Using RSS feeds to save time

I've long been a fan of RSS feeds as a way to save time when monitoring blogs.  It affords me the ability to see the headlines of new posts (and only the new posts) as they appear.  I can choose to visit the blog if the headline sounds interesting or if none of the articles catches my eye, I can mark all headlines read which makes the web site disappear in my RSS reader until the next time they add content.  It is so much faster than actually visiting a bunch of web sites that it's not funny.

I have three separate lists of RSS feeds I monitor.  I use a cross-platform app called QuiteRSS on both my Mac at home and on my Windows laptop at work.  On my phone and tablet device, I use a mobile app called Feedly to monitor a third set of RSS feeds.

At home I follow RSS feeds for beer news, book releases, and information about RetroComputing.  I don't read about these topics at work because I don't feel right about asking a company to pay me to do that.

At work I follow a number of technical RSS feeds on computer security, software development, embedded system, computer communications, and a few other tech topics.  These are all directly or indirectly related to my job.  Having these RSS feeds to read allows me to take small breaks at work while my software is building or when I'm waiting for code to download to one of my development boxes.  I'm a firm believe in the studies that say these micro-breaks improve productivity.

Whenever I have a bit of downtime during the day such as while waiting at an appointment or in line at a store, I can look at the local news sites I monitor in the Feedly app on my phone.  Feedly synchronizes feeds so when I look at those same feeds at home on my tablet device, I only see articles I haven't marked read on either device.