I’ve been effectively offline since last Wednesday night. Since then, until a few hours ago, I spent about 5 minutes checking work email (once on Friday and Saturday morning) and about another 5 minutes filtering my personal email Saturday. I can’t even guess how long it has been since I traveled without a laptop (10 or 15 years?).
I hadn’t had a look at my Feed Reader (Google Reader) at all during that time.
Now I think I finally understand the “100+” thing that Google Reader does. You see, after 100 unread posts, GReader won’t tell you the grand total anymore. It just shows “100+” and I’ve now decided that’s a good thing. Because if it was that real number (which if not over 1000 has to be real close) I think I’d just break down and sob…
This is clearly a mental health benefit.
That being said… I think I’m going to cherry-pick a few favorite feeds, read them and then I will indeed just mark the rest read. Just typing that makes the little anal-retentive person deep inside me die a little… I always read all my feeds. That’s pretty much how I finish each day — and to be honest, it’s kind of a pride thing. But this time I just can’t bother to take on this challenge.
Do you ever mark them all read? What’s it take to get you there?
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March 26th, 2007 
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Just the other day I came back to 500+ unread feed items. I looked over most of the headlines, at various degrees of attention (based on the category the feed was under), marked what I wanted to come back to and hit “all read” for everything else.
Sometimes it’s best to skip over the less important stuff, than to start falling behind on your top choices.
I have to agree with Tony. I haven’t done a Mark ALL read yet. I’ve marked whole categories read at times.
Somehow marking all my GTD feeds read so I can actually get things done instead of reading about it doesn’t feel so bad to me if you know what I mean.
Other posts I won’t mark read. WWdN:ie I won’t mark read, neither will I mark dilbertblog read without reading them. No matter how behind I am I’ll at least skim all their stuff.
But yeah, I’ve marked entire chunks read before without even a wince. Sometimes I get a paper and don’t read anything but the Parade. *shrug* It’s not a sin. This thing is here for me, not vice versa. I don’t owe it nuthin’ lol.
Tony and Rich – the category thing is pretty much exactly what I ended up doing. Still lost a couple hours this morning, but there were a few categories of posts that I marked Read without a second thought.
A couple of other categories that I skimmed. And a handful of subscriptions that I patiently waded through one by one.
Was also a good excuse to trim down the sub list… I figured if I mentally groaned when looking at some of the subscriptions, that’s probably a sign to ditch it for a bit.
I agree with the others. I won’t mark everything, but if I haven’t read anything in a few days, I’ll mark certain categories of news as read. Other categories I’ll always read no matter how long it takes.