Do You Put New Items On Top, Or On Bottom?
By Daniel Miessler on February 23rd, 2007: Tagged as Geek | Productivity
So, when you’re sorting stuff like email, RSS feeds, etc., do you put the newest to the top or to the bottom? I’d love to hear your best reasons for doing whichever you do.
– EDIT: I’m switching back to new-on-bottom for both Mail and RSS. It’s just more natural to me. It doesn’t seem logical to me to assume that because something happened slightly farther in the past it’s less important. As such, I’d like to take them as they came in.
--
RSS feeds - New stuff on the bottom. That way, as I hit the ‘j’ key I go forward in time.
Email - New stuff on the top. My inbox at work is always full of crap. If I had new stuff at the bottom, I’d never see it when it came in.
In general, I like seeing new stuff at the top just so it’s visible whenever I open the app. It’s not too much trouble to scroll down to where the new stuff begins and then read upwards.
However, if I’m reading an entire blog entry by entry, I’d like to be able to view it so I can read it like a book. Seems like it would be a nice feature to put on popular blog software — “click this link to start reading from the beginning”. I think I’ll do that with my blog. I’ll start a precedence.
Comment by Tim — 2/23/2007 @ 12:57 pm
RSS: new stuff on the bottom, partly because it’s how blogs do it. I scan it all my feeds, but want to keep news in the order that it occurred. I don’t have to respond to RSS, so LIFO isn’t needed.
Mail: new stuff on top. I have to respond to the important things, so top-feeding is essential. Mail is threaded too, which is something RSS isn’t doing yet.
Comment by Bruce — 2/23/2007 @ 1:54 pm
New stuff at the top, both for emails and RSS. It just feels better that way - the stuff that’s just come in that I need to read/deal with is at the top of the list, and older stuff drops away further down.
Comment by David Precious — 2/23/2007 @ 3:13 pm
Interesting. I was wondering why Google decided to use the “New on Top” paradigm with their Google Reader application. I generally prefer newer stuff on the bottom because it lets me see things as they happened, but I am wondering if this is a somehow antiquated mode of thinking.
Thanks for the comments.
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 2/23/2007 @ 11:37 pm
RSS: New on bottom - I want to read things in the order they occored. New on top means when I’ve been away for a few days, I end up reading conclusions before the beginning of stories.
Email: New on bottom. It just feels more natural to me, I can’t give any rational reason why. I do have filters set up so that I can read the important emails (ie, those from my managers and their upstreams) first, then those from my own team, then those from other parts of the company, then those from outside.
Comment by zhasper — 2/24/2007 @ 11:39 pm
Everything: New on top. I cant believe you would have stuff with new at bottom, always the latest first for me!
If im using Gmail, well that solves all my news for Email, the whole conversation concept is just awesome, so simple but no one has done it as good as they have.
Comment by Sherif — 2/27/2007 @ 11:23 pm