In GReader there is good shortcut - press 'n' few times ant your done . Basically i have it always opened in one tab, i use Google Reader Watcher FF plugin and many off those feeds are flickr and ~rlslog feeds. Not all items get read from beginning to end, word by word.
And time, i work as parttime as System Monitorer (??? - not like web2.0 but Nagios) ( and the spear time right as student-programmer, as end of school, practical part )