NetNewsWire is one my favorite Mac applications. It’s a beautiful RSS/Atom reader with so many wonderful features that it’s easy to lose one of it’s smartest ones in the lights.

I’ve talked recently about the value of setting your email program’s “autocheck” frequency to something more realistic than “every minute,” as so many folks currently do. It’s an easy way to minimize distraction, plus it encourages the smart habit of “ganging” email work into focused sprints of activity—rather than dashing away from whatever you’re doing every minute or two like Pavlov’s drooly puppy.

NetNewsWire has a setting that supports this same good habit in your site surfing habits. Under “Preferences > Downloading > Feeds”, you can set “Refresh all subscriptions” to any of [Manual only | Every 30 Minutes | Every Hour | Every 4 Hours]. While the last one is optimal for server load etiquette and reduced distraction fu, I think you could be forgiven for wanting updates every hour. But what if you want even more granularity—to further minimize distractions from time sink “fun” sites? Easy.

1. In NetNewsWire, select the feed whose checking frequency you want to edit, and go to “Window > Get Info” (or key CMD-i).
2. Flip the little reveal triangle for “Refreshing”
3. Click “Use custom refresh schedule”
4. For “Refresh every X hours” choose something that works for you.
   • I’d suggest somewhere between 2 and 24 hours, depending on the site
5. Click “Skip during manual refresh”

You can repeat this for any feed whose siren’s call is taking you away from the work at hand. Alternatively, I suppose you could use this trick in reverse; set the “Refresh all subscriptions” to “Every 4 Hours” and then tell a given individual feed to refresh every hour or 1/2-hour.

Also, if it’s not clear already, I do really recommend Mac users consider having a look at NetNewsWire or it’s freeware little brother, NetNewsWire Lite. Atom and RSS always seemed like a good idea, but it took Brent’s amazing work on NNW to make them as integrated into my working day as email and the web.