Anyway, we got home and did a little more relaxing but today I finally hopped onto the computer to do some actual catching up. I had 108 messages in my work email to go through...70 in my personal email (most of which were filtered away due to specific rules for various newsletters, etc).
I pushed through all the various emails in 15-20 minutes. There are some I'll address when I get to the office tomorrow and a number of newsletters I'll read over the next few days but I'm mostly caught up on email and fairly quickly.
And then I went to my "Reader" to catch up on the various blogs and news pages I follow. To my dismay, there were over 1000 new posts for me to filter through. Wow! Fortunately my reader has them broken down into categories...so I caught up on close friends and family first then on my favorite blogs...but that still left about 800 unread posts.
The cause here is two-fold. First, I follow a number of bloggers who are VERY prolific...writing sometimes 4 or 5 posts a day. Second (and this I found by looking over my list), I am "following" 207 blogs/sites. So even an average of a single post each day would have gotten me well over 1k in a week. Yikes.
Now the question is...do I just do a bulk "mark all as read" and move on? Or do I slowly but surely push through the list so as to be sure to catch any posts that really interest me and make sure I comment on them?
Due to the mass of posts, I'm leaning towards the former...I went through ~150 posts, skimming some and reading most. I commented on ~10 of the posts. I found many of the others interesting. But the 2+ hours it took to go through them make me wonder on the productivity of it.
When I stay on top of my "blog reading", it's usually something that I spend 10-15 minutes on each day catching up with the various blogs. But when it piles up like this, I suddenly wonder if I'm following too many sites and if so, how do I go about trimming down the list. Honestly I really enjoy the sites I follow and while I may not be passionate about every post/article that comes from every site, I find cool nuggets from each of them over time.
Have any of you fellow bloggers run into this dilemma? Come back from an "offline" hiatus and found yourself so far behind that you just want to clear the slate and start fresh? What have you done in those situations? As of now, I have 659 unread posts to go...and tomorrow, I'm back at the office.
4 comments:
I know what you mean. Sometimes just the two day weekend can be rough.
Usually I go through and read the blogs that I'm very interested in, and after that I either do a quick skim or read enough to know whether or not to finish. And then some blogs I simply mark them all as read.
Good luck!
Your post made me chuckle. Since beginning the 365, I just don't have the same amount of traffic as I did when I was book blogging. Back then, there was no catching up. Thankfully it's to a manageable level and I do disappear for days at a time. I don't stress over it as before. When I get back, I decide how much time I'll give it. When I've hit my limit, the rest gets deleted. That said, I do skim through first.
Through some major skimming (and removing a few blogs I've decided I just don't care about any more), I've trimmed it down to ~250 unread. I figure I can make one more quick skim through those and then call it good.
Oh man, I've never come back to that bad of a backlog, but yes, I've experienced this in principle. I have mine broken down by categories too -- real life friends, online friends, writers, agent/editors, design/photography, and other. Usually I will bulk mark-as-read the latter two categories, read both types of friend categories, and then slowly make my way through the writing-related posts. I do find myself commenting less and skimming more when catching up, but you know what? Everyone lives, lol.
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