Priority-Based Feed Reading with Google Reader

Folks have a variety of methods for organizing their feeds.  I’m a river of news guy, preferring to see all of my feeds in one big stream.  I don’t bother reading things feed-by-feed, or use a zillion tags to categorize things such as “news”, “friends”, or other topic-based delimiters.

Instead, I have four tags.  Every feed gets one of the four.  They are: a-list, b-list, c-list, and d-list.  These are totally arbitrary assignments based on priority.  Things I tag as a-list are absolute must-reads.  B-list is for things that I really want to read (local news, local bloggers, the best of the tech blogs related to my profession, etc).  C-list are usually more entertainment type things, wider area news, some politics, etc.  And D-list are there only to read if I have time.

Monday night, we had a new addition to our family.  The little guy is doing great but the schedule disruptions that a baby cause are definitely impacting my feed-reading time… so I can head over to my D-list feeds, just hit “mark all as read”, get caught up, and know that I probably didn’t miss anything too important.