I used to have these RSS feeds up on my Bookmarks Toolbar. Every five minutes or so, I'd scan through them, checking to see if there were any new updates. Most of the time, there weren't.

This became very tiring. I spent quite a lot of time everyday just checking my RSS feeds. Wasn't there an easier way to do this?

And then I found Google Reader. It's amazing. You can subscribe to feeds, categorize them, view short summaries, the works. I've sorted my feeds into "A-List", "Friend's Blogs" (which ironically includes Four Island), "Comments" (comment feeds), "Linux" and "Other".

Now, you may be asking, how does this increase productivity? What am I getting out of Google Reader? It may seem like I'm only getting a little more productivity because now all of my feeds are in one place. But, no, there's more.

Soon enough, I found the Google Reader Watcher Firefox plugin. It sits in your status bar, checking Google Reader every five minutes (this is adjustable). If it finds any new feeds, it announces this fact and puts a number in your status bar (the number of new feed items). When you hover over this number, it shows you the feeds the new items come from. All you have to do is click on the number and you get swished off to Google Reader.

So there you are. No more constant checking of RSS feeds. Now, you're instantly (or, at least, within 5 minutes) notified of any new items in your feed list. And, I've noticed my productivity go much higher because of all the time I've gained by not checking RSS feeds every five minutes. Now, the plugin does that for me.