I’m a lightweight, I only have about 15-20 feeds I read, but I tried this in Google Reader:

I created three priority levels:

1 - High 2 - Medium 3 - Low

And I assigned all of my feeds a priority level in addition to whatever category I felt I needed to put them in.

Once I did that, I leave the Google Reader gadget on my iGoogle homepage set to display only “1 - High” items; these are either work-related or some special-case items.

Now, instead of looking at Google Reader and seeing the 56 items that have accumulated in the past hour or so, I may see two or three; I can take a mini-break and read them. If I get an actual break or am on lunch, I flip to “2 - Medium” and will browse more stuff; I try to browse the “3 - Low” category no more than once a day.

As I write this, I realized that I can do away with “3 - Low” and just use the All Items view, once I’m done with the first two thresholds. Or I can browse by category.

If you want to be really hardcore, you can probably just get away with having one “Priority” grouping and let everything else collect in All Items.