Being flooded with information can easily negate the benefits of staying informed, up to date. Nowadays its increasingly harder to close to the right amount of information; the Internet's billion sources and the ease of connecting to them can get you addicted to adding just one more source to your watch/monitoring list, following one more link, checking out yet another PDF file.
I am using NetNewWire to keep track of a selected number of Feeds (30 or so, most of them feeds to blogs of my friends, people I am interested what they have to say and the rest being about sources I very interested in ), Google Groups ( some 5 or so Usenet groups ), iTunes ( various podcasts related to MacOS-X development, Photoshop(a new found 'love') and other education oriented ones. On top of that, Mail.app connects me to the world, which I check once a day mostly -- which is also true for NNW - and that's about it. In total, I spend around 30 minutes a day on all that which leaves a whole lot of time ( never enough, of course ) to attend to more meaningful activities ( reading, programming ).
Keeping your life simpler, which is also about limiting distractions, is always a good thing.
The last 8 months I was out of work, staying at home and enjoying doing nothing. My NetNewsWire feeds got tripled within that period and I was barely able to find the time to read them all. RSS can be a real time saver, but if you're not careful can be a real time waster too. Now that I'll have to find a new job (because unemployed although cool, doesn't bring any money into my pockets), I must make some brave decisions and bring the feeds I read, down to double-digits. I think your plan of 30 feeds / checking the email once per day is a nice one, but now with the addition of the jailbroken iPod touch to the mix, I am obsessed checking my emails every 5 minutes or so and wasting my time on wapedia (mobile formatted wikipedia)...I'll have to deal with that as well ;-)