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Habits are difficult to get out of and web habits, sometimes even more so.

Here’s an example: Look at the internet browser you’re using. Most of your have decided to use one a while back and have stuck with it. Often they perform well, but we can get used to their quirks and problems all to easily.

But what if there’s something better out there? A better way of getting what you need, a better tool, or a method of speeding up something that takes longer than it should. These are often called “productivity tips”, which you may or may not be familiar with.

I LOVE productivity tips. If there’s a way of doing something quicker, better or just different, I’m on it. Any idle time I have, I look at the way I do things and ask myself – could I be doing this better?

Checking my feeds

Here’s an example: I check a few web pages out throughout the day to checkup on the latest news. Those sites include:

• BBC News
• Flickr
• 9to5Mac (for Apple rumours)
• Facebook

With twitter, I prefer to use Tweetie – another habit – that one is harder to kick!

It can take time to go to each site, let the pages load and often I get sucked in and waste time browsing – not efficient.

But now, I use iGoogle. iGoogle let’s you pull in feeds from your favourite pages and shows you it in a simple, easy to understand way. Here’s what mine currently looks like:

So now, with a glance, I can check my feeds in a way that feels right to me. I’ve used RSS readers in the past, but it just didn’t feel right to me, and I often just bulk “show as read” on my feeds. This is better (for me).

The silly thing is iGoogle has been out for a while, and I’ve certainly heard of it, but I haven’t tried it.

Browsing habits will always be changing. Apple Safari’s latest “Reader” option may be telling us that content will be more important in the future, and the design of how content is shown will be suited to the device you’re using, showing content on an iPad, for example, differently to that of a browser. That’s the right way to do it and it keeps content relevant to the device and user.

I’ll try and share more of my productivity tips in the future. Do you have any that have saved you time or improved your workflow? Please share them in the comments!