Till around two years ago I had tons of subscriptions in my RSS reader. Hundreds of news I had to skim through every day. Then I realized this was neither sustainable nor healthy. I needed to spent less time on skimming through news that did not interest me.
I scrolled through all the sites that I had in my RSS reader and removed 2/3 of them. I didn’t need three tech sites talking about the same stuff. Choosing just one would be enough. Week after week I reduced the list of subscribed feeds.
After a few months of cutting through my subscriptions I realized something: I replaced three feeds with a newsletter. That was an eye opener to me. Instead of reading all the news, I trusted someone to create a curated list of news for me. Why should I read all the stuff out there when I just could get the most important news of the week? This freed lots of time that I could use for other things.
Today my RSS reader has under 50 subscriptions, most of them only post something once a month. A handful of them are still news sites. Sites I really enjoy reading on a daily basis. The rest is done through those newsletters. Every Sunday morning I grab a hot chocolate and open the newsletter folder of my email app and start reading them. And after 30 minutes I am done and up to date again.
Another positive side effect: I’m not lured into reading some comments discussing the links on reddit or hacker news. Most times reading those comments is not worth it anyway :wink: .
Here is the list of newsletters I’m currently subscribed to:
- Ruby Weekly
- Html5 Weekly
- Javascript Weekly
- Hackernewsletter
- Changelog
- iOS Dev Weekly
- Neues aus der Zukunft
What newsletters have you subscribed to? Did you found another solution to keep up to date?
