As you can probably tell, keeping up with RSS is going to be more than a hobby. In this industry, it's a necessity that you begin to understand and use it as soon as possible. I mentioned finding a good time in your day to do this in passing above, but I want to expand on that point briefly as an encouragement to those who might be overwhelmed at just the idea of the "rising tidal wave" that is RSS. I'm a morning person, so I tend to do the majority of my reading (and skimming) early in the day before my phone starts ringing and my email inbox filling up. However, I'm also fairly used to quickly checking in on my Reader account multiple times throughout the day. These quicker check-ins allow me to stay ahead of the curve and file away new articles or mark others to read later (using the "mark as read" feature is helpful here). This is the schedule that suits me best and enables me to keep up with the number of subscriptions I have. Likewise, you'll need to find a routine that suits your schedule best. Ultimately, one time of day is not necessarily better than another as feeds are being updated on a 24-hour basis- it just needs to be sometime each day. Otherwise, you'll end up spending a much larger amount of time trying to catch up on several days worth of information in one sitting.

Though this all may seem very daunting, it's also going to be fun. The internet was created out of a desire to enable communication, and RSS has truly raised the bar in that regard. If you desire to learn and want to take advantage of all the information available to you, RSS will enable you to do so with the greatest ease and flexibility the internet has to offer at the moment. I have no doubt that there will be advances in the future that make this even easier and more flexible... but chances are you'll find out about it via RSS.