Continuing with our another post about Personal Development, I decided to analyze how much reading I was actually doing and took a brief, non-scientific measurement on the quantity and quality of my reading. I found I do most of my reading through Google Reader. I use Google Reader to aggregate the RSS (Real Simple Syndication) Feeds of the blogs that I like to read. There are quite a few of them. Perhaps its the reason I don’t read that many books these days. I always feel that I might get behind in some current posts…and by the count, the post number can increase quickly.
I’m hard on myself about keeping up with what is going on and what people are writing about. I think its good to stay current. As a caution, however, sometimes that (reading countless blogs endlessly) can be the minutiae that can get in the way of getting things done or what Seth Godin calls “Shipping”. Its good to be well read, but if we are not creating and shipping our products or services, we are just cods! That has been one of my problems!
Google Reader is an amazing tool that is easy to use which helps you aggregate blogs and websites that you subscribe to. I find it extremely useful to quickly access the information and websites that I enjoy and can easily know if there is something new to read. [Hint: there is always something new to read]. This doesn’t come without its drawbacks! One drawback is that there is always something new to read on the many blogs that I subscribe to and it makes it nearly impossible to have the number of unread posts at zero! LOL! In fact recently, I’ve stepped back and made a goal for myself to read more books. Larry Zimberg of Team Beachbody suggests reading 10 Pages a day. If you do just that, you’ll complete an average book in about 20 days. I tend to read a bit more than that daily and I think if I substitute some of the time I spend reading all of the blog posts in my Google Reader with some content from books, I will certainly complete more books over the year. There are a bunch of titles that I want to dive into and so little time!
Google Reader can also be Social. In fact, I connect with a lot of people through my Google Reader. I learn of good posts through others who use the ‘share’ function within Google Reader. Google Reader also allows you to do other things such as ‘like’ a post, ‘share with a note’, ‘email a post’, ‘add tags’ and ‘send to’ (Delicious.com, Digg, Facebook, Ping.FM, Tumblr and Twitter). Its a great way to share and provide value to others that are in your social networks!
Another use for Google Reader for me is to gather some posts as ideas to create new content and/or discuss information that is relevant to what projects I’m working on or that which may benefit others. I’m sure there are other ways to use Google Reader that I am not thinking of but on a practical level, these features are extremely useful.
Do you use Google Reader or another Reader? If so, are there any other ways that you use it?
