RSS "Poison": time fragmentation, low productivity and obsessive-compulsive disorder

Jecquie (Jacqui Cheng) wrote for arstechnica.com that RSS subscriptions tend to be too numerous and repetitive, not only wasting a lot of time, affecting productivity, but also making some subscribers produce "RSS compulsive disorder" for fear of missing any content. The author also points out that even if you leave RSS, people have other ways to get news, while improving work efficiency and rational thinking.

On the face of it, RSS seems great for those of us who want to keep up with the "everything" (yes, I mean "everything") on the Internet. For me, as long as I'm awake, I basically look at RSS every 5 minutes. My job and my personal life are rss--it helps me keep a close eye on almost every important tech site so I don't miss anything, and besides, it focuses on the blogs of my friends and family so that I know their lives. If there is no RSS, I will "not keep up". Is this really going to happen?

This August, for two weeks, I was forced to leave my baby RSS content. The exact reason is irrelevant-during that time, my network connection was limited by some technical limitations-however, this "escape from RSS" experience and some subsequent experience, indeed opened my eyes, let me see how RSS in my life is really unnecessary. Not only do I still know much about major technology news, but I am quicker and more productive at work. I can also always read the personal essays I really want to read, improve my concentration and understanding of those articles, while eliminating the deep sense of guilt and the psychological baggage of "Keeping up with everything" as an obligation.

I have to say, when I left RSS, my quality of life and quality of work have improved. I think this may also apply to everyone.

　　RSS content too much, repeat serious

When I left RSS this August, I only visited 35 of the best websites I had in mind to get the latest news. I combine this approach with daily email conversations (for listening to readers, conversations with company PR people, visits, and so on) and regular access to Twitter to know what is happening. There was no pressure on that, and I didn't feel like I was going to miss anything-I knew that if something really important or controversial happened, I would quickly learn from Twitter or my loyal readers.

The next day when I loaded RSS content, it did accumulate thousands of days before. The first thought that came to my mind was, "Gosh, can I really comb through all this crap in one day?" They're all piled together to make the RSS look really different. I finally screened them all, and then I realized that, in the time I took the "outdated" approach, I didn't miss any of the stories; on the contrary, when I looked at this whole bunch of RSS feeds, all I saw was a lot of repetition of the same story, and I wasted a whole day watching them.

RSS was originally designed to allow Internet users to see every article on a particular site for the first time. When it first appeared, there were not as many as 150 daily postings on every site in the world, and your friend's blog didn't have 60 tweets per week--even if there was an original article, it was pushed out of the way.

Now, everything is going to be different. In RSS, the "echo effect" of the Internet is particularly significant--anything more interesting is replicated on friends ' Tumblrs sites (between Twitter and the traditional full-featured blog) at breakneck speed. Controversial content invites comments from almost everyone (and possibly puppy)-he can type his own comments as long as he can knock on the keyboard. Of course, that's one of the great benefits of the Internet-everyone has a say-but it doesn't do much good for everyone's productivity and rational thinking.

If you have a small red label on the RSS reader icon, the numbers in it indicate that you still have a lot of content to read and the situation gets worse. You often think of the question: "How many of these 342 items can I mark as ' read '?" How many of these are I actually ' pretending ' to read? "Even a strictly filtered list of RSS feeds makes you feel the need to read all the backlog--even more strongly, because you've invested time to make sure that you're focused on" quality content "--and that it doesn't help you get things done, or let you feel relaxed.

　　A lot of multitasking is bad for you.

Read 20 fishes RSS feeds on an hourly basis (or unintentionally)-which means you have to always put aside the things you do to do something else. Even if it's simple, this inattention behavior can also affect our focus and persistence, which affects what we are temporarily left behind, so it takes longer to finish the work that you're doing after you've checked out the RSS feed.

Don't people believe what I say? Many studies have shown that humans are extremely poor at this multitasking approach. In 2007, Eric Horvitz, a researcher, found that employees of Microsoft Erikholvitz were interrupted by phone calls, emails or instant messages, averaging 15 minutes to continue their previous work. A report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009 said that highly multitasking people are more likely to be bothered by external information than those with a higher concentration of spirit. A 2010 report, published in Science, confirms that a single task can do a good job; the brain of a dual task needs to be separately processed and monitored separately, and it is hard to be precise to maintain accuracy while performing three or more tasks simultaneously.

Of course, one would argue that keeping an email or Twitter account Open is similar to the way you regularly check your RSS account. But as I've just pointed out, a large part of RSS content is from the reader's content, and spending a lot of time reading them is not worth the candle. (The author of the message sent out of confusion, at least there may be a hint of new ideas, let people smile. ）

　　Draw Lessons from the masses

According to ARS, a market research firm, only 6% of North American internet users use RSS content more than once a week--less than Apple's market share in the U.S.--based on its latest study of RSS usage. The percentage of Americans who used Twitter less than in 2011 was less than the proportion of American companies who were black in 2007, or the proportion of Americans who got sick every year because of food contamination.

According to the above data, 94% of North American internet users live a happy life without knowing what RSS is. (Of course, some of them wear socks and sandals and still use Windows 98, but on the other hand, many RSS users ignore RSS content.) In fact, RSS is not very popular among the public, and this is reasonable. Even people who once belonged to the "geek" (geek) group avoided RSS from the beginning or were completely disappointed with the current RSS feed.

A typical example comes from an ARS reader who is a programmer for a well-known company but does not want to be named. "About one or two years ago, I gave up RSS. Some good blogs are published in about one months, and RSS is then occupied by rubbish blogs, "he/she said to ARS," and sometimes there are some interesting things, but overall, what RSS does is keep stuffing the inbox with rubbish. I realized that when I opened NetNewsWire (an RSS subscription tool), I just wanted to mark everything as ' read '. My heart feels empty. ”

37signals programmer Samsteifensen (Sam Stephenson), a network application company, agrees. "I gave up RSS a few years ago, I found that it was just another" unread "indicator in the toolbar, another number waiting for zero," Stephenson told ARS, "important articles or links will almost always appear on my Twitter stream, or on some sites I've been looking at all day. ”

"I don't even have RSS," said Aurich Lawson, creative director at Ars Olichlosen. ”

It should be explained that RSS also has other specific uses. Like a friend who told me in the morning of Friday that he was going to write an RSS reader that could check for security updates, send a warning to corporate customers--an RSS feed that is clearly valuable, and requires no end user to look at its content. Another useful use for users is to use RSS to send new photos to Apple TV, set-top box, or LCD electronic photo frames. Users can easily get photos.

Others may say they can avoid spending time on RSS all day long, by logging on to accounts only once a day. But I think: even if you do this, a lot of content will still backlog, to want to see the end of a lot of time is bound to waste.

Of course, people have their own reasons for the adoption of specific technologies. I don't judge people who are "dependent" or "enjoying" subscribing to RSS content. However, if you are faced with unread content that you have to sift through and feel overwhelmed again and want to curse, I strongly recommend that you leave RSS for a few days and use the "outdated" approach to find what you are interested in. You may find that the contents of RSS are cutting your precious time over and over again to make it fragmented.

News Source: Donews