I have the RSS feed in Netvibes that I check during the day/evening. I don't read everything, just skim through the titles trying to find what seems interesting to me. And from this I mark as "to read later" every article that I like but is too long to read now or to be sure to come back for comments later.

Then I also skim through the Ask HN/newest posts depending on the workload.

You don't have to follow everything, read everything, just skim through the topic that interest you. Overtime you'll instinctively dismiss a lot of articles just by their title.

And anyway, just go to the "frontpage" of HN to see which threads are really popular at a given moment.