In the past two months I had a huge bump in busy-ness. I have had a hard time finding free time for some things I used to do, and had my remaining free time soaked up by new things. One of the things on the way out is reading gratuitous amounts of weblogs. (I _was_ up to about 500.)

I have a system for managing my weblog reading volume, as this has happened before. I divide developer web logs (of which I read more than any other category) into A, B, C, and D. I "have to" read the A's, the B's less so, the C's even less, the D's when I'm really bored. I also have about 10 other categories, including comics (Dilbert, Calvin & Hobbs, etc.), finance, and local news.

I used to get through at least the developer A's, Comics, Local News, and Finance News every day (except the occasional day off.) Over the past 2 months, I have only gotten through Developer A's once and even then, only by marking things for follow up.

I am finding that I lack the attention span to really enjoy it like I used to (constantly thinking, "OK, I've got 20 minutes left...let's make this count. Only read really profound stuff!") I am afraid to open my RSS Reader.

I don't think the great reset trick (mark everything read, delete all Cs and Ds, move some As to Bs and some Bs to Cs) will work this time. This whole thing is just not working. When I first started reading RSS feeds, they were a great way for me to find out about new things in my areas of interest, but in the mean time, the feeds that I read have grown more diverse, into subjects too diverse for me to possibly maintain interest (and a job, and a family) in. Example: Maybe one time I was working on something to do with Sharepoint, so I subscribed to a really great blog about Sharepoint development...then I lost interest...then the guy writing it started writing about something else...then I never read it - it's just an annoying number of unread posts in my RSS Reader. Multiply this by x 300. I don't feel so good...

RSS was a good cure for a certain information flow problem - I could subscribe to things I was interested in - instead of searching or discovering by accident, I could monitor. Now I need something better. What comes next? Is it summary blogs like Jason Haley's or The Daily Grind? Is it "portal" monitor sites like DotNetKicks? Some new technology that tells me who the best writer on subject X and pushes me all that content? I don't know, but I hope it gets here soon. I am starting to feel dumb not being able to digest all the content there is.