My Inbox Is Empty

Today I finished emptying my inbox and unsubscribing from almost every e-mail list I was on. I stayed on a couple because I really like to get the information and the sites/organizations/people do not provide an RSS feed. The motivation for cleaning out my inbox should be obvious to anyone who has an e-mail account. But why dump all the e-mail lists and sign up to RSS feeds?

First, I was receiving dozens of e-mails a day from lists, some of considerable interest or value and others that had some professional interest but were only a step above spam. With all those e-mails requiring at least a cursory view to decide if they warranted more action, I was spending a lot of time handling messages that I mostly didn't have time to deal with. Personal messages were lost in the volumes. So most of my time went to the less important stuff.

Second, with multiple e-mail addresses and lots of friends, family, business and club contacts and responsibilities for a couple of web sites, I get a fair amount of real e-mail that requires personal attention and responses. My e-mail time needs to be spent on those. With family and friends scattered all over the world, I want to be able to keep in touch by e-mail easily and quickly.

Third, while having e-mail lists flooding my inbox was intolerable and time consuming, there was still information in many of the e-mails that I wanted to get without having to go searching. I also follow a number of blogs and websites. My browser bookmarks are rapidly getting out of hand and pushing the limits of manageability, so adding more sites for browsing and tracking is not a reasonable choice.

Which brings us to the beauty of using an RSS reader. The RSS allows you to subscribe to the feeds you are interested in and keep them organized for quick review of what is new. Once you subscribe, the RSS reader periodically gets updates from each of your subscribed feeds. When you select a feed (or a folder of feeds), you see a list of items, with unread ones highlighted. When you select an item, a short summary is shown with a link to the full item. The list of items and summary information are already loaded by the RSS reader, so you can scan the items very quickly. When you find something of interest, you can follow the link to see the full item either in a web browser or internally in some RSS readers.

The process I just described for using the RSS reader sounds a lot like what you would do with e-mail messages with the same kind of summary (like many e-mail newsletters, except they usually have links to multiple items), so why is it better? Partly the pre-loading of summaries makes going through the items faster than going through e-mails. But most importantly, you choose when to go look at the RSS feeds. You aren't forced to look at them in order to keep up with e-mails that really need a response. Separating all the optional content out of e-mail makes handling the important e-mail much faster and easier, without the risk of losing things in a flood of e-mail (like the item I forgot to put in the club newsletter this month).

How do you get started? It's pretty easy and the price is right. My personal favorite is NetNewsReader Lite, free for Mac OS X from NewsGator. For Windows, I recommend RSS Bandit which is a free open source RSS reader.

Look for the little orange or icons on blogs and web pages and click on them to subscribe. You'll find one on my blog pages in the left sidebar.