It’s one of those mornings. Rainy, wet, and too cold to go outside. I keep wondering if The Cat in The Hat will show up at our door. 
After my super productive day yesterday I have a lot less to do today, and most of it can get done in a 2 1/2 hour span while daughter #2 is at preschool.
This morning I have wasted spent about 2 hours checking forums, twitter, my gmail accounts, and my feedreader. Whew. I’m on overload and I still have multiple tabs open and 154 posts in my feedreader. I’m a fast reader, but not that fast.
Despite the 2 hours, it could have been an all day affair. The way I cut down on my things to read is simple, and worth trying if like me you often stare at pages of posts, emails and places to visit and suddenly become disoriented and have to lie down.
How To Empty Your Inbox
1) The first thing to do is make a folder called unsubscribe. Every time you get an email from Pottery Barn, your grocery store, or any other retailer label it unsubscribe. Go back after one week and unsubscribe to all those emails. When you NEED something you can go look for it, but having Pottery Barn send you weekly e-mails is not good for your budget or your time if you are like me and can waste an hour putting things in your cart you aren’t really going to buy!
If you can not bear unsubscribing, then simply delete those emails without opening them unless you have something on your to-buy list from that retailer.
2) Respond immediately to any email you receive. With personal or business email send an email reply as soon as you read it, that way you don’t add to your to-do list, and you don’t forget!
Taming you Feedreader
For sites that produce a lot of content (Consumerist, Lifehacker, etc.) if you miss a day or two you will likely have 50+ posts to sort through. Here are some ideas.
1) If you have time to read them, quickly scan the titles and skip them if they aren’t relevant to you. That can take as little as 10 minutes.
2) If I don’t have time, I click “Mark all as read” without a moment’s hesitation.Try it, it is very liberating! If there is something relevant in those posts I will likely stumble upon it some other way, or my ever helpful husband (or a friend or reader) will point it out.
I will also use the sidebar to go directly to sites that produce MUST read content. When I have time I go back to the sites that I like but aren’t MUST reads, and blogs that produce thought-provoking content, like Zen Habits.
Hopefully I just saved you some time!
Do you have any tricks for keeping you email box to a minimum, or spending less time reading online? How much time do you spend reading online?
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