I use Google Reader to provide the articles from my favourite sites as a ‘River of News’ so that I can keep up with the news I want to read in more efficient manner than keeping a list of bookmarks to surf through. Lately, I’ve become deluged with posts and have struggled to keep up with it all in the limited time I get for such purposes. As my feed list approches triple-figures, I’ve had to adapt the way I read my feeds. Here are the five ways I manage my feeds to be as efficient as possible - bear in mind that they’re predominantly Google Reader-based.

1. Star Items

For items that you’re likely to want to refer back to in the future, use Google Reader’s star feature to mark a post as important. This may seem obvious, but it’s the simplest way to start structuring your favourite items for easy reference

2. Tag Items

Another probably obvious one, but taking the time to add a few tags (or ‘labels’ as Google calls them) to each post you’re may want to refer to later, but don’t necessarily warrant a star can save you time in the future.

3. Use the del.icio.us plugin for firefox

Use the del.icio.us plugin to right-click on the headline of an item and bookmark it along with tags, for future reference. Also see #5

4. Collapse your items

In a rush? Use the ‘List View’ rather than the ‘Expanded view’ to quickly skim the titles of items and pick the ones you think really matter to you at this precise moment.

5. The killer tag: ‘toread’

Using the Google Reader tagging system, or in conjunction with del.icio.us, tag an item as ‘toread’ when you know you really want to read an article, but just don’t have the time at the moment - this is more efficient than marking an item as unread, or bunching it in with the starred items etc because you can remove the ‘toread’ tag when you’re done but keep all your other tags for categorisation purposes. Bonus tip: searching del.icio.us for items tagged as ‘toread’ can sometimes provide some interesting results if you’re bored - consider it a StumbleUpon without the toolbar!

These tips could probably be expanded upon - an example would be to add more ‘toxxxx’ tags - todo,tobuy etc etc.