Organizing Your Google Reader

As you get immersed into social media, it’s sometimes difficult to stay on top of things without getting sucked into the web abyss. You go to answer a few emails but you end up checking twitter, facebook, and reading a few blogs in the process. There are a few things you can do to organize and reduce your time online, though. By fully utilizing your Google Reader, you can have new posts from all the blogs you frequent in one place. When you have a few minutes to spare, you can check your reader and not get distracted (hopefully) by the rest of your online world!

How to Organize Your Google Reader

1. Subscribe to your favorite blogs, twitter feeds, etc. using their RSS feed. You can also add the websites directly into Google Reader by ADDING A SUBSCRIPTION.
2. When you’re in Google Reader, click on ALL ITEMS.
3. Look through your feeds and STAR the posts you’d like to read. Don’t read them yet; that comes later. (Kind of makes your realize how important your post title is.)
4. When you’re finished, click on STARED ITEMS.
5. Now, read your posts. UNSTAR any post that you don’t need to refer to again.

Bonus tip:

You can TAG a post (found at the bottom of the post in Google Reader) and use that as a filing system of sorts. For example, if you want to refer back to a tortilla soup recipe that someone posted, just tag it as “RECIPE” and/or “SOUP” and unstar the post (this is similar to using de.li.cious). You can still find it quickly but also keep your “stared” folder cleaned out.

TAGS are found under your subscriptions on the left side of your Google Reader.

Using these tips, you can breeze through hundreds of blogs per day while only reading posts that are relevant to you. Do you use Google Reader? If so, how has improved your productivity online?

By the way, if you’ve been contemplating subscribing to iDreamofClean, now would be great time to do so since you know how to fully utilize your Google Reader!

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Linked to  We’re Organized Wednesday

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Tagged as: google reader, organization