RSS and it’s impact on productivity.
I just read this post by Greg that describes the impact RSS has had on his productivity, it’s as if I wrote it myself so for once I will repeat it here in full!
My RSS reader saves me about 300 hours a week
The one about how using RSS opens up information to me in a way that is so reliable I could only do it this way manually if there were two of me…
Okay, so maybe it’s a little exaggerated. But seriously, I read an incredible amount of information these days. So much more than I ever did, and a lot of it on the Internet. Not only that, but I get the information I need (or want) so fast now that I can practically always act faster than most people when news breaks. Research that used to take hours and hours of searching and browsing now takes just minutes. I’m consuming much, much more information and doing so in much, much less time. What I can accomplish today in the information gathering department would have taken two of me just a year or so ago, before I found the real beauty of RSS.
I use RSS feeds for practically everything now. Rarely do I browse to a web site these days as my first method of gathering my daily doses of information. The data comes to me, based on my subscriptions. I know what I need, and I use the tools to get it. I find information sources just once, and then let the tools take care of the rest. I update my information world in real time, using tools like FeedDemon to do the dirty work for me. I focus on consuming, and the rest is practically magic.
RSS has made me a more productive, and therefore (in theory
) more valuable employee where I work. A huge part of my job is staying up to date with the latest technology, trends and issues. I subscribe to a couple hundred feeds that I review several times daily, some of which are aggregated feeds or feeds that are the result of a search of thousands of blogs and other sources for certain keywords or subjects. Then there’s the couple hundred others that I review periodically, both work-related and otherwise.
When news breaks, when someone writes a new article that I might care about, when new security patches or alerts are released, when Woot! posts their latest great deal for cheap geeks on the web, it all comes straight to me.
In a nutshell, RSS has enabled me to work (and play) on the ‘net in a way that would not be practical (or even possible) without the technology.
