stevelawson.net

I’ve spent a lot of time considering how to filter information, get good information, and cut back on pointless information, but haven’t thus far said (or thought) all that much about what we do with it once we get it.

And that is clearly key. Information requires processing as well as ‘managing’ - it might require an action, it might require dissemination, responding to or it might change the way we’re already doing something. So finding a way of processing it is vital.

I’ve already commented that To-Do Lists are the bain of my life, and I’m constantly on a quest for better ways of processing the information that comes in via whatever stream, be it email or twitter, conversation or SMS, spontaneous idea or blog post.

What I want to be able to do with information can summed up in a four step process - record, process, disseminate, respond.

• I want to record the idea, if it’s not recorded already, or just extract the bit of a larger document that I need to remember.
• I then want to process it somehow - file it under a category, assign it to a task list, put a date on it…
• It’s highly likely that I want to let other people know about it too - either people with whom it’s a shared task, or if it’s just general helpful information, to share it with anyone else who wants it.
• And finally, I want to perform whatever action I need to in response to it - the task I assigned to it in the ‘process’ stage.

This is heavily influenced by the David Allen’s GTD system system, but in a second hand way. I’ve only just read what his system is - Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Do - even though I’ve been using software designed to help you do this for a while. I’ve combined his ‘process’ and ‘organise’ into process, and added disseminate, as I see that as a distinct and different action from the responses that require me to do anything else… but that’s just me. :o)

His system is tried and tested, so you may want to read more about it.

Anyway, the key to all of this is finding a way of doing those steps that dovetails with how we live. I did a straw poll on twitter a while back, asking twittists what they use for their ‘to do lists’ - the most popular was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a paper notebook. I’ve tried various things, from the to-do list parts of mail.app, to-do lists on iGoogle, paper, mobile phone, iCal and a GTD app called Thinking Rock. Thinking Rock seemed promising, but just took way too much setting up for my liking.

So I started to use Twitter - just as a simple way of posting a daily to-do list publically, and getting feedback from people. That seems to work really well.

But clearly, it doesn’t help me process more complex tasks or arrange projects. That’s where Things comes in. It’s a task management app, using GTD ideas, but seems pretty simple to set up, easy to follow, and so far I’m finding it pretty useful when I remember to check it - I’m looking into ways of getting the alerts from it to interrupt my usual daily faffing to remind me what I really ought to be doing. If I can get it to do that, it’ll be a life saver.

So Things is how I do the recording and processing part of my ‘to do list’ and inspiration-type information management. The bits that are more article/blog/news-based, I manage using three web services - Google Reader, del.icio.us and Twitter.

Google Reader I use to ’star’ things for myself to read later and to ’share’ items with anyone who reads my shared items (or looks at the front page on my blog at the list on there. I might also cut phrases from that and drop them into Things for later processing.

Twitter I use to post links if I want some instant discussion about a topic, or just to flag it up for people who follow me on there, in case they’re interested. It’s a way of throwing it out there and not having to work too hard to monitor the response.

and Del.icio.us I use if I want to save a link with a comment, add it to the links page on my website, or tag it for someone specific that I want to send the page to, if they’re on my friends list.

So with that lot, I manage to perform my four tasks - record, process, disseminate, respond. Feel free to give this some thought, and to check out GTD a little deeper. It’s clear that David Allen’s GTD system is a hell of a lot more clearly and deeply thought out than mine. I just have the kind of brain that likes to personalise systems and processes before implementing them. So this is my version. :o)

Similar Posts elsewhere in this blog:

• Managing Information Streams 4 - General twitter tips. - March 12, 2008
• Managing Information Streams Pt 2 - Twitter! - March 10, 2008
• Managing information streams (Pt 1) - March 7, 2008

Right then, I’ve mentioned RSS quite a few times in the course of my Managing Information Streams series, and its led to quite a few emails and tweets asking what the hell it is and how it works.

So here’s a really basic version of how to get started with it - RSS stands for either ‘Rich Site Summary’ or ‘Really Simple Syndication’ - doesn’t really matter.

I’m not going to address how it works - go here or here for that.

What it does for us is that it brings together all the news and blogs that we like to read as though someone very friendly was emailing or IMing us to tell us that they’ve been updated. So if you, for example read this blog and Future Music Talk, then RSS allows us to get a notification, and often to read it without going to that site.

When you build up a portfolio of ‘feeds’ that you want to read, it becomes like an electronic newspaper.

There are loads of ways of reading RSS, but I’m going to focus on one, cos that makes life easy - Google Reader.

if you already have a gmail account or you use the iGoogle homepage, you can add google reader really easily, as it’s already there in your google portfolio. just go to the Google Reader homepage, log in to your account, and there’s even a tuitional video to help you.

Here’s the first thing to do with it - once you’re logged in, and you’ve got the ‘welcome to google reader’ page up, click on the word ’settings’, then click on the ‘goodies’ tab. At the bottom of that page, is a section headed ‘Subscribe as you surf’ - and there you’ll see the word ’subscribe’. grab it and drag it to the tool bar at the top of your browser. This will allow you to click on any blog or news page that has an RSS feed and add it to google reader in one click.

Once you’ve done it, come back here and try it with this page. Just click on the toolbar link that says ’subscribe….’, and you’ll get the google reader page that says at the top ‘you are not subscribed to this feed yet’. So click subscribe, and it’ll be there. then do the same on any other blogs you read.

Have a look at the blog links on this page for some more suggestions. If you want some news bbc news feeds are fab, and you can try the Guardian, New York Times and The independent.

Here are a couple of tips.

Set up tags/folders in google reader to keep things in chunks - have one labeled ‘news’ for all the sites with loads of updates - that way, you can click on the ‘news’ tag, and then click ‘mark all as read’ to get rid of them on a day when you haven’t got time to read them.

The natural colour of RSS is orange (see the square logo at the top of this page) - wherever you see that, it means there’s RSS around. On most decent browsers (PLEASE tell me you’re not still using Internet Explorer - it’s worse than shit) a little orange RSS icon shows up in the address bar when there’s a feed on the page. Then you can just click your ’subscribe…’ link, add it, and you’re away.

Think about having the iGoogle page as your homepage - that way you can have your google reader feeds there along with email, twitter, weather, etc. etc.

Use the tips, hints and advice that the Google Reader offers you as you go along. Google are very good at plain english. Make the most of it.

That’ll get you started. We’ll do some more advanced RSS stuffs in a while…

Similar Posts elsewhere in this blog:

• Blog feed at stevelawson.net - August 19, 2007
• Managing information streams (Pt 1) - March 7, 2008
• Jaiku - micro-blogging - July 31, 2007