I try to read posts in my RSS reader twice a week at most. I let them all build up, and then spend a few hours going through them all at once. I started doing this because I felt like the RSS reader was taking up a lot of my time each day. It’s so easy to go from your email to the reader and start reading a continuous influx of new articles.
Anyways, there are a few sites that I check almost every day because they don’t require tons of reading and I can go through them very quickly. The content on these sites is both light and entertaining. Here are five that I subscribe to:
- Garfield minus Garfield – Ingenious premise for a comic.
- Criggo – Ridiculous clippings from newspapers.
- PostSecret – They put up one long post each weekend, but it’s fun and quick to read.
- The Impulsive Buy – I usually just read this guy’s notes at the bottom, but his full reviews are pretty damn funny.
- TheDieLine – One of my new favorite design sites. They post pictures of really cool conceptual packaging designs (primarily for food products).
What low time-commitment sites do you subscribe to?
CharlieHoehn.com 
I enjoy I Can Haz Cheezburger and its sister sites (like Fail Blog) for a very quick laugh. I also love Yanko Design and Coolest Gadgets which I can flip through instantly but still be inspired by cool new ideas/stuff.
I check RSS daily because much of what I do involves feeds of one sort or another, whether reading other filmmakers’ blogs or checking if there are new posts in a discussion forum. Still, I keep these “quick-reads” separate from most others so I can enjoy them when I’ve only got a second, and also so that when I am focused and working, I don’t waste my concentration on the lighter stuff.
I’ll check WWTDD every morning. Quick, light, and pretty consistently funny. Great to wake up to.
At dinner: “I read my reader once a week.”
This post: “I read my reader at most twice a week.”
Reality: I read my reader at most five days a week.
:)
@Ben – You must know that I was simply trying to inspire the group at dinner, so they could realize how easy it is to live one’s life to the fullest :)
My site, although amazing in its own right, is not decidedly intellectual. So you should expect to see the occasional glaring contradiction.
[Note: Everyone should be reading Ben’s site, it’s great. One of my favorites. Although it’s definitely not a low time-commitment site.]
I classified all my feeds in google reader by the average reading time per post. So I check my reader everyday, but I usually only read the quick stuff, leaving the longer articles/essays to the weekend.
As for the quick stuff, I check out the following stuff every day…
Design milk – good for little things to put in your house
Fuck you penguin – some guy tells off cute animals (always hilarious)
F*** My Life – it’s almost like a list of people’s daily “fails”
Lunch bag art – a guy draws really awesome pictures on his kids brown paper lunch bags everyday
Once upon a win – “epic wins” from the 80s and 90s
White wine – stuff white people wine about
Cool things in random places – lists of cool stuff from all around the world.
I have no problem getting bogged down in my reader because a large number of those sites I follow are part of my niche. This allows me to always be in conversation with my community.
@Anne – I think that’s a good idea and have no problems with that. My issue is that I don’t currently have a community to stay on top of, so reading stuff for hours on end every single day in the reader is largely a waste of my time. I’d rather hold off until the end of the week.