Simplifying Life

I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to simplify my life during 2011.  Part of that will involve getting rid of stuff in my house that I don’t want, need, or use (of which there is a shocking amount).  Part of that is cutting out any unnecessary obligations.  I don’t have too many of those that haven’t already been axed.  Part of it is cutting out some of the online stuff that is a time suck for me.  And that would be blogs.

Aye, there’s the rub.

I always did a periodic purging of blogs that I stopped reading for one reason or another.  And when Bloglines announced that they were closing down back in September, I looked at all the other feedreaders and wound up at Netvibes.  Well I didn’t like it either, so I kind of got out of the habit of reading stuff that way and relied mostly on Twitter or friends to say “Have you read this?”  Then in early November I heard that Merchant Circle had bought Bloglines and it wasn’t going away.  Huzzah!  So I moved BACK.  Well, then they went and changed it all.  It’s now powered by Netvibes (which, if you’ll recall, I didn’t like), and I lost ALL the articles I had clipped.  So not cool.

Rather than trying to find some other feedreader, I figure I’ll just use this as a sign that it’s time to cut down on my blog reading.  Frankly, I’ve spent more time skimming and marking as read than actually READING with the exception of a very small handful of blogs.  So I’m taking a page out of Pot‘s book and subscribing to those five or six blogs by email, and I’ll rely on everybody else to tell me to read stuff, and click on stuff on Twitter that interests me.

Will I miss interesting articles.  No doubt.  Will it kill me?  No.  Will I miss out on developments in the industry.  Maybe.  Twitter will keep me up to date on that.  And, frankly, for the most part, since I’m indie, what’s going on in the industry doesn’t affect me all that much.  I’m just going to keep on writing my books in the best way I am able.  And, hey, cutting out all those blogs just might help my productivity so that I can do that faster.

10 thoughts on “Simplifying Life

  1. That’s a pretty healthy thing to do especially if you’re trying to progress. You’re not the same person you were last year and year before that, so it only makes sense to change.

    I’ve already had to cut back my blogs because my RSS feed was getting gigantimous and switched to email. So much neater.

  2. I don’t subscribe to blogs if they don’t offer email subscriptions. That’s kind of a shame because there are some friends’ blogs that I would love to get notification of when new posts go up. All those friends are on blogspot, which either doesn’t offer email subscriptions, or those people don’t know how to set that up. I love WordPress. :0)

    Kait, I’m glad you’re cutting down on some things. I keep feeling that one of these days, you’re going to run out of steam. You work WAY too hard and do too much. I hope you add some fun in there sometimes!

    1. Oh dude, I am SO THERE. LOL. But it’s all part of the master plan! Remember that whole “get hired as a full time instructor and make up the loss of the part time teaching in writing proceeds” thing? There is a necessary end to all of it. We’ll be starting a family next year, okay, no wait, it’s not 2011 yet. 2012 and I simply will NOT be able to continue this insane pace, so just 2 more years. Or year and a half or something. I want to get 2-3 more titles out before rug-rats. I think I calculated that if all of them sell at about the rate I’ve sold FBS, then I’ll be able to cover that loss of part time teaching from royalties.

      I wonder if there is a meeting for compulsive planners? “Hi I’m Kait…”

  3. Simplifying is always a good thing, especially if you plan on a family. (You think it’s insane now–wait until babies enter the picture.)

    I use Google Reader for a wide spectrum of blogs–not all of them writing related. So far I haven’t lost any post I’ve saved to my favorites. I don’t like subscribing via email because I average about a hundred emails on a bad day and they would just get lost in the jumble.

    But simplicity is the best resolution I’ve heard yet, and good at any stage of life. Good luck!

  4. I so approve of this. I subscribe to so many blogs through Google Reader, and I NEVER read through them all. I can be doing pretty well for a day or two and then they start piling up because Life happens, and then I end up — like you — just marking all of them “as read” so I don’t have to see all those bolded numbers anymore.

    Subscribing via email to the few I really enjoy (and relying on Twitter for the rest) seems like a great idea. I wish Blogspot offered email subscriptions, but as far as I can tell, they don’t offer much for non-Blogspot users. Seems very clique-y, if you ask me. But that’s okay.

    Here’s to a cleaner, simpler 2011! 🙂

    1. Hey Claire, I just discovered that Claire Farrell has a Blogspot blog and it has an email sign up on it. There must be some widget for it like on WordPress, maybe just not as obvious. I thought I would pass that along since I saw it a few minutes ago and we were complaining about that not being available. :0) I did notice that the URL when mousing over the sign up link says feedburner.google.com, so it may be a widget that has to be downloaded. I just don’t know that much about Blogspot.

  5. Yeah, Kait, I just have a VLOG now plus the Posterous Blog which I can post to from my email. The VLOG is going to have to be updated monthly and Posterous I mostly share stuff right from my email from NYT, ABC, Obama or whatever. I think we all need to simplify a little. CPU usage does more than get crowdy; it wastes time. I have a laptop as well as my desktop but I’m intimidated by it. Call me crazy but today I turned on my Toshiba and my website popped up on the desktop with Jennette McCurdy singing about Ashley trying to make it big in Cali. And I thought Alice in Wonderland was a bit strange. Yeah, my head just about popped off!

  6. Now is the time to purge! Once you have a kidling, the stuff multiplies like bunnies on Viagra. I’ve had to let some of that go, because I’d be cleaning constantly and never writing, if I tried to be vigilant about a clean, organized house. Other than letting go of reading so many blogs, how do you purge more time vacuums that come from never ending commitments? That’s tough when you’re a working mom. I sometimes wish I didn’t need to sleep at night…
    (P.S.–I use Blogspot and can’t see how to add subsriptions by email. I don’t know why they wouldn’t offer that feature.)

    1. If you use a feed service like Feedburner or the like, I believe their button or whatever offers an email option.

  7. Is it selfish to say this is great because I know you’ll read my blog more? 😉 I actually keep a lot of stuff on my Google Reader because it syncs with my phone and much of the day I only have my phone.

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