Otherwise titled: “How I cut down my list of RSS feeds and podcasts and why the ubiquitous availability of digital data storage has made me a pack-rat.”

Two weeks ago, I sat down and decided to get a handle on all my subscriptions. I realized earlier this month that I had more subscriptions than I could possibly keep up with, and it didn’t make sense spending time filing and classifying content that I had no intention of ever consuming.

So I made a small inventory of what I had: 17 magazine subscriptions, 72 podcasts subscriptions, and 2,432 blog subscriptions. As you can imagine, such a large inventory was overwhelming, so I decided to take out six hours of my weekend and devote myself to getting my subscriptions under control.

Sifting through the magazine pile

Figuring out which magazine subscriptions to keep and which to cancel was relatively easy, and I’m guessing the added money in my bank account will be appreciated when the next billing cycle rolls around.

My process for filtering my magazines was simple: I went through the pile of unread magazines in the corner of my room, and saw which titles came up most often. I canceled those subscriptions, leaving me with only four magazine subscriptions now: The New Yorker, The Walrus, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly.

Clearing up some iPod space

I had already reached a point where I had stopped transferring some podcasts over to my iPod because I just wouldn’t have the time to listen to them (or watch them in the case of video podcasts) before the next update came out. Those subscriptions were the first to go.

Next, I asked myself whether I actually got more utility (and yes, entertainment was considered utility) from each podcast as compared to the time I had to expend listening to or watching it. Those that fell on the wrong side of the scale were deleted.

Finally, I realized that I actually enjoyed audio podcasts much more than video, so I pruned my list of video podcasts to only those I found essential. In the end, I was left with sixteen podcasts (five video, eleven audio) that I felt I could follow effectively.

Switching my RSS reading habits

I always thought I was pretty judicious when it came to adding feeds to NetNewsWire, but when I realized that I was trying to keep up with over two thousand sites every day, I knew my feed subscriptions had gone out of control. How to get them back under control seemed like a daunting task. I was determined to go from my obscenely large number of subscriptions to just under a thousand.

My first task was to switch my RSS reader. I was happy with NetNewsWire, but knew that if I was to make a clean break from the blog overload I was already suffering from, I would need a complete change of environment. I had been reading some rave reviews about Google Reader — a product I had tested back when it was first launched — and thought I’d give it another try despite being pretty disappointed the first time around.

Google Reader does not work well when you subscribe to 2,432 feeds: the updates are slow, the AJAX interface is buggy, and everything just seems cumbersome. This, in fact, was a blessing in disguise. Knowing that Google Reader would only really work well for me if I kept my subscription numbers very low, I was forced to re-evaluate my goal: perhaps even a thousand feeds would be too much.

So I began to chop. The first feeds to go were the ones that didn’t update regularly enough, followed by the ones that hadn’t updated in several months. Next on the chopping block were feeds that I routinely ignored because I had lost interest in them. Finally, I applied my utility test to every RSS feed that remained and was left with 132 feeds that I then imported into Google Reader. I had surpassed even my own expectations.

What was the point of all of this?

In the meatspace, I’m the complete opposite of a pack-rat. I throw things away that I should keep; I give things away that I still want; I get rid of any clutter around me. In the virtual world — as this post clearly demonstrates — I’m a hoarder. Why the big change?

The first, of course, is because digital storage is so darn cheap. With Gmail offering over 2GB of storage space, there is no longer any reason to start deleting emails (until you get to the point where your Gmail account is almost full like I did four months ago), and with desktop and web search being so good, there is no real reason to worry about not being able to find things. While space in the real world is constrained, space in the digital world doesn’t seem to be as hard to find.

The second reason may not apply to everyone, but much of my digital pack-rattery comes from my obsession to consume more and more information. In what some call today’s “information age,” getting content and media to consume is easy for almost anyone: the difficult part is filtering that content in order to find the relevant and purposeful information. That filtering process takes a long time, and in the digital age, it ends up being easier to just consume more and more rather than critically filter media.

This trend, at least in my life, has to stop. So here’s my commitment: at any given moment, I will only subscribe to as many podcasts and feeds that I feel that I can truly engage with. That number is probably sitting at 20 podcasts and 200 RSS feeds. Next time I start complaining that I’m feeling swamped with reading and listening to catch up on, remind me that I could always just filter that content and concentrate on what is truly important.

(If you’re a digital pack-rat like me, Zen Habits posted a 3-step cure this past Monday.)