Here’s a quickie for the start of the week.
I’ve taken a little break from tweeting and blogging for the last week. Part was for vacation. Dusty and I went to Pigeon Forge, TN for a few days. We had a great time! No computers, no Twitter, just us. Wonderful.
But it did cause me to think about producing and consuming.
Lately I have been producing a lot. I’ve been blogging, Wordpressing, and Tweeting so much, I drained myself. I’ve blogged before on the value of silence before. I think I relearned that this week.
So, to keep it short: sometimes you need to just sit back and consume life. By that, I mean to enjoy time with family and friends, to go out and relax in the woods, to experience at art as opposed to creating art. When we overproduce, we empty ourselves. And when we are empty, nothing overflows. Our art, our work, our passions come from that overflow. Remember this next time you push yourself too hard. Take an hour, a day, a week to refill yourself. It’ll do you good.
So, what recharges you? What drains you? When do you need a break most?
With all the means to get news, blog posts, and almost anything else on the web, which tools do you use? How efficient are they? Could they work better?
I was inspired by this post to think about my subscription practices, and I’ve found they could use some work. For my RSS feeds, I use Google Reader. I love it. But the number of articles per day has grown beyond what I can read everyday. What the above article suggested was to use email subscriptions for your must-read feeds. This would act as a filter and let you spend less time checking your feed reader. Cool.
So, my mind is taking that idea one step further. I find that for the few sites I frequent daily, I end up just checking their actual website. Why? Well, I comment on the posts. To do that, I have to be on their site. So why go through the RSS middleman? I did subscribe by email to these sites to see if it helped me at all. I think it has, at least a little.
I’ve found that I will probably end up with three categories of “feeds.”
Of course, the feeds are always in flux. If I really start liking a feed in the third category, I’ll jump it somewhere above.
So what’s your way? Any cool tools you use to make it easier?