I think I’ve come to grips with my RSS addiction. My name is Jason and I have an RSS problem.

I’ve always been a big proponent of RSS as a tool to follow a ton of sites and stay on top of the news. It’s definitely a time-saving tool versus visiting these sites individually. Not to mention great applications, like Reeder for the iPhone and Google Reader on the desktop, make reading RSS feeds fast and easy. It sounds like heaven for an information junkie, like myself.

However, I started to realize I spend a TON of time reading RSS feeds. At home, at work (for work purposes!), waiting out in public – you name it. And what did I do with all that information? Not much, really. An occasional blog post, tweet, Google+ post or Facebook update? Sure. Did I pass on good articles to friends and family via email or use the information in a conversation? Yeah, but not very often.

Then I started looking at the information I was reading and found a lot of duplication (either folks link blogging with very little commentary or the same basic article posted on a bunch of sites within minutes of each other), lots of useless information (horrible infographics and top 10 articles are big culprits), and a lot of stuff I didn’t really care about all that much.

These feeds averaged 1,200 postings per day over the last month and I read less than half of them under the current setup. Sound useful?

Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng had a similar revelation recently: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

RSS was essentially created so that Internet users could stay up-to-date with every single posting made on a particular website. This was, of course, back in the day when every site on earth didn’t post 150 new stories per day, and your friend’s blog feed didn’t contain 60 cross-posted Twitter musings to crowd out the one real post per week. Nowadays, things are different. The Internet echo chamber is most apparent in RSS—mildly amusing items multiply across friends’ Tumblrs like rabbits on crack, and controversial items seem to invite commentary from every single person (and possibly some cats) who has access to a keyboard. This is, of course, one of the great benefits to the Internet—everyone has a voice—but it is not a great benefit to your productivity or sanity.

Sure the article is a little misguided, as she places a lot of blame on the tool and not the usage/user. But what she did (that I can relate to) is evaluate the usage of the tool. My usage pattern was obviously not working, so I decided to start fresh on Google Reader.

This time around, I selected around 15 topics I care a lot about and hand-picked the 5 best sites for each. In all, 75 total feeds that are averaging between 300 and 500 posts per day. Any given time I log in to Google Reader I see around 30 or 40 unread posts, where I used to see hundreds. Getting through all of these takes just a couple of minutes, not 30 minutes or however long it would take me to get through them when I didn’t just give up and hit Mark as Read.

Since the change? I’ve felt less overwhelmed by information and unread counts. My read ratio is a lot higher too. Very close to 100%, actually. And I don’t feel like I missed a thing. In fact, this only helped me realize that the fear of missing out has played a large role in what drives my RSS (and social media) usage in general.

Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr) wrote a great article on this fear, called FOMO and Social Media:

FOMO is a great motivator of human behavior, and I think a crucial key to understanding social software, and why it works the way it does. […] Social media has made us even more aware of the things we are missing out on. You’re home alone, but watching your friends status updates tell of a great party happening somewhere. You are aware of more parties than ever before. And, like gym memberships, adding Bergman movies to your Netflix queue and piling up unread copies of the New Yorker, watching these feeds gives you a sense that you’re participating, not missing out, even when you are.

An almost endless amount of information (news, social sharing, status updates, etc), combined with easy to use technology that allows us instant access, creates both the feeling of participating and connecting with others, without doing either in most cases. Like knowing what your friend is up to through Facebook updates, but not actually participating in their life through truly connecting. All while feeling a need to constantly check your news feed to make sure you didn’t miss anything important.

And she even related all of this back to Buddhism:

It’s an age-old problem, exacerbated by technology. To be always filled with craving and desire (also called defilement, affliction) is one of the Three Poisons of Buddhism, called kilesa, and it makes you a slave. There is true meaning in social media—real connections, real friendships, devotion, humor, sacrifice, joy, depth, love. And this is what we are looking for when we log on.

All is not lost, though. These tools, from RSS to Facebook and Twitter, have potential to create real connections and help us become better people through knowledge, laughter and compassion. The important thing to remember, though, is that these tools help us complete tasks (connect, learn, share, remember, etc.), not become tasks. Once you get caught up in the act of using the tool and not the result, it becomes more about the fear of not using it, than what you really get out of the process.