More and more of our professional development has moved to blogs, wikis, and social software. While this means we are more up to date than ever, we are also at risk of becoming overwhelmed. You might have returned from a holiday, an intense project at work or just realised that your RSS feeds have become unmanageable, and your email is bold with new items from top to bottom.

Here are some tips to bring things back into perspective:

Tame Your Feeds

RSS out of control? Back them up to an OPML file, then start cutting shamelessly. Start with:

• Dead blogs
• Blogs that are no longer relevant to your current work
• Newspaper feeds – I find these are the most difficult to keep up with. They update several times per day and can quickly spiral out of control.
• Blogs or feeds that update too frequently. They are are often not much more than linkblogs – causing you to spend more time reading as you click through to each link.

Keep:

• Blogs with few subscribers – because you won’t be rereading their comments on everyone else’s blog
• Analytical, thoughtful blogs – they’re worth the time
• Blogs outside librarianship, or with a higher ratio of original content
• Feeds you actually read, if you use Google Reader use the statistics feature to work out which you read the most

Who said you have to subscribe? There are several sites I prefer to browse now and then rather than subscribe, like Lifehacker. Ever had a magazine you bought now and then and liked, but when you subscribed you stopped reading it? If you’ve got that problem identify a few sites you’d rather visit directly now and then, rather than through a Reader.

Email

Email eating away at you? Don’t make things difficult for yourself by using all the fancy flag, follow-up and folder features. The Fatal 3 F’s! Make it easy for yourself to sort and reply:

• Move messages more than 2 weeks old to an archive folder. Check with your IT staff – if your space is generous there’s no need to ever delete most of your emails.
• Make a paper to-do/follow-up list. Easier than keeping track of flags.
• Once you’re done sorting, follow some new rules: Dave Pollard has an excellent and sensible list of “when not to use email“.

Overly Social

Social software too, can be difficult to keep up with. It is all too easy to get carried away by trying everything on Mashable. A good solution might be to try one or two new sites a month, but really only use two to three actively. Personally, I really like Facebook because you can integrate so many other applications into it. That way, you really only have to interact with one website regularly. See Michael Porter’s bigwig presentation on Facebook for more.

How do you manage your feeds and online presence? Leave a comment!