In one of my all time favourite books – Tim Ferris, The 4 Hour Workweek (in fact I quit my day job because of this book), he talks about productivity (you certainly have to be very productive to only work for 4 hours a week).
One way to increase productivity is to limit distractions.
But at the same time I don’t want to miss out on stuff that is going on.
So I have subscribed to a few News Feeds (RSS) for my favourite blogs. But news feed readers suck! I don’t want to install software, and I don’t want to get interrupted all the time when I am focused on a project. So I set up these news feeds on my igoogle dashboard. But the problem is, they are buried at the bottom of the dashboard so I don’t even notice them.
I have to consciously make an effort to look in that area to scan the headlines. It feels like too much work.
And often, they are interesting so was a bit gutted that reading the headlines wasn’t easier.
Anyway, I use my email inbox (Gmail) for my workflow. I automatically filter much of what comes in (like newsletters and automated alerts), and deal with messages from real people before doing anything else.
The bottom line is, what I really want is to be able to receive these News Feed headlines into my email inbox for 3 reasons:
- So receiving these messages doesn’t interrupt my workflow
- So I get a chance to take a closer look in a timely manner if they are interesting
- So I can still apply my automatic filter so they bypass my inbox so I can look at them when I have spare time
I have found the solution: www.FeedMyInbox.com.
You don’t need an account, you just type in the url and your email address and you are done. Easy.
Cool service. But it makes you think – how the heck do they make money?
Why do so many online companies give away awesome services for free?
Do they just hope that huge companies will find them and pay the founders millions to buy their ideas? Perhaps.