Is RSS killing your productivity?

Posted on 3 years, 8 months

Under Rants

I am a contributor and avid reader of the Business of Software forums. For those who are not aware, it is an excellent resource for small and micro businesses in the software sector.

However, what piqued my interest this week was a post by an anonymous young reader, who was seeking advice on Procrastination and how to get over it. The overarching theme in the discussion seemed to be that a lot of people feel that they are spending an increasingly more amount of time "surfing the web", than getting things done.

Since the early days of the web, random surfing has always been the bane of productivity for many people (I was there in my university days, so I know the feeling). Obviously, there are many contributing factors to why our active time on the web has increased (I am looking at you Facebook), but I cannot help feeling that RSS is probably a bigger slayer of productivity in early adopters and especially the tech-savvy crowd.

Before the semantic-web-loving, standards-touting crowd frown at me in disgust, let me make it clear that "I love RSS!". Without it, I would not have a voice. Neither would I have been able to keep abreast of current events using what is now my "daily newspaper".

Recent data from time management solution Rescuetime indicates that even though e-mail and IM are still the primary bane of productivity, news & blogs are the second worst offenders when it comes to productivity killers. Obviously, this data is skewed towards people who are sensitive about time management, but nevertheless, it shows an increasing addiction in feed subscribers.

How should organisations handle this? How should individuals handle this? Is the targeted-delivery and subscription RSS provides, increasing the information that is delivered to us or decreasing it? I am afraid I only have questions and no answers at this point.

Finally, I must say I am sorry! Not only have I left this post with more questions than answers, I have also just contributed to killing more of your productivity.