The amount of things that I have coming in can be overwhelming and I'm trying to find that balance point where I sort and retain useful things, without spending a huge amount of time on it.
How do you do it? Any tips you can share?
- I go through Google Reader once a day scanning for useful things. Anything that I can't go process in a few minutes or don't want to deal with immediately I save.
- Anything I come across during the day (from emails, friends, colleagues, etc) that I want to look at later also gets saved.
- I save things in two ways: articles/text to Instapaper, and everything else to a 'temporary' bookmark folder on my browser.
- When I have some time, 3 to 5 times a week, I'll read through the articles on Instapaper. I'll archive the articles after I read them on Instapaper, deleting any that weren't useful.
- 2 to 4 times a month I'll go through the 'temporary folder'. Deleting anything that isn't useful and and using diigo to archive everything that is.
- The key thing so far for me is to make sure I relentlessly remove anything that I am reasonably sure isn't useful especially from my RSS reader.
Its not as simple as I'd like it to be, mostly because I'm using two archiving services. I like instapaper's ability to easily convert articles into a readable format. At the same time for organizing and archiving everything else diigo works great.
To a lesser extent: evernote, readitlater, and firefox bookmark folders.
My mantra: don't archive what will still be there tomorrow, and don't sort what you can search for.
Websites (or just specific content on a site) are not guaranteed to be there tomorrow. They just probably will be there tomorrow.
Agreed - it's your time downloading and organising stuff versus the possibility that it might one day go away; for me, it's rarely a contest. I can imagine certain situations (eg. you are a publicity agent saving public mentions of your client) where it really is your business to preserve such things, but I don't fall in that category and I doubt most people do.
We're starting off targeting the academic market (students, researchers) but have found it pretty useful for organizing interest-based links and having general discussions as well.
Check it out http://thinkpanda.com and any feedback is appreciated!
multimedia
downloads
torrents
ebooks
to read
to keep
music
to select
to keep
speech
to hear
to keep
text
video
to see
to keep
We come across a lot of data. Lots of it is interesting, but we don't need it right now. I save dozens of articles a day in Evernote and search it first when researching a topic I'm interested in. It's likely I've saved some great posts on the subject, but haven't gotten around to reading them yet.
Synced Notes with Evernote
Synced Docs/Files with Dropbox