Since I’m still in the process of developing my own, I currently have to rely on other RSS readers. And from time to time, I switch them.
Today was such a day.
Normally, what I do is export an OPML file from my old reader and import it into the new one. But in my current reader, I couldn’t find that export option.
This forced me to transfer the feeds one by one. Which was a surprisingly meditative thing to do. Repetitive, not much to think about and occasionally stumbling upon a blog that I had forgotten about.
This way, I was able to prune my subscription list, and it’s much shorter now. Decluttering is always worth it, even in the digital space.
The “forced inefficiency” of this process made me think about why chasing efficiency is so prevalent in everyday life.
In my case, it’s maybe a cursed side-effect of being a programmer. The “Software Brain” is so trained on finding opportunities to automate things that it always thinks there must be a more efficient way to do something.
If you don’t know that you can let a computer do something for you in the first place, you probably don’t even think that much about it. You simply do the thing and are content with it taking time. I personally am not used to this.
Maybe that’s why manually copy-pasting RSS feeds from one application into another this afternoon felt like a breath of fresh air.