wood.tang's blog

If you’re like me, you probably got a whole playing deck worth of gift cards over the holidays, those presents that say, “I felt like I needed to get you something, but put the least amount of thought into it.” And if you’re like me, getting one of these cards is a mixed bag of emotions. For one, there’s the “Woohoo!

I thought for sure the one thing that would nag me about the iPhone when I finally got one was its lack of a to-do list app. To my surprise though (and maybe it makes sense, as I’ll explain), now that I have an iPhone I haven’t felt the need for a to-do app at all. It’s an egregious omission for most people to be sure, but for me it’s turned out to be a non-issue. To understand why, I need to provide some context.

When the iPhone came out this summer, I was locked into a contract with another cell phone carrier, one that I couldn’t escape on pain of a $200 surcharge. So I waited it out, and dreamed my little iPhone dreams all alone with my Plain Jane cell phone and suddenly archaic-looking iPod Video.

To be honest, I didn’t really need an iPhone. I work from home, rarely more than a few yards from a computer (we had two laptops and a Mini in our house at the time). I don’t travel for work, and when we go on vacation, I never bring work with me anyway. When I do leave the house for extended periods of time during the day, running errands, taking appointments, etc, it doesn’t matter because I’d trained myself to plan ahead for that situation. Besides, I never get any messages that can’t wait a couple hours until I get back to a computer anyway.

I was amazingly good at rationalizing away my need for an iPhone, but I still wanted one ever so badly. So last week I created a way out.

When I wrote about my method for controlling RSS overload a couple weeks ago, 43 Folders user terceiro left a comment that put me in my place:

You’re feeling stress about your RSS feeds? Talk about self-created problems. The real solution to managing RSS feeds is to stop reading RSS feeds. It’s simple … when a purely optional “convenience” technology is causing stress, it’s time to re-evaluate at a pretty fundamental level.

I read this and thrashed and spluttered like Yosemite Sam for a while before I admitted it: he’s right. It is a self-created problem, and I need to understand what makes me feel the need to consume the equivalent of a Carnegie library every day, instead of just finding a more efficient way to choke it down.

Since I’ve been on an RSS kick this week, I wanted to pass along a tip about Yahoo Pipes, a pretty slick, albeit nerdy, “composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” In a nutshell, it lets you mix, match, slice, and dice web searches and RSS feeds to your heart’s content.

Besides baseball, coffee, and my music collection, I probably obsess over how I read RSS feeds more than anything. Sometimes it feels like I tinker with the setup more than I actually read the news, but I’m making progress. I won’t claim to be completely satisfied with how or why I try to consume so much information from the internet, but lately I’ve been as content with the process as I can hope.