It is a bad idea to lose control of your feed reader in November.

I pride myself on being somewhat of a minimalist when it comes to organzing my professional life (when it comes to my private life, I have a Shoe Problem that prevents me from minimalizing). My desk is often clean, or at least similar items are stacked together, usually with a post-it on top explaining what the pile is. I keep files electronically, reducing paper. My electronic files are (mostly) organized into separate folders. I know exactly where my files are and they are updated as needed. My recycling bin is an integral part of my file system.

I have been busy. If you look at my work calendar, I have no less than 5 appointments on at least 3 days each week. I am tired when I get home and my social media existence has been suffering because I would rather spend time with my family than blogging or figuring out Pinterest and Posterous.

Enter NaBloPoMo and I lost control of my feed reader. For several weeks now, my unread count has been at 1000+. Some of the individual ones are in the triple digits. Most are in double digits, except for the items I read regularly.

“Self,” I said to myself last night while monitoring the local elections, “You don’t read all of these people regularly. You should just unsubscribe and forget about it. If anything important comes up, you’ll probably hear about it on Twitter or by word of mouth.”

So there you have it. I am unsubscribing from all the blogs I don’t read regularly. Some of them are ones I feel I should read and may come back to later on because I feel that at some point they will have some value to me.

But not right now.

Others sit in my reader, unread because although they are thought provoking, I don’t always want to think or read an entire essay.

Until now, I had 139 subscriptions in my reader. I read, perhaps, a couple dozen of them regularly.

Today, I knocked my feed reader down to 24 subscriptions.

And hopefully I will not lose control of my reader again, November or otherwise.