
[...] interessanten, diese Möglichkeiten noch vertiefenden Ansatz verfolgt Daniel Miessler: Seine Feeds im GoogleReader werden nach 3 Eigenschaften [...]
Pingback by imgriff.com » Blog Archiv » GoogleReader: Feeds dreidimensional ordnen — 1/6/2008 @ 12:26 pm
Nice an useful!
But a question: how do you do to change the order of the tags ? In your “screenshots” the order is not an alphabetical order but a customized order, in my Google Reader the order is alway alphabetically and I can’t find how change it.
Thanks!
Comment by lpalli — 1/10/2008 @ 6:47 am
Just drag them. :)
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 1/10/2008 @ 6:48 am
It’s too easy! I’m a big user of Google Reader but I don’t knowed the possibility to dreg the tags.
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Pingback by Inferis’ Mind Dump » Blog Archive » links for 2008-03-31 — 3/31/2008 @ 10:33 pm
[...] also mentioned a post that describes how to do a 3d organization of your feeds. I need to do much more of this. One good thing about organizing like this is that it lets you see [...]
Pingback by Too Much Information: a Follow-up — Keener Living — 4/9/2008 @ 9:04 am
Daniel,
This is an elegant and happy solution to blog management. Thanks for thinking this through and sharing it on the interweb.
You saved me time by not having to “reinvent the wheel”.
Best to you, Alec
Comment by Alec Satin — 9/18/2008 @ 3:11 pm