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Ministry of Innovation / Business of Technology

Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

Are you a slave to your RSS feeds, or are you one of the roughly 94 percent of …

Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson

On this long Labor Day weekend in the US, we're bringing you a set of opinion pieces from various Ars writers—and we'd love to have you join the conversation in the comments.

On the surface, RSS seems great for those of us who want to keep up on everything happening on the Internet—and I mean everything. As for me, I use RSS regularly at five minute intervals for pretty much the entire time I'm awake. I use RSS for both work and personal reasons—it helps me keep tabs on practically every tech site that matters in order to ensure that I'm never missing anything, plus it lets me make sure I'm on top of my friends' and families' lives via their blogs. If not for RSS, I could never keep up on anything. Or would I?

Twice in as many weeks during the month of August, I was forced to go without my precious RSS feeds. The details don't matter—there were technical limitations on my Internet connections at the time—but my experiences during and after The Great Breaks From RSS really opened my eyes to how unnecessary it may actually be to my life. Not only did I manage to stay on top of the important tech stuff just fine, I was faster and more productive while working. I also made more conscious decisions about whose personal ramblings I actually wanted to read at any given time, increasing my focus and understanding of those posts while removing the heavy weight of guilt and obligation to keep up with everything.

Dare I say it, but the quality of my life and work improved when I went without RSS. And I think it might for you, too.

RSS is overwhelming and repetitive

The first time I went without RSS in August, I simply went around to three or so of what I consider to be the best sites to get the latest news from. I combined that with my usual e-mail communications (tips from readers, conversations with PR folks from different companies, interviews already in progress, etc.) and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what was going on during the day. It was stress-free, and I never felt like I was missing anything—I knew that if something truly important or controversial blew up, I'd hear about it instantly via Twitter and our loyal readers.

The next day when I loaded up my feeds, there were literally thousands of items piled up from the day before. ("Wow, I really comb through this much crap in a day? It looks so different when it's all smashed together like this," was the first thought that went through my head.) And when I ended up sifting through them all, I realized that I hadn't missed a single story doing things the "old fashioned" way—rather, by following all these feeds, I was instead seeing hundreds of iterations on the same handful of stories. And I was wasting time going through them all day long.

RSS was essentially created so that Internet users could stay up-to-date with every single posting made on a particular website. This was, of course, back in the day when every site on earth didn't post 150 new stories per day, and your friend's blog feed didn't contain 60 cross-posted Twitter musings to crowd out the one real post per week.

Nowadays, things are different. The Internet echo chamber is most apparent in RSS—mildly amusing items multiply across friends' Tumblrs like rabbits on crack, and controversial items seem to invite commentary from every single person (and possibly some cats) who has access to a keyboard. This is, of course, one of the great benefits to the Internet—everyone has a voice—but it is not a great benefit to your productivity or sanity.

What makes it worse is that a huge number sitting in a little red badge over your RSS reader icon carries an obligation. "How many of those 342 items can I just mark as read, and how many of them do I actually have to pretend to read?" becomes a question that you ponder often. Even a ruthlessly curated RSS list can make you feel like you have to read the entire backlog—maybe even moreso, since you've now put time into making sure you're following quality sources—and that's just not a feeling that contributes either to getting things done or to relaxing.

Multitasking is bad

Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task. Even if it's a brief task, the very act of breaking your concentration means it will impact the focus and flow of whatever got shoved to the background, and it takes longer to resume that task later when you're done with the RSS scan.

Don't believe me? There have been numerous studies that have shown that humans are notoriously bad at multitasking in this way. Research scientist Eric Horvitz found in 2007 that Microsoft employees took an average of 15 minutes to return to the task they were working on after being interrupted by a phone call, e-mail, or instant message. A 2009 report in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science said that heavy multitaskers tended to be more readily distracted by extraneous information than their more focused peers. And a report published in Science in 2010 confirmed that single-taskers could perform work just fine, double-taskers had to split their brain processes to monitor things separately, and three or more tasks simply caused hell to break loose.

Sure, one can undoubtedly argue that keeping an e-mail or Twitter client open requires similar brain demands as regularly checking an RSS client. But as I pointed out earlier, a huge portion of RSS items tend to be repetitive from the reader's end, so the tradeoff offers very little reward for your time. (At least that e-mail from your perpetually confused coworker offers the potential for a fresh chuckle.)

Take a lesson from the general public

Forrester Research told Ars that, according to its most recent RSS usage numbers, only six percent of North American, Internet-using consumers used an RSS feed once per week or more. That's less than Apple's market share in the US, the percentage of the population using Twitter in 2011, the percentage of black-owned US businesses in 2007, and the percentage of US citizens who get sick from contaminated food every year.

Going by those numbers, some 94 percent of the North American Internet-using population is living in blissful ignorance of life with RSS. (Sure, some of those people also wear socks with sandals and still use Windows 98, but then again, so do many RSS users.) The fact is, RSS just hasn't caught on much among the general population, and for good reason. Even some of those who run with the geek crowd have either shunned it from the beginning or are now getting disillusioned. 

A prime example comes from an Ars reader who asked to remain anonymous, but who works as a programmer for a high-profile corporation. "I got rid of RSS probably a year or two ago. There were some good blogs that posted around once every month, and then there were trash blogs that just barfed up tons of stuff," he told Ars. "They were sometimes interesting, but it was just basically this perpetually filling inbox of trash. I realized I was just opening NetNewsWire to mark all as read. I felt empty inside."

Sam Stephenson, a programmer at 37signals, agreed. "I gave up on RSS a couple of years ago when I realized it was just another unread indicator in my dock, another number to zero out," Stephenson told Ars. "If an article or link is important it almost always shows up in my Twitter stream, or on one of the handful of websites I check throughout the day."

As Ars creative director Aurich Lawson says, "I don't even own an RSS!"

To be clear, there are certainly other use cases for RSS. For example, a friend told me Friday morning that he was about to code an RSS reader that checks for security updates and sends alerts to his company's clients—this is clearly a valuable use for RSS and doesn't involve end-users going through feeds. Another helpful use case is using an RSS feed to deliver new photos on your Apple TV, set-top box, or LCD photo frame. You get the picture.

Others may say that they can avoid the all-day-long RSS time suck by only opening their clients once per day, but I argue that it still piles up redundant content that you now have to waste time going through all at once.

Of course, people have their own reasons for using certain technologies over others. I don't judge those who rely on—or dare I say it, enjoy—subscribing to RSS feeds. But if you ever find yourself cursing under your breath at the prospect of filtering through your unread items yet again, I highly recommend taking a break for a few days to find interesting content the "old fashioned" way. You might find that RSS is slowly nickel and diming your time away, one feed at a time.

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