I've been using a news reader for over a year now, and I have noticed a lot of interesting things when it comes to productivity. I started with the famed NetNewsWire and with the launch of Reader and my love for all things Google, I gave that a try. After a while, I moved back to NetNewsWire.

Here is a little graph estimating the amount of time I have spent reading news with certain events affecting the amount:

When I started reading news, I was using NetNewsWire and only had my iMac G5 at home. I used Windows at work, so I left my news reading for night time at home. I started building my subscription list because of how easy and quickly I was able to read news, which of course counteracted the point of being able to get done with it faster because now I was reading twice as much.

When Google launched Reader, my love for Google led me to give it a try. I learned to like Reader a lot, so much so that at work, when I had some down time or during lunch I would just launch reader and 'j' through my new articles. I continued to add subscriptions and started to read more news than ever.

I eventually decided that I was reading too much news too often. It is a difficult thing to keep up with, that's for sure. I decided that the only way to cut my news reading time down was to move back to NetNewsWire because it would force me to only read news at home. This worked really well.

Until I purchased a MacBook Pro. A clash of productivity and non-productivity has risen to a new level. I love my (non)laptop. I quickly gave away my 3.0GHz Windows-running beast at work made my mbp my only work machine. In fact, I have always had a hard time having multiple machines and putting both to good use, so I don't really ever use my iMac anymore. I feel sorta bad. I setup my mbp right in front of my iMac most of the time.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Now that I have access to my news reader wherever I am, my time spent reading news as really sky-rocketed. Other things are adding to the equation, though. There is the increase in my feed subscriptions, now up to roughly 75, and also the increase in the popularity of digg and how so many stories are dugg to the front page.

Whatever the cause, I need a solution. Fast. So what do I do? Try real hard to just not open NetNewsWire during the day? That's really the only thing I can think of. Maybe I will try and write something that only lets me open NetNewsWire between certain hours. Maybe an applescript or something? Okay, I think that's what I'll do.