I’ve heard people say they find RSS overwhelming: the constant flow of new items. I find that managing RSS well is not actually all that hard though; it just takes the same kind of discipline as keeping an empty inbox does.

In short: keep my reading list restrained, and have a strategy to keep up to date on that list.

My strategy for keeping up to date is simple, too: for every time, either read it, send it to Pocket to read later (on my Kobo, via Kobo’s Pocket integration), or mark it as read. Then move on.

As for the Pocket items: clear those out after long enough, too: I go through my backlog every so often and if I haven’t read it yet and it has been in my to-read list for more than a month or two, I decide to read it now or just remove it. (At some point you just have to admit that you’re not going to read something, and that it’s okay. We all have limited time.)

With that simple strategy, RSS becomes more than merely “manageable” for me: I get to read a lot of things I actually want to read, and it’s focused in a way that Twitter or Apple News or whatever else isn’t.