Have You Discovered RSS Aggregators?

Have you discovered RSS aggregators? I recently came across this new tool and believe that it can really have a great impact on our productivity especially if your job position requires any amount of research or you often find yourself searching for news.

RSS Aggregators allow you to read RSS feeds on your desktop and organize these feeds into different categories. Although your aggregator might come with its own categories for feeds I highly recommend creating your own categories so that your feeds are organized in a way that really suits you and that will make your research easier. For example, if you are an internet marketer and have collected a number of feeds relating to internet marketing then you may want to divide them into feeds on affiliate marketing, article marketing, list building, information products, etc. By using your own feed categories you can work on different things at different times when they are most appropriate in your day.

By being able to organize the news and information you get in this way you should save a lot of time by being able to easily find the information you are looking for and focus on one subject at a time.

You can also set up your aggregator to receive new news feeds at different specified intervals and here you need to watch out for your productivity because if you set the intervals too short I can easily see how, like email, RSS aggregators could become a highly demanding productivity pest. I would recommend only checking new feeds once a day (set to the maximum specified interval if your aggregator does not go up to once a day and then turn it off once you have read all your newsfeeds for the day).

If you haven't got an RSS aggregator and you regularly look up information and news on the internet then I would really recommend getting one. You can get free open source aggregators that can greatly improve your research productivity but just watch that these do not also become productivity pests. Set up categories in a way that is meaningful to you and easy to find what you are looking for and then don't check feeds on demand but set aside time each day to go through your newsfeeds.

Check out RSS Bandit. It is the aggregator that I use and it is a very high quality product. ...and best of all, it's 100% FREE!