Every now and than I reflect on my own workflow and how I do things, just to make sure that I am focusing on the things that are important and I am not complicating matters than they should be. Along the way I have learnt and re-learnt the fact that having "things" simple is an effective way to deal with "things". I wish I was doing it more often.
Remember when RSS feeds were HOT, a lot of people [and I mean a lot] were subscribing to 1000's of feeds {me including} and were immersed in the reading. When Twitter was just getting HOT, it was all about following people and getting more people to follow you. It went to an extend that people would unfollow you if you did not follow them back. Thus you accumulated 1000's of followers and followed 1000's in the process. The story on Facebook was somewhat similar, a lot of people followed almost everybody [some living their bosses out of their networks] they knew and more in the name of social networking.
Fast forwarding it, it's getting difficult if not totally impossible to keep track of those 1000's of Twitter updates in the stream everyday. RSS Aggregator has not been touched and has more than 100K items unread. It is becoming difficult on social networking side of things, as there are 100's of updates on Facebook and a lot of them is just as good as SPAM. Now we look for simplifying "things" to make it more effective. We start creating Lists on Twitter to separate important tweets from other 1000's of updates, we create folders in RSS Aggregator {I have a folder called 'Must Read'} to keep track of important posts and we create categories on Facebook to separate our 100's of friends.
If at the end, all we wanted to do is focus on reading updates from a bunch of people. Then why did we waste a lot of time creating a chaos for ourselves. When we can just think of what is going to be meaningful for us and keep things simple and effective from the beginning.
It is a skill and comes from more practice.
TEJAS PATEL'S LIFESTREAM 