silva rerum

Keep me groovin’ with some energy

Some people have wondered where I find the time to do that which I do. I’ve never really given it any ser­i­ous thought until today, when I wanted to look at all the tools I use for pro­ductiv­ity. Here are three things that I do to same time and atten­tion (both of which are finite resources).

“You Have No New Mail”

I’m among those that are guilty of check­ing email obssess­ively, leap­ing for joy when new emails come stream­ing in. As with most, I have sub­scribed to some peri­odic emails which ini­tially seemed use­ful (dis­counts to my favour­ite stores) at which I don’t even bat an eye­lash any­more. But that’s beside the point.

When I check email, I attempt to make every attempt to either ignore emails (those which are merely inform­a­tional), defer emails (actions that are not time-​sensitive), del­eg­ate emails (actions that are unim­port­ant but time-​sensitive) or act upon emails (actions that are import­ant and time-​sensitive). I use Thunderbird so I can star emails that can be deferred or del­eg­ated while act­ing upon emails requir­ing my imme­di­ate atten­tion. I don’t typ­ic­ally mark inform­a­tional emails but I know I can always search for them if a need arises. I don’t tend to delete emails; rather, I amass an archive of emails, search­able at a later time.

Having done this for years before I learned about “Inbox Zero,” I advise any­one who leave emails unread to begin work­ing towards Inbox Zero. It really makes a huge dif­fer­ence in work­flow and you just need to learn the knack of it. Be an email ninja! I’ve even begun to apply Inbox Zero philo­sophy to com­mu­nic­a­tion with people. It just requires more of my men­tal desktop to process.

“If You Build It, They Will Come”

Like most, I used to check out the same web­sites every day for new con­tent, assuredly spend­ing hours cumu­lat­ively on mere brows­ing. Of course, we’re in Web 2.0 and so the paradigm has shif­ted. Users no longer need to go to the con­tent (unless they are cre­at­ing the con­tent), the con­tent is now com­ing to the users. That’s right, I’m talk­ing about RSS!

RSS feeds are the joy of my life; they save me the trouble of going to web­sites and check­ing them each indi­vidu­ally. But like most, I suffered from inform­a­tion over­load with RSS feeds – so much to read in so little time. Enter Feedly.

Feedly is an RSS aggreg­ator (Firefox-​only) that also doubles as a social medium through its recom­mend­a­tion sys­tem. Basically, in Feedly, you can have a digest page list­ing only some of the new­est news from your favour­ite feeds as well as some of the highest recom­men­ded art­icles by other uses using Feedly. The more users that are recom­mend­ing dif­fer­ent art­icles, the bet­ter! Feedly really cuts down on the use­less art­icles through which you have to sift while also allow­ing you the serendip­ity of dis­cov­er­ing new art­icles (which Digg doesn’t allow; serendip­ity is often buried).

I’ve got 159 sources cur­rently in Feedly sep­ar­ated into 18 cat­egor­ies; only some of which makes it to my digest. I read the digest, skip any­thing not of great import­ance or interest and move on with my day. Think of brows­ing 159 web­sites in mere minutes! Doesn’t that blow your mind?

“Into…the TWITTERSPHERE!”

For the deri­sion that it has received, Twitter has with­stood the acid test and proven itself use­ful in sev­eral regards. Sad as it sounds, I no longer have to manu­ally ask people what they are doing; they’re let­ting me know via Twitter. Saving time shouldn’t be about being anti­so­cial but the socially man­dated exchange of plat­it­udes has now shif­ted to a very busi­ness­like model: on Twitter, I tell you what I am doing. If you aren’t inter­ested, don’t read it. If you are, then I’ve saved you the effort of ask­ing me. Better yet, If I want to know some­thing about you, I can send you a Tweet, free­ing your time and atten­tion to con­tinue with your affairs and allow­ing you the liberty of answer­ing me later when you are free.

Serendipity still exists in this model! Ask the world any­thing, any­thing, and any­one could con­ceiv­ably reply. Twitter also dove­tails neatly into so many other ser­vices; it’s the one-​stop shop for status updates (Twitter->Facebook; Twitter->Blog; Twitter->Windows Live; etc.) I’d rather post updates to one, uni­fied inter­face and have it dis­sem­in­ate to everything else. It’s like the inven­tion of the print­ing press. So don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it.

So there you have it. I’m sure I have more pro­ductiv­ity tricks (I’m always learn­ing from Lifehacker, Stepcase Lifehack, etc.) Anything you want to share with me? I might try to ana­lyze how I spend my time more.