Instapaper or Read it Later? Both!

As I battle to keep up to date with everything that happens in my industry (IT, specifically security/networking), one of the best tools I use is a 'to read later' application: basic premise is that if you come across something that you think might be interesting but you just don't have the time (or resources) to check it out now, you can mark it for later. Then, when you have moment (yeah, right...), you just go back through your unread list to check them out.

There's a few of these apps out there - Apple actually included the functionality in the latest Safari with iOS 5.0 - but the ones I'm more familiar with are Read it Later and Instapaper. They both have support for tags, multi-platform support and free/paid versions (though Instapaper offers virtually all functionality for free so 'paid' really means donation, which I find totally worth it).

One of the more interesting thing about both of these apps is that they have a stable API so other applications can hook into them. This has led to a variety of applications supporting direct "one-click" integration, allowing things like sending a link to the 'to read later' queue while browsing your Twitter feed or Facebook news, for example.

That - sending off to 'to read' list while browsing Twitter - is primarily how I use this functionality. My preferred Twitter client is 'Oosfora HD' (paid) on the iPad and I'll happily bookmark links for reading later from within that app.

But which one do I use? The answer (as per the title of this entry) is both! Wait, what? Why both? Heresy!
<sarcasm>
As with every other 'battle' in IT (Windows or Mac? Chrome or Firefox? iOS or Android?) there *must* be one choice. Your entire self-worth as an individual is tied to choosing the ONE app that is clearly BETTER.
</sarcasm>

Well,no. One of the benefits of using BOTH apps at the same time is that you can easily curate your collection so that you end up with two distinct 'flavours' of bookmarks to check out and can then review them according to your mood, resources at hand, etc...

As an example, I use 'Instapaper' for industry-related links that I either have to be in the right mindset to review or that I want to take notes into my Personal Knowledge Management system (future blog post...). I use 'Read it Later' for more 'generic' links that I want to check out but not necessarily 'study'.

Why not use one and just tag things instead? Simple answer: the process of tagging something is not well integrated into the other apps I use and frankly just slows down the process. It is a lot easier to just select 'Read it Later' or 'Instapaper' from a pop-up than actually type a tag.

Anyway, I hope this helps others who face similar situations.

Dashboards and my Weekly Planners

I mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of mindmaps for personal organization. My tool of choice is MindJet's Mindmanager, which I bought out of pocket for back in 2001 and never looked back.

One of the things I've done recently is to finally set up a couple of dashboard mindmaps - for me, maps that summarize what I have to worry about as it relates to a particular topic and jump-off points to other locations, from other maps to Web sites out there. The benefit of dashboard mindmaps is that I can quickly glance at them and take in all the relevant information about something.

My first dashboard is business-specific (sorry, not meant for publication): as a Sales/System Engineer (see my LinkedIn profile here), I need to keep track of business contacts and current business opportunities. A couple of maps - one for the business contacts, with linkages to account-specific maps, and one for the opportunities themselves - let me have a great summary of my territory. Some of the benefits I get from it are:
- Quickly identify key people I need to get in touch with.
- Have an at-a-glance summary of opportunities I need to focus on in the short term.

My second dashboard is 'personal', meaning it tracks everything in four main categories: work, personal, career and home (family, kids, etc...). I use it as a scratch pad for things on my radar (in addition to my detailed task list in MyLifeOrganized). See my earlier posts for some description of how I work.

Here's a high-level view of my personal dashboard:

Well, one thing I added to my personal dashboard is a weekly planner. This is simple but very useful. In a nutshell, I now have an easy to view/edit location where I consolidate information from many sources:
- My personal and business calendars (Gmail and Outlook, respectively)
- Key tasks I want to achieve on that date (manually, but taken from MLO)
- Additional tidbits not available elsewhere that I think are relevant.

Here's a redacted example:

The nice thing is that I also have not only similar views for upcoming weeks (as you can see in the image) but also a 'weekly template' (not shown) that I can just copy over to a new week.


Like I said, this is simple stuff - maybe old news to more experienced mindmappers - but still something that helped me organize my affairs better. Hope it helps others too.

Until next time!

My Personal (Dis)Organization System - 2 of 2

Hello again,

In the first post, I described some of the high-level concepts I use to organize things. Now, on to specific tools...

The two tools that I can' live without - ok, a bit melodramatic, but you get the point - are MyLifeOrganized (MLO) and MindJet's MindManager. I have gladly paid subscription/software fees on both tools and will continue to do so.

MyLifeOrganized is a VERY capable to-do manager with superb outline capabilities. It allows for nested tasks, advanced recurrence schemes and is quite fast and inobstrusive to use. Without going into too many boring details, I use it to keep track of everything that "needs to be done" in my life. I have four master "branches" in my overall task list:

• Work - this is where I keep track of everything to do with my job - customers to follow up with, administrative tasks, etc...
• Career - this is DIFFERENT from work - here I keep track of my own personal development independent of work-specific topics. Certifications, professional memberships,etc... come up here.
• Home - this is a biggie: everything around the house, from keeping track of finances to household chores. One of the things I've done over time is to create "Prep Lists" for key times of the year that really streamline what needs to get done.
• Personal - this is for own projects, tasks, etc.. that are, well, personal. This is where I track specific birthdays or key dates to remember, fitness goals, self-study goals, etc...

How do I use MLO? Well, it is the central storage system for every task I need to do. Usually, I will add tasks to it from a variety of sources:

• After scanning inboxes - Google Mail, Outlook (MLO allows drag and drop from outlook, nice!), voicemails, even feeds such as Twitter or RSS.
• Directly into it from a Rapid task entry system tray icon.
• Directly into the main interface and being able to add details such as recurrence, dependencies, ...

For those familiar with mind-mapping, Mind Manager should need no introductions. It is a professional-grade (i.e expensive... :-( ) mind mapping application for Windows - there's a version for Mac too - that has a ton of features. I rely particularly heavily on linked maps and hyperlinks. To make a long story short, I create mind maps of any topic I'm working on as a way of organizing the information in whatever format makes more sense. Some of the maps I've created over the years include:

• A whole process of how to study for certification exams. This actually became a guest post on Mindjet.com (thanks Michael!).
• Personal and professional dashboards - usually single maps with a high-level view of things going on with links to specific maps or other files (Excel, Word, ...) as needed.
• Status maps, presenting in a single, clear page all the relevant for status for initiatives, from the state of personal finances (my wife and I review them regularly) to a project status report at work.

Mind Manager is the central repository for distilled information - anything I learn, anything I think about in a structured fashion, etc.... I have several maps on topics ranging from golf to mathematics, from wines to study notes, ...

There's still other tools out there that I use more or less on a regular basis, but I'm still trying to figure out how to best use them:

• Evernote shows great potential as a knowledgebase, but I still need to figure out how to best interface it with Mind Manager, which is my primary study tool. I also use it as a bookmark organizer, but certainly not to its full potential.
• Read it Later is great as a repository of "should check out" links that may eventually make their way into Evernote or some other repository.
• I like Google Reader's "Star" option for marking posts for later reading, but these usually just end up accumulating with limited follow-up. Gotta thing about this one...

So, I'll stop here on this topic... for now. I keep trying to optimize how I use these tools, so expect changes next time I come back to this topic...

My Personal (Dis)Organization System - 1 of 2

I'm always curious about how people organize themselves in this day and age - e-mail, tasks, contacts, etc... - so I can continue to fine tune how I do things myself. I once heard the term 'productivity pr0n'. I don't think it applies to me, but almost... :-)

I decided to break down this post in two:
- a high-level overview of key concepts.
- a description of tools I use to implement my system.

I have read - and heartily recommend - David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD). Some people treat it as gospel - it does have a cult-like following - but I took some things from it and that was that. More than anything, I liked the concepts of:
- Recognizing one's "Inboxes".
- Breaking tasks down to actionable items (define what the "next action" is)
- Having a specific method of handling incoming things: Do now, Delete it, Delegate it, Store it for Reference, Treat it as a Project, move to a "Someday" area of your system.
- Doing periodic reviews.

I also embraced the concept of 'Inbox Zero'. This is extremely liberating - I know that anything not in my Inbox is properly captured elsewhere in my system and I can clearly see what is new.

Finally, I need somewhere to keep the information I accumulate. I would like to build something like a Personal MemEx, but my system is far simpler.

So, to end this post, the key concepts I use are:
- I have multiple (but clearly defined) Inboxes: personal and work email, social media (FB,Twitter,RSS), personal and work voicemail, my own ideas, etc...
- For everything that comes in I process it the same way, deciding what I need to do with it.
- I keep track of things on a somewhat coherent personal knowledgebase.

More stuff on the next post.