For those non-Latin speakers out there, you are asking yourself right now, what the hell does “pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate” mean? Literally, it means “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” It’s a theory made popular by 14th century friar, William of Ockham, and is better known as Ockham or Occam’s Razor.

Why am I thinking about 14th century friars and Latin phrases about plurality and necessity on the day after Thanksgiving you ask? The short version of the story is that my friend, Kyle Flaherty, recently shared a great post with me by analytics wizard, Avinash Kaushik. Avinash writes a well known blog called — get this — Occam’s Razor. After reading his lengthy, but thought-provoking, post on social analytics, it got me wondering about the inspiration for the name of his Avinash’s blog.

Now I think it’s mandatory that we all learn about Occam’s Razor at some point in high school or college but of course that, along with billions of other pieces of knowledge that don’t fit into our everyday lives, somehow fell out of my head along the way. But after reacquainting myself with this concept of seeking the “simplest answer,” I’ve been thinking a lot about streamlining my work and personal life these days. In particular, slimming down my information sources and my day to day work flow.

I wrote about taking steps in this direction several weeks ago following my brief retirement from Twitter. But the place I’ve really fallen down is on keeping up with my Google Reader. I know some people like Bob Scoble have abandoned their readers altogether but I realized the other day that there are a dozen blogs, mostly written by friends, that I haven’t been keeping tabs on as closely as I would like. And the reason was because their quality content was getting drowned out by the 50 plus other blogs that I was keeping in my Google Reader, many of which contributed to my reader consistently registering 1,000 unread posts mark.

Maybe I’m unique in this fashion (although I doubt it) but thinking about 1,000 unread posts is just too daunting. Instead of going in and chipping away, I tend to ignore my Google Reader and thus miss out on dozens of great posts by people like Kyle, Peter Kim, Rachel Happe,  Tim Walker, Greg Verdino and others. So in a fit of “pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate” (which is really more about the concept of “the simplest solution is usually the correct one), but inspired me to “simplify” or slim down my reader to about 15 blogs.

The result is a much more manageable, 137 posts, all of which I was excited to read. The downside is that I will miss out on the good posts on ReadWriteWeb, ChrisBrogan.com and the HBS blog. But the way I look at it, it’s better that I read a few blogs all the time then have lots of great blogs that I never look at.

What about you? Are you able to keep up with it all? If so, how?