source: DRB62
This was first published more than a year-and-a-half ago, but it’s one of my most popular post. As many of us focus on simplifying and prioritizing in the New Year, I thought it would be appropriate to share it again!
This is a scary post for a blogger to write. After all, you might get to the end of it and think, “Hmm, Life Your Way kind of falls into that second category. I’m going to unsubscribe now and simplify my life.” Let’s hope not, but I think it’s an important enough topic that I’ll take that chance (which is not to say I haven’t had second thoughts!).
But seriously, how many blogs do you currently subscribe to by email or in your feed reader? For some of you, it may only be a handful – and if Life Your Way is among them, thank you for considering what I have to say worth your time! (For more about feed readers, Abraham Piper from 22words has a great post called “What is RSS?“)
However, it’s easy to get caught up in the community aspect of blogging and feel like you have to keep up with everything going on everywhere all the time. Maybe you don’t really like what this popular blogger has to say, but they’re popular, so you feel like you should like them, and so you stay subscribed to their blog.
Or maybe you’re afraid that the next post will be like the one that attracted you to subscribe in the first place, and you’ll miss it. Never mind the fact that the last 99 posts were on a completely different subject and don’t happen to interest you.
Or maybe you’re so caught up in the blogosphere that you spend hours and hours zoned in front of your reader, and you spend your time adding blogs, rather than culling them, so that you’re never left without something to read.
Reevaluating and Decluttering Your Feed Reader
I want to encourage you to take a step back and think about which blogs you excitedly click on when you see they have a new post. Those are obviously keepers – blogs that encourage and teach and inspire you, that make you feel like someone else understands what you’re going through or that remind you how precious life is.
But what about those blogs that you only read when everything else has been read? What about the ones that give you just the slightest feeling of dread when you see that they have new posts adding to that ominous unread post count at the top of your reader?
I am going to go so far as to encourage you to listen to that feeling of dread and unsubscribe. Life is too busy and too fleeting to spend time reading stuff that you really don’t appreciate simply out of habit. If you’re worried about running out of things to read, grab a book and keep it next to your computer. Next time your post count is zero, crack open the book instead. If you’re worried about missing something important, let me assure you that you won’t. If it’s big enough news, you’ll hear about it somewhere else.
How many blogs do you subscribe to? Do you declutter your subscriptions, or is visiting your feed reader something you dread because it’s gotten to be so overwhelming?
