Staying on top of your online reads

About 5 years back, I had first set up RSS feeds of my favourite news sites and blogs on Google Reader. It was a nice and simple interface to consume content. That was until Google decided to shut it down, amidst huge uproar from loyal users. After evaluating options, I settled on Feedly, which seemed promising and importantly offered one-click migration, by pulling in all feeds from the Reader. It has served me well the past couple of years, and this post is about how I've organized my Feedly account over time to stay on top of content.

With a limited set of feeds, organizing and reading stuff doesn't need much of thought. As you keep continually adding feeds, things start getting a bit muddled with diverse categories of interest, variety of sources (self-hosted websites, medium, blogger, news sites) and a varying velocity of feed generation - ranging from hundreds every week to an occasional gem-of-a-post.

I started simple with just 2 categories to group all feeds or article sources - 'Headlines' or the not-to-be-missed articles and 'Others', that had everything else. Eventually, my sources grew to over 100 feeds, and 'Headlines' ballooned to over 50. Overwhelmed by this torrent of information, I did some minor re-categorisation which didn't seem to help. I was looking for an optimal mix of categories, while also being able to flag off the 'hot sources' across categories.

Preview of my Feedly panel

Eventually I settled on 7 categories (as shown in the image) to organize the feeds, with each having not more than 15 to 20 feeds each. To maintain sanity, I keep purging sources that doesn't match up with consistent content. Feedly has a super-useful feature of flagging of favourite sources by them as 'promote to Must read', which essentially mirrors the same feeds onto a separate list called 'Must reads'.  This list is again kept at around 15 to 20 feeds and any new additions are always after some removals, to keep it manageable. This workflow has been working well for me, and here are things I like most about Feedly:

1. Good UI with a easy procedure to add & organize content. The feed recommendations are quite relevant too.
2. Clean reading interface with 5 presentation layouts ranging from a mailbox view, cards or an online magazine layout to fast-read stuff. I generally use the 'magazine' layout.
3. Features in the free version are good enough for basic usage, with unlimited feeds & social sharing options bundled.
4. Maintains a 30-day window for articles, after which they get cleared. As opposed to storing content over months or years and getting inundated with scary notifications of thousands of unread articles, I've realized that this time-bounded expiry brings in some reading discipline.