This is not the first time we’ve talked about our workflow. It has evolved over the years. Our workflow currently consists of a Read It Laterservice and a
long-term bookmark archiving service.
When we started, the Read it Later service was Instapaper. We adopted Pinboard as the long-term archiving service. It is nice to know all the reference material we might use is stored for later use.
We later moved to Read It Later, which has recently rebranded as Pocket. The problem is we have 11,000+ bookmarks in Pinboard, and near 3000 in Pocket. Just reading all the stuff we need to learn to keep informed is a challenge.
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Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet discusses this problem, and makes a large amount of suggestions on the subject. He refers to the idea as infoveganism. This is not to say we totally agree with Mr. Johnson, but we see the point that information overload is a problem.
Last year, Ars Technical posted an opinion piece titled, “Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity.” Perhaps RSS is but so is the alternative, social media. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc are all sources of often repeating information. Who can keep up with all that?
The secret to a good workflow is to wisely choose your information flows, keep your inbox empty, and try to schedule spring cleaning for your accounts the same as anything else.
As part of that, we’re trying out ifttt.com, which allows you to tie together parts of the Internet. Using If This Then That logic, you can tie things together. For example, since Pocket support in Pinboard doesn’t allow bookmarks to be added when read, ifttt.com can add this functionality. There are dozens of suggested tieups between sites that otherwise would not be possible.
It is time to liquidate the Pocket account, get up to date, prune the Reader accounts again, prune the Twitter followers…
What is your workflow?
Related articles
- Information Overload: Several Different Problems Under a Single Name (mobileopportunity.blogspot.com)
- Avoid Overloading Social Media Networks with Useless Noise (blogs.constantcontact.com)
- Coping With Email Overload (e1evation.com)
- Notifications Are Evil [Information Overload] (lifehacker.com)
- How to Get the News You Want Without Being Overwhelmed (theatlantic.com)
