When I came back from vacation, as the rest of the world, no doubt, I faced an endless number of unread items in my feed reader. Around 12,000. I suspect (or know?) a dirty secret in the feed reader biz is that no one really reads that much.
In the spirit of the naked desktop and a more distraction free work-top, I turned off two feed reader attention grabbers: the growl notification of new items and the dock icon that tells me how many unread items I have.
At the time, I didn’t really realize how much of a relief it would be. As with most others in the web-world, I’m continually battling to get and maintain focus on tasks (ironically, this post is distracto-rat-hole from a larger post I’m writing). So, even though the little “56 new items!” pop up and dock decoration was minor, it’s just one less shiny object to pull my attention.