I have been using Google Reader for quite some time and reading feeds for what seems like forever. My habits and ability to organize and plow through my feeds has changed dramatically over the years and I wanted to share my own use case and experience here.

I originally heard about the idea to organize feeds via a tiered structure where Tier 1 through Tier x are folders containing feeds in order of importance. I loved this idea because it solved the problem of “where to start” every day when I wanted to get some feed reading done. The task was a little daunting because I had 100+ feeds categorized and organized into folders and now I needed to work them into the new system.

It was well worth the effort and now my Google Reader looks like this;

This allows me to prioritize my feed reading and know what to jump into without going “feed specific” or alphabetical. Jumping into the Tier 1 folder lets me make progress with blogs of friends, contact, colleagues, and other things I am following. Tier 2 is where I go if Tier 1 is empty. This holds all the feeds th