Subscribe to lots of RSS feeds. But how to organize?

Right now, I’m attempting a three folder system

Folder 1. Actual Reading

This is a folder you could diligently and even addictively read on a daily basis and not feel guilty about, or feel like you were wasting anytime. In fact, as some new media people might have us believing soon, this kind of reading may be a perfectly valid …um, substitution (?)…um, yeah, for actually reading books, you know … that old 15th century hardware, and 18th century software.

Folder 2. Feed Candy (aka Crack, aka Time-Waste Central)

This is anything you’d tag #humor, #awesome, #funny, #tech, #cool, #fail, etc. This is the raison d’etre of the web, but it doesn’t have to be yours. Limit time in this section.

Folder 3. Infrequent Check-Ins (aka Stuff either you think you should be reading but don’t have in Folder 1 or Stuff you use to get your fix when your Crack folder runs out)

Be very careful with this stuff. It might mean you need to go out and exercise, or at least turn the computer off. Or the guilt of how little you’ve accomplished in your intellectual career is growing. And for the stuff that’s just sitting in there? Why isn’t it gone for good? Now there might actually be a good reason for that…It would be great if Google Reader had a hide or archive like feature where you could recall at a later date what your subscriptions were in case you want to resurrect them.

Re: Periodic Infrequent Check-Ins. For example, I might want to read something on the Mozilla Firefox blog every once in a while, so instead of visiting the website and looking for the blog I can just keep that feed in the Reader and check it occasionally

I have had other systems where I go by subject (politics, tech, funnies, etc.) but I think a priority system is better. Also, I recommend never reading from the “All Items” folder because it is way too distracting to switch back and forth between politics, fail, tech, etc.

This is a tough one. I’ve been criticized before for praising someone unworthy of praise, but I generally feel that applause is the balm that heals pretty much just about anything. You can easily applaud for mistakes in a humorous way (like if someone spills something), and it makes someone feel better, or you can applaud for someone who did a bad job (like a kid at a piano recital who screwed up the Entertainer), or you can genuinely applaud for someone who performed well (Barack Obama giving a speech). I’m not putting a whole lot of energy into this, but I can’t really think of a time that applauding would be bad other than applauding at the wrong time.

The system:

Applaud when someone has made a mistake and you know them well enough.

Applaud when someone feels self-conscious about their less than stellar performance.

Applaud when someone does a great job and you want them to know it.

Don’t eat at Friendly’s unless:

You want a tuna melt with french fries and really good pickles and you are in a good enough mood that you don’t mind spending a ton of money on what would cost way less anywhere else with that kind of quality and you want to feel warm and cozy like all those years when everything was ok in life and your mom took you to Friendly’s.

Or ice cream, from the outside counter, on a date, in July.

For better or worse, twitter is genuinely becoming the everyman’s blog, and while I’ve had this discussion before and lost, one solution to my lack of time to post regularly to system sally may be just to tweet my systems. It leaves out a great deal, I know, but it’s better than nothing, no?

That way I can do it mobile style wherever I am, whenever I think of it. You can reply to my tweets with “please flesh out” if you want me to flesh it out here.

But I will also try to post here even in the midst of the busyness.

Sorry dedicated readers, System Sally has been very very busy. I have new systems daily (there will never be a shortage), it’s just that cataloging them seems like such a chore when you’re so busy exercising them. Also, it’s like when you’re actually in love you don’t want to talk about it that much, whereas after the heartbreak it seems like something that you need to understand. System Sally arose out of a time when there was time to understand my systems, to get them up and running, to reflect on past systems, to have the luxury of experimentation. But now that I have so much busyness, there’s no luxury, and there’s no room for error. Systems have been stripped down to their purely functional level. In some ways that essentializes the systems even more, but in some ways it takes the joy out of it. For example, I have a system that is filling up the gas tank the night before. You know that’s a good system, and so do I, but I do it because I have to, and I hate doing it. Or, I have a system where I leave my wallet and keys in an outbox crate before going to bed so when I wake up I know exactly where they are when I wake up. But when I wake up very early in the morning, and grab my wallet and keys I’m only happy that I have them, I’m not happy that I have a system for having them. This is how System Sally has Sadly Shifted Since Summer.

But, heck, having systems purely to support busyness is a meta-system, so it all still fits, it’s just that there’s less energy to focus on the individual pieces. For now, I will list, just by name at this point, some of the systems I’ve employed since getting busy. If I have time, I will give you more of a breakdown.

I kinda take back everything I said…These systems are AMAZING!

• Sleeping with a thermal ski mask to stay warm
• Growing your hair out to stay warm
• Using a mirror in the shower to shave
• Using shoulder bag on one shoulder, and another shoulder back on the other shoulder to balance out the weight.
• Shining shoes
• Not washing dress shirts or dress pants, but instead relying on deodorant and undershirts.
• Setting two alarms
• Using three moleskine notebooks (one for hard landscape calendar, one for work to do, one for personal to do and journaling)
• Not carrying pens in pocket anymore
• Not having a cellphone
• Changing your mind and getting an awesome smartphone
• Showering less frequently
• Not reading
• Klean Kanteen still best thing ever, but using a carabiner to have more hands free
• Fingerless gloves
• Eating breakfast
• Wearing hats…go silly looking rather than conservative (thanks to Holmes for that)
• Dealing with customer service by complaining, but choosing battles wisely

Anyway, that’s all I have for now.

I think what I’ve learned in this shift is that systems design themselves when situations demand it, and especially when there are time and energy constraints.

Rationale:

Update

System:

Entries will have both @next and @previous links if necessary.

Advantages:

Full navigation forward and back in a system’s evolution.

Status:

@current

Rationale:

Update

System:

Do not use the @wip tag for new system sally entries.

Advantages:

• It will be clearer to myself and readers that all systems are simultaneously set in stone and works in progress

Status:

@next

@previous

Rationale:

As I’ve been organizing System Sally, I’ve realized it is about time to have a more standard way of composing System Sally entries

System:

Have a single-word title (descriptive adjectives can follow this one word by a comma to make it clearer to the reader what kind of entries I am referring to, for example). Start off with a rationale, then explain the system, then list the advantages of this system to make it clear to the reader why I think my system is worth practicing. This list of advantages also helps open up dialogue, because it is easier to disagree with a list of advantages than the unexplaining system itself. This list will be a bulleted list, and will not be listed in order of importance. Then offer the reader a status message on the system, which can be @new, @wip (which is similar to @new by shows that I have not finalized it for myself, in that moment at least), @current, which means it is the most current iteration and has a link to the previous version, @previous, which means it is not the current version but has a link to the previous version, and @next, which means that it has been updated. @new tags will not have a link, but @current and @previous both link to the previous iteration, and @next links to the more recent iteration, in some cases the most current.

Advantages:

• I will enjoy posting more, because it will be more systematic
• Readers will get more out of the posts because they will be clearer

Status:

@next

@previous

Don’t bother with public libraries. It takes too much effort to take out the books you want (because they’re usually only available through InterLibrary Loan, which takes forever, limits your check out time and doesn’t allow for renewing), and you don’t get around to them in time, and then you have to pay overdue fees.

Better to invest in a book, keep it on your shelf, get to it in your own time.

@current

I’m switching from tags to categories. I think categories is a much better system.

Also, I’m going to be more clear when updating. I will always have a link to the previous version of a system, written at the bottom like this:

@previous

If I can, in this previous post, I will edit it and have something at the bottom saying:

@update