Jean-Paul had this to say about being more effective.
I'll agree to most of his points (except getting up early--with 5 kids, 5AM is killer) and add--READ. Read voraciously. Invest in learning to read faster. Learn to recognize what is valuable and what is noise.
When it comes to blogs, I'll add a blog to a to watch folder. When a blog has 10-20 entries, I'll go back and read those entries and determine if it was a valuable blog or a noisy blog. Then I'll categorize it by priority to read or dump it.