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I had the same problem as you and here's how I solved my problem. Bear in mind that while this worked for me, it's not a "one size fits all" situation. Clean your subscriptions removed most of my feeds kept the ones from authors with really great content, which I read 90% of the time kept work-related feeds (security updates, partners feeds, competitors ...

ManicTime is a time tracking solution that has been worked out well over the years, it has the following features and comes in a free and paid version: Auto tracking of computer usage Manictime sits in the background and records your activities, so you can just forget it is there and focus on your work. When you are finished you can use collected data to ...

It's very simple. Never, EVER close your RSS client without marking all as unread read. So, you either open everything up in new windows, instapaper what you really wanna read or you don't open up your RSS client at all. This encourages discipline in estimating time available and drilling down to what you should effectively spend your time on. It's a ...

This depends, adding them to my own system needs to have benefit. I don't add them for the sake of having it all in my own system. How I currently approach this: If it's a small item I have to do, I usually add it to my own system (I work on different projects with different issue trackers) If I need to solve a bunch of issues or tasks for a specific ...

I use RescueTime, it's great! It has superb reporting, you can see your activity per day, week, month, etc. Another awesome feature is that it can distinguish between productive activity and non-productive activity, you can view per category / application how much time you have spent on it. You can checkout Scott Hanselman's review for further details:

I don't think keystrokes are a good metric. You can sit and type and backspace all day long to get a high keystroke count, and not have any productivity. Or play typing speed games. You don't want to measure activity, you want to measure results. I suggest a better proxy is "pages produced", using some standard definition of a page. For example, page ...

Cleaning out any feeds with a low signal-to-noise ratio and relying more heavily on curated sources is excellent advice that should reduce the number of feed items overall and decrease the volume of uninteresting content. Given that you've done all of that, the remaining improvements are going to be in workflow and how you interact with your reader. My ...

I've recently employed a Getting Things Done system in my life. In doing so, I wiped out the "backlog" to which you refer to and it now, instead, resides in my system as things I know need to be done, but for which I have determined appropriate groupings as to when I'll get to them. The constant "knowing" of what lurks and that you've accounted for is it ...

I've found Zite for iPhone/iPad very useful, especially when I accumulate more than 1K unread items in Google Reader. It gives you personalized magazine with topics you're interested in based on how you rate them, but the important thing is that it can use unread feeds from Google Reader as one of the sources.

My understanding of GTD (and this would be an excellent time for people to correct me) is that one of the core ideas is that everything drains down into one trusted bucket of tasks - so I'd assume that under that philosophy, we'd add the tickets. Now I don't subscribe entirely to that model (although, come to think of it I should be merging at least a ...

edit: Seems like I did not read you comment about how you wanted to see edits to your notes (in this case Evernote is no good). I think for this purpose markdown + Git is a good idea, however you might want to have a script which e.g. runs every day and makes a commit to your repository automatically (example how someone did a similar thing). IMO making the ...

So, embarrassingly, and against a number of sources of advice, my next action list is sorted by the time that the task arrived in the box, newest tasks at the top, oldest at the bottom. One of my ways of dealing with the inefficiencies that the sort-by-entry-time method causes is to make a rule that everyday I must do the oldest task in the list and I make ...

The work time is usually limited to a similar amount every day but time is not strictly related to productivity. I personally understand productivity as a standard output unit over time, meaning a higher output in the same time interval suggests an increase in productivity. Taking for example an industry employee who's supposed to pack boxes: if he manages ...

Try out offline readers like Instapaper or ReadItLater. This helps in multiple ways While reading the RSS feeds, you can have a quick decision on whether you want to read the whole article later at leisure, or do you think the summary itself is good enough for you to mark it as read. This allows you to work in two modes - the accumulation mode where you ...

Use Twitter to follow people who tweet good links instead of subscribing to RSS feeds. You could use instapaper or just email yourself the link to read later if a link is interesting. Remember that You don't have to read everything. Important stuff will be mentioned by multiple sources and tend to come back more than once.

Given I am a proponent of the GTD (Getting Things Done) system, my advice would be to treat them as either standard projects, or in the GTD bucket of Someday/Maybe, and just integrate them into your normal workflow. If they are a standard project, you will review them during your weekly once-over, and generate any new active tasks to go into your various ...

What features you need for task management depends on how you want to manage your tasks. Example of some ways you can manage tasks and related features you need are... FIFO (First In First Out) - just a linear list will do. By Context - you need a list with context field, or a general field that can be re-purposed to serve as context. By Priority - you ...

I have been using Good Noows for my personal use.. It has a list of popular RSS sorted by categories and you can select which RSS you want to view or not. You can also create your own categories. I have created "My feeds" and added some frequents websites I visit daily. It also allows you to view the content in various different layouts suitable for you. ...

All these answers are workarounds but don't really adress the question that was posed. There's no real way to stop your RSS feeds from becoming a mess and there's no real way to stop information overload. Filtering tools slow this down but aren't enough. You can do your best to pare your feeds or followers but at the end of the day info overload is a symptom ...

You could try Workrave. It's a tool to help prevent RSI rather than a time management tool, but it keeps track of mouse movement and number of keystrokes.

You can still use something simpler than a full CRM system like Outlook or Gmail. There are scaled down CRM systems like Highrise by 37signals.com. The main thing for you is the search functionality. Not only do you need to research these products to find out which ones work for you, but then you need to become proficient at them. I'm a big fan of ...

I'm not sure it has all the features you're looking for, but Evernote Food might work for you. It is an application that works on top of the Evernote system. I'm sure it can do the photo and add notes, I'm not sure about the rest. Evernote runs on pretty much every platform currently available, and syncs between them flawlessly. Creating an account is ...

Doesn't it depend on your job and current position? In my case, my backlog is often "one month long" which means that I have not yet completed my tasks which should have been completed a month ago (this would be perfect). For me, this is not a real problem since I am involved in long-term projects and the customers understand that not every problem can be ...

I was coming here to firstly suggest manictime, as I used to use this and it is a good all around tracking program. However, this was overkill and I too only wanted to know my active hours, so ditched it for KeyStrokes. This is a lightweight option which tracks keyboard usage over the day: Keystrokes Homepage. The only downside is that it does not track ...

I take a slightly more philosophical approach to your question and respond with two questions: Are you comfortable with the size of your backlog? Is your backlog growing, shrinking, or remaining fairly stable? Backlog size People have different tolerances for backlog. Some really struggle if there's more than a couple of projects on their plate and ...

I don't think keystrokes are a good metric for productivity unless you are a typist. Having read through this, I don't think you even know how to define productive activities and unproductive activities. How productive you are is a balance between what you have to achieve and the time you are taking to achieve it.

I struggled with this for longer than I care to admit when I was first using GTD in a DevOps setting. In the end, I found a simple solution, but only by rethinking David Allen's GTD for this setting. He has the idea of having a "minimum number of collection buckets, and emptying them regularly". An issue tracker is something more and less than a collection ...

it is really hard to measure productivity in multiple devices. I've also used RescueTime and it works perfectly for me. It helps me spend time efficiently with less effort. But it I feel there is still something is missing and I try other software. Now I found this tool that also works like RescueTime and it is also a good alternative to RescueTime. I hope ...

There are many great answers, let me add yet another approach that help me keeping subscribed to 2,700 feeds without too much distractions reading. A bit of philosophy. First, you'll never read everything. Secondly, feeds are different by their nature. For some of them, nothing happens if you miss any post (or all). Others are critical. Third, in different ...

I use Yahoo Pipes to filter some feeds where only 1% of the content interests me (eg Job Boards) and group my feeds by category (or moods) in Google Reader. Then when the mood takes me I just browse through a category such as "Tech" with the scroll wheel and middle click articles that look interesting into other browser tabs. I'm essentially using Google ...