Five things to clear the infodecks for 2009

This one isn’t about stocks but rather infor­ma­tion and some of the new ser­vices out there that have changed how infor­ma­tion is received, shared and put to use (sometimes.)

At the begin­ning of the year most of us weren’t using ser­vices like Twit­ter and social net­work­ing plat­forms like Face­book and LinkedIn have come a fair way over the course of the year.  At the same time fil­ter­ing ser­vices, alerts and Google reader are all very good alter­na­tives to email for pro­cess­ing information.

Here are a few things to con­sider doing over the hol­i­days (feel free to add more in comments!):

1. Most peo­ple are on far too many email lists.  This tends to make actu­ally using email fairly dif­fi­cult. Most ser­vices now have an RSS feed which means they can be received in a ser­vice like Google Reader.  If you haven’t inves­ti­gated Google Reader yet now is the time to do so and set yours up.   Start at the link above.  It’s worth spend­ing a few hours doing this instead of read­ing your Sun­day paper.  By elim­i­nat­ing email sub­scrip­tions and putting them in your Google Reader you can spend time quickly scan­ning the news when you have time to do so.
2. Elim­i­nate some sub­scrip­tions but save the links.  We tend to accu­mu­late sub­scrip­tions that become junk because we can’t keep up with them.  How­ever we still have an inter­est so may not want to elim­i­nate them entirely.  One strat­egy is to out them into the Reader as out­lined above but they can also sim­ply be saved to shared book mark­ing tool like Deli­cious.  What’s good about this is that they can be tagged with your inter­est (like solar or dogs) and you can find them later.  Also you’ll be able to see many other links with the same tags and expand your online resources when you find time to do so.  Again it gets things out of your inbox and avail­able in a bet­ter way for future use.
3. Get a Twit­ter account and explore ways to use it.  Twit­ter is basi­cally a new ser­vice that posts short mes­sages around to peo­ple who “fol­low” one another.  Some­times the ser­vices are not peo­ple but ven­dors like Ama­zon or Dell.  There are many use mod­els for Twit­ter but instead of get­ting an email from Ama­zon on the “deals of the day” if you are into that maybe it’s bet­ter to get a Twit­ter mes­sage about it.  It’s easy to act on or ignore. No delet­ing is nec­es­sary.  Twit­ter has a pas­sion­ate fol­low­ing but it’s also a tool that should be in your com­mu­ni­ca­tion arsenal.
4. Set up and/or update your LinkedIn and Face­book accounts.  These are free and use­ful ser­vices these days. LinkedIn works well for your pro­fes­sional con­tacts and Face­book is bet­ter for those that know you but may not be in the busi­ness world.  (BTW your Twit­ter mes­sages can be used to update your Face­book sta­tus, help­ing friends stay up to date with what you are doing.)  There are also fairly vibrant spe­cial inter­est groups emerg­ing on these plat­forms that are worth joining.
5. In the event that you are some­how not already using IM and online col­lab­o­ra­tion tools get set-up on Skype or sim­i­lar.  These tools have the some­what unique qual­ity of detect­ing and shar­ing online pres­ence and allow­ing real-time chat, dis­cus­sion, video or infor­ma­tion shar­ing to occur.  They sit at the core of any high-performance team.
6. Lastly if you have even slightly con­sid­ered start­ing a blog this is a good time to get that set up as well.  It’s just as impor­tant to have it so that oth­ers can com­mu­ni­cate with you as you are with the world.  Some of you already have monthly updates and let­ters that can at least start to serve as a start­ing point for a blog.  We’re talk­ing mostly pro­fes­sional stuff here but there’s a whole per­sonal side there as well for those that get excited about it.  There are lots of blog choices out there.  We’ve used them all and pre­fer Word­Press but they are all pretty good.  Google Blog­ger is prob­a­bly the most sim­ple to use.  You also might want to start com­ment­ing and/or writ­ing a guest post or two on other blogs if you’d rather get started that way.

This is also a good time of the year to con­sider an upgrade to a time man­age­ment tool of some sort.  Lately we have been using Mac-based Things and like it quite a bit.  Read­ing some books like Get­ting Things Done or the 4-hour Work Week may also help stim­u­late some bet­ter work habits in the new year.

In sum­mary this is a good time to ratio­nal­ize and pri­or­i­tize your infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing and the new tools out there are impor­tant ele­ments of tak­ing full advan­tage of what’s out there.  We left out as many as we included here so this is just a start.

Tagged as: Tips