Second in a series from Attensa.

Look Before You Leap – Preview Before You Subscribe

It’s so easy to subscribe to new feeds that most new users quickly over-subscribe and begin drowning in a sea of information.

Think through each subscription. Use the Attensa preview feature to judge the value of each new feed. Don’t just look at the headlines, look at the article content. Does the feed provide full content, or just teasers forcing a visit to the originating site? Ask yourself how you will benefit from subscribing before pulling the Add Feed trigger

Stay on Top of Critical Information with Desktop Alerts

The Desktop Alerts feature places an Attensa icon in your System Tray. When new articles are available, an alert dialog is displayed just above this icon, showing you which feeds have new articles, and how many articles are available.

The Attensa Desktop Alert toaster allows users to track fast breaking business information whether you are working in Outlook or not. The Desktop Alert appears when your selected priority feeds are updated with new articles.

You can use this power for good or evil. Use it too frequently on too many feeds and you’ll only contribute to information overload. Use it judiciously and you’ll be notified the instant new information is available from your carefully selected list of must read feeds.

We live in an interrupt driven world. You can’t control the flow of email into your inbox, but you can control how frequently your feeds are updated.

With Attensa you can get as granular in your updating schedule as you want. You can specify global settings for how often your feeds are updated, and you can specify updates for individual feeds and/or categories. For most feeds, updating hourly should do the trick. You may want critical feeds to update more frequently.

Don’t be Afraid to Delete, and Don’t Feel Guilty About It

Give yourself permission to ignore things that don't look threatening or critical. It’s ok to delete articles that aren’t relevant. Attensa for Outlook can help. It cleans up nicely. You can set a schedule for automatically deleting read and unread articles.