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I think I'm on a roll here with this whole productivity-related posts. Thanks again to Ben from the Instigator blog for "instigating" this meme.

For a while I've been wanting to share our cool way of sharing stuff at work. In any typical office working environment, you've got a lot of e-mails flying back and forth between desktop workers. The e-mails are mainly forwards of interesting videos, pictures, articles or documents found on the Web or received through personal e-mails. Most of them are non-work related. Hell, when I got back from my vacation last week, there were 215 e-mails sitting in my inbox, of which about 10% only were related to my project. Most of the others were simply links to interesting sites and articles from my friends (honestly, some of them weren't even that interesting).

The Problem

While I appreciate the gesture, sometimes it gets really annoying to mix work- and non-work-related stuff in the same inbox and having to sort them out. Furthermore, getting frequent new-mail notifications can be very distracting and it often breaks my creative flow.

The Solution

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Believe it or not, there came a period when I kept thinking "the web sucks, there’s nothing to do, nothing to read, nothing to watch!". I would launch the browser, and stare for a while in the blank white canvas, thinking: "so now what?". I had no good use of the web except for emails and chatting.

That was between 2004 and early 2006. Sometime mid 2006, I discovered something that would make a bigger impact in my life than anything I’ve ever tried before!

That thing was Netvibes; a wonderful online service that puts everything you’d ever want to do on the web in a single customizable page. The odd thing is, nowadays, I don’t use Netvibes (for some reason). However, credit goes to Netvibes for introducing me to the wonderful world of really simple sex syndication, otherwise known as RSS feeds (click here if you don’t already know what that is).

So I went ahead and gave it a shot. I added some preset feeds for popular sites and later discovered some more on my own, such as LifeHacker.

Fast forward to this day: I am one hell of an RSS addict who realized so many benefits from using RSS that I can’t even count. However, it occurred to me yesterday why not think of the top 5 things you achieved by using RSS?

So here they are. While reading this, try to think of things you achieved by using RSS and share them in the comments section.

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