RSS can reveal your true potential to get things done throughout the day.
Every day.
Productivity is placed upon us with great expectations of performance and it’s fairly easy to just lose your sanity on the digital merry-go-round without the right tool to structure your information diet. Those who want to maximize every single minute of their day can do so by turning to an old favorite – RSS!
If you weren’t part of the blogging craze in the early 00s, you might not know what it is though.
What is RSS automation?
RSS automation changes how you receive, read and even explore content on the Internet. With the right RSS feed reader, you’re in a position to radically change how you follow news, read for your pleasure and even search for your job. But before we explore how, let’s touch up on the basics.
RSS
Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. Both abbreviations are valid and describe the protocol of syndicating content from a site to a third-party client. Through RSS, users can access the posts and articles of sites without even having to visit the site in the first place.
RSS feed
Found in the source code of a site. Feeds contain information about every post and are formatted in XML. You subscribe to a site’s RSS feed in order to view its content in a feed reader.
RSS reader
The client, which syndicates content from sites and displays it in a single dashboard. This is also done in chronological order and RSS readers have additional tools for labelling and organization.
How does RSS help you be more productive?
RSS has had such longevity, because it’s quite versatile as a tool and generally boosts performance through incremental changes to how you consume articles.
Adding structure and syndicating many sources into one dashboard gives you a peace of mind, which it’s rare to come by in these hectic times. RSS is beloved, because it preserves your focus and keeps your mind from scattering. You feel better when you use RSS.
However, you want some examples.
Keep track of the topics you care about
Everyone has a field of interest that drives us through our careers, vocations and passion projects. What has happened in the past decade is that we have more than ever access to everything we want to know about anything in the world, which makes it hard to objectively follow large conversations happening.
RSS consolidates your reading according to topic and you can further filter headlines to narrow down your field of interest.
View social media posts from important accounts
No matter how well-curated your Facebook or Twitter accounts are, your timelines are a jumbled mess where you can’t find anything. RSS readers have long since moved beyond following blogs and news sites.
Users can now follow specific accounts so they never have to miss anything ever again. Inoreader for instance has developed a number of features to let you follow Twitter feeds.
Helps you with job hunting
Job hunting is stressful and trying even under the best of circumstances. In a COVID-19 world, it requires a lot more effort and strategy and it’s here that RSS emerges as a natural co-conspirator to get you the best possible job offer BEFORE anyone else.
As we’ve mentioned, RSS readers can now monitor social media so you can add hashtags and accounts. What’s most useful is that you can direct the search results from multiple job boards to your dashboard.
Declutter your inbox
I wouldn’t be wrong in assuming you’re subscribed to a number of newsletters. It’s also accurate to say that you get quite annoyed when you think you’ve gotten an important email only to find out it’s a newsletter. The disappointment aside, newsletters drastically lower productivity because they clog your inbox.
You also don’t read them, because it’s just not practical. So why not directly subscribe to a site’s RSS feed rather than a newsletter? If that’s not possible, then you can easily transfer your subscription to an RSS feed reader.
Easily discover experts and leaders
RSS feed readers have moved beyond mere receptacles for your subscriptions. They can be used to discover new content. Inoreader has worked hard on its discovery mode, which not only creates topics of interest, but also promotes user-generated collections filled with feeds you might never have seen otherwise.
Or you can directly take your keywords to the Inoreader search box and find relevant articles that way – fully bypassing Google’s search algorithms. If that isn’t enough, you can go one step further and try out Sort by Magic. It’s Inoreader’s most interesting contribution to content discovery.
Do not miss important information
Last but certainly not least, you’re not going to miss anything ever again. There’s a sort of digital FOMO where you don’t want to miss out on the latest breaking story or latest meme. RSS keeps all your subscriptions together and easy to browse so that when you do go back, you’ll find it.
This is definitely a far cry from the chaos associated with social media. Technically, yes, you can find just about everything that’s been posted on your Twitter feed… but is that possible in a short period of time? And in chronological order? RSS gives you exactly that.
RSS feeds are beneficial for both readers and business owners
We touched upon the uses and benefits for individual users, whether that’s a freelance who needs a little bit of assistance in their work or anyone who wants to optimize their reading during their downtime.
However, we also have to mention the benefits for business owners. Brands can gain much from RSS readers whether it’s to perform brand monitoring or collect valuable information through the act of social media listening.
If you’re running a research team, the right RSS feed reader can even help coordinate work. Inoreader offers pro users a ‘teams’ feature.
