Recently I’ve been inspired by our own Patrick Rhone’s new Minimal Mac project, wherein he (and a host of contributors) post about different ways to simplify your Macintosh experience as well as how easy it is to simplify that experience. I’ve taken steps to simplify things on my own Mac, things like eliminating Widgets, menubar icons, Dock icons, and the like.

One thing that has bugged me over the past year or two is the volume of RSS feeds that keeps piling up. If you’re like me, you add more and more feeds to your feed reader (mine is Google Reader). And eventually the volume of feeds gets to be too much. I know some people get as many in one day as I get in one week and are fine with that, so I can’t say there’s a “magic number” for the maximum or minimum number of posts that can be read without it becoming unwieldy. The bottom line is, you have to be aware of your own limits, and know where stress sets in for you.

I know some people go so far as to divide up their RSS Feeds into different categories based on topic. Personally, I divide mine up into six folders:

• 1st Tier: Things I really want to read
• 2nd Tier: Things I want to read, but not as badly as the top tier. Strangely enough, this is the shortest list.
• 3rd Tier: Things I want to read, but not as badly as the previous two.
• people: Friends and family members’ blogs
• personal: blogs I run or otherwise have a stake in
• read when time permits: Stuff I can live without reading, and usually view in list mode, after which I usually hit “Mark all as read” after skimming the headines. Many of these post way more often than I’d like.

As I typically read my feeds about once a week in one one-or two-hour session, I’m thinking about changing how I go about my RSS feed consumption. So, over the past few weeks, I have begun pruning ruthlessly, eliminating items from Google Reader that I know I don’t have much interest in reading anymore. It’s like when you realize you no longer read a particular magazine you subscribe to: you may feel a little sad that you’re parting with a dear old friend, but relieved that you’re letting go of something you no longer really pay attention to, thus freeing up more attention to devote to what you really care about. You lose that “Ugh, one more thing I have to read” mentality when it crosses your mental threshold one more time.

So, in the forums, I have 3 questions for you:

1. What’s your strategy for dealing with RSS feed overload?
2. How often do you review your RSS feeds (if you do that sort of thing), and how long does it take you?
3. Finally, how do you decide when to let those feeds go?

Fire away.

Will work for attention (photo by Stephen Poff)

We’re all easily distracted. I know I am. Seems like everybody I know has multiple irons in the fire. A lot of our various projects may overlap, and everything cries out for attention. But what happens when many things really do warrant your attention? What ends up happening is you try to pay attention to multiple things at once, and not doing a very good job of it, as neither thing will get the amount of attention required to keep it running efficiently and smoothly.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but I think the trick is to only try to focus on ONE thing at a time. Not two, not three, not five. Just one. If something pops into your head that’s unrelated to whatever you’re working on at the moment, make a note of it, capturing it in such a way that you can review it appropriately later at a specified review time. Make that note quickly so you can stay on task.

This is a problem I see all too often in the workplace: our attention is pulled a million directions, and projects and relationships suffer.

That’s right. Don’t forget your attention to your relationships with people: if you give are distracted when someone is talking to you, that person is likely to come to the conclusion that you don’t value their time or what they have to say. If someone ignores me repeatedly, or disregards me or interrupts me, am I going to think they care about what I have to say? Probably not. In return, I’m probably less likely to pay much attention to them. It’s reciprocal.

Remember: until you respect people’s time and attention, you’re not likely to earn much respect — except by bullying. And that’s not “real” respect.

How have you dealt with harnessing your own time and attention to better focus on important projects and — perhaps more importantly — relationships? And what if you were the person being ignored? How did you deal with that? Share over in the forums.