Have you ever enjoyed standing in line at the post office so much that you didn’t want it to be your turn at the counter?

With 423 feeds in my Google Reader, I’ve never been more abreast of both current events and news related to my special interests than I am now. I also find it effortless to strike up interesting conversations with almost anyone, and I spend less than an hour a day doing it.

Here are some ideas to help you turn an RSS addiction into an RSS asset:

Categorize. Group similar RSS feeds together. On busier days, I can skip (or very quickly skim) entire low-priority groups like “raw foodists” and “beauty” without missing anything under “blogging.”

• TIP: If you subscribe to multiple visually-oriented feeds (like StyleDash, Yanko Design or Cute Overload), group them together so you can page through the entire group without having to stop and read anything that doesn’t catch your eye.

Keep Your Favorites Separate. I keep a few select RSS feeds in a “favorites” folder so if I’m pressed for time, I’m sure not to skip over the gems. My current favorites include: Ben Casnocha, Dave Seah, Guy Kawasaki, Lifehack.org, Lifehacker, Petri Project, Ririan Project, Seth Godin, Signal v. Noise, and Today is That Day.

More Blogs Doesn’t Mean More Reading. If you subscribe to Ars Technica, Gizmodo, and Engadget, chances are that a lot of the same material will be covered by each blog. After you read about something once, you can skip over similar posts on the other blogs in a fraction of a second. (This also gives you the advantage of reading the same news as early as possible and ignoring later reports.)

Skim, Skim, Star. In following with the previous tip, look for similarities across posts to decide which ones to skip and which ones to at least look at. Reading the post title and/or looking at the associated graphic can be all you need to tell if you’re already familiar with the content.

• TIP: In Google Reader, hit ‘s’ each time you see a post that catches your eye. Once you’ve skimmed all your feeds, return to your Starred Items and settle in for a more thorough read.

Don’t Read Every Word. You’ll be amazed by how just quickly scanning multiple articles from a number of blogs on the same topic will lead to your remembering key facts and stories.

Come across a long post you really want to digest? Star it, print it, save it, tickle it, or delicious it, but get it out of your main feeds.

Only Subscribe to Full Feeds. You may be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald (one of my favorite authors), but I am busy, and your content isn’t so unique that I can’t read it elsewhere. (Yes, this means you, Freakonomics!) If I had to click-through each post in my feed, it would literally take all day.

• TIP: If there’s a site you really enjoy that has partial feeds, add them to a separate category (“partial feeds”) and go through them separately. This way, having to click through to a site won’t break your full-feed-flow.
• TIP: If your favorite blog only has a partial-feed, let them know that you’d prefer a full one. Many less-technical bloggers aren’t opposed to offering full feeds, they just don’t know how to turn them on!

Learn Keyboard Shortcuts. Just manually clicking on the star on posts of interest in Google Reader will add many minutes to your feed-reading time. Take the time to memorize the Google Reader shortcuts or the shortcuts for your favorite reader.

• TIP: Set the page of shortcuts as your homepage so you can refer to it easily and often until you master them all.