We all have a system in how we get things done.  Some systems are explicit, in which we follow someone else’s methodology to the “T”, some are the opposite, in which we design it all on our own.   For most of us, we fall somewhere in the middle.  I borrow heavily from David Allen’s GTD methodology, but want to spend a few posts diagramming and discussing my own methodology.   Allen shies away from attaching his methodology to tools, but tools are precisely where the work gets done.  I’ll make them an integral part of the discussion.   In this first post, I’m not going to talk about “getting things done”, per se, but how to systematically identify meaningful information, share it with others (if you choose), and archive it for recall at the appropriate time.   Next post, I’ll go into greater depth about the tools, and talk about what’s missing in the tools currently available.

Lately I’ve been giving some thought to how I take in information.  We all have a limited amount of time each day that we can spend in browse mode, and let’s face it, the web is suffering no shortage of content.  I won’t waste time discussing whether this overabundance of information is a good thing or a bad thing.  It’s just how it is.  I want this time to be as productive and efficient as possible.   As a starting point, I sketched the part of my own system for finding useful content, sharing it, and storing it for future reference. 

Any system is a collection of people, processes, and tools.  For purposes of discussion, I’ve broken down my methodology into 4 parts—collecting, discovering, sharing, and archiving.

Collecting

The purpose of the Collecting phase is to identify high value content sources, so that you can aggregate them in one view.   Think of those websites you like, that you visit one at a time.  Imagine the time saved by having all that information pre-fetched for you (this isn’t remotely new… in fact, the usefulness of the traditional RSS Reader is heavily debated). The goal is to create an environment where you’re most likely to find great content.  I’ll come back to this in the next phase.  I also import my Facebook friends feed, FriendFeed, and Twitter feed into the experience, as well as those articles I think might be interesting, but I don’t have time to read when I find it. 

Discovering

In the Discovering phase, I’m doing one of two things.  I’m either engaged in “disciplined browsing”, by reading my RSS feeds in Feedly, or I’m randomly surfing the web.  Assuming you’ve chosen good sources, the more time spent on disciplined browsing, the more high value content discovered.   Feedly is an Firefox browser plugin that is essentially a magazine-style UI on top of Google Reader.  The Google Reader UI is bad,  which Feedly overcomes nicely.  In addition, Feedly incorporates recommended articles, photos, videos, tweets, and people into the browsing experience, contextualized to the subject.  In Feedly, I have roughly 20 topics (think 20 magazines) that I read, that range from news to business and technology topics to personal interests.     

Sharing

When I find something interesting, I’ll let others know about it.  Over half of what I find interesting has come from a friend, colleague, or someone I follow on Twitter, so I’m more than willing to return the favor.   I share by posting to twitter (twitter.com/wbright) if I like the article, and delicious (delicious.com/wbright) if I like the site as well.  I can blog about it on Posterous if I have more than 140 characters to say (wesbright.com).  Each time I share something, it gets added to my NewsFeeds on both Facebook and FriendFeed. 

Archiving

Archiving is essential if the content is great, and it has a shelf-life of longer than your short-term memory.  I used to work at Plumtree Software.  A key feature of the Plumtree Portal was the Knowledge Directory, which was essentially a virtual card catalog for the content in the enterprise.  It provided searchable metadata (including the full text) and new the address (where to find) the actual content.  When I led design sessions for portal implementations, I always stressed the Knowledge Directory was for “finished content”, or the top 2% of content in the enterprise.  This was to combat the “infoglut” of information that quickly amasses in an organization.  By restricting the Knowledge Directory to the top 2%, you essentially increase the likelihood of finding high-value information when searching for it in the future.  I’ve been wanting to implement this on a personal level, but the Plumtree Portal was slightly overkill.  Now, an application called Evernote makes this possible.  Evernote allows you to organize content according to folders and tags, and provides full-text searching capabilities (including inside images!).  I’ll save the Evernote deep-dive for a future post.