Why Google Reader and GTD Don’t Mix

Google Reader has been my feed reader of choice for awhile now, but it has never achieved the status of a must-have application that I cannot live without.  It was only recently that I recognized the reason I have never wholeheartedly embraced it is because I believe it is designed in a way that creates a drag on my personal Getting Things Done (GTD) system; which for me lessens my desire both consciously and subconsciously to make it part of my daily routine.  I am going to review where I think Google Reader falls short, but also discuss a workaround I have implemented as well as how Google could make a simple feature change that would make the Google Reader experience much better for both GTD’ers and non-GTD’ers alike.

If you are not familiar with GTD, it is a very popular personal productivity methodology developed by David Allen based on his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.  One of the first steps in GTD is making sure you have a system for collecting all of the things you need to do in your life into “inboxes”.  For example, typical inboxes are physical paper inboxes at work or home, your voicemail, your email, etc.

When I think of Google Reader from a GTD perspective, I look at it as a new inbox.  In and of itself that is not good or bad. David Allen says you should have as few inboxes as you can get by with, but only as many as you need. However, it does rapidly become a problem once you start subscribing to more than a handful of news feeds.  In fact, I would argue that Google Reader becomes the most anti-GTD inbox around.  Why?  Take a look at your subscriptions feed.  If it looks anything like mine, it probably indicates you have 1000+ articles to read (which to the best of my knowledge is the highest number Google has designed Google Reader to display), and is constantly getting filled each day with more items.

One of the main concepts to be successful with GTD is to ensure you regularly empty and process the items in your inboxes using a simple workflow which directs your next actions.  While I could argue that Google Reader has built-in features to support processing each item in a subscribed feed — such as automatically marking items as read once you skim through them, the application is still based on a core concept that each article be treated as an item that has a status of being read (or unread).

As paradoxical as this statement might sound for an application whose purpose is to provide an interface to read news items — I would argue this is the wrong way to look at it.

News feeds are not like email.  Think about how you read a newspaper.  Would you consider a newspaper unread or unfinished if you did not read every article in the entire paper?  Of course not.  You skim through and read what is of interest to you.  Dave Winer, one of the pioneering figures of RSS, said as much in a blog post he wrote several years ago:

He is dead on with this comment, however four years later Google Reader still treats each item in a very “email inbox” way.  Getting back to GTD, it creates a major problem for the processing phase which in a nutshell is about getting “in” to “empty”.  Even though I do not expect to read every article that flows through Google Reader, its interface makes me feel like I have a big lump of unfinished stuff.  If you are of a GTD mindset, this is a tough pill to swallow as you want to process every one of those items.

Given the above, I made a recent change to how I manage my news feeds and moved all of my favorite feeds and feed groups to tabs on my iGoogle page.  Why?  Because iGoogle is designed, at least from a UI perspective, to treat news feeds as queues.  Each iGoogle gadget displays anywhere between the most recent three to nine items for each feed (the exact number is configurable per feed).  There is no build-up of news items if you go away for a couple days and miss a few articles, or fail to read one.  This is exactly how feeds should be treated.  In addition, with the new update to iGoogle you can do this and still get the best of Google Reader’s features – by expanding the feed you see Google Reader’s canvas view which provides the ability to email, star, and share articles.

So far this is working great for me and has eliminated a perceived drag on my GTD system.  That said, given the infrastructure for iGoogle and Google Reader are fairly tight already, I would think it would not be too hard for Google to to adapt a similar queuing system into Google Reader.  The simplest way would be to create a new setting on a per feed and / or global basis, that would treat the feed as either 1) a queue with a given number of items to display, or 2) an “inbox” as it is in the current setup.

David Allen almost never makes a recommendation on the tools to use to implement GTD, and while I talk specifically about my experiences with Google Reader, the same comments could be made for practically every other major RSS or feed reader.  In the end, what I am advocating for “good GTD” is to not think about whatever feed reader you are using as a GTD inbox.  Instead, recognize that feed readers are systems for information to flow through, as opposed to systems for information to collect into and be processed.

Tagged as: google reader, gtd, igoogle