So I’ve been giving a lot of thought as to how best to organize my info life and make it more manageable. Let me first say that the hardest part about all of this is trying to ignore the “I WANT TO KNOW EVERYTHING THAT’S GOING ON” voice in my head, the one that says every deleted Bloglines subscription is surely going to have all sorts of interesting nuggets tomorrow that I’ll never see. (I’m an info hoarder, what can I say.)
Step 1 was to chop out 50 feeds at Bloglines just now. (Ouch!) Step 2 is to come up with some really focused search feeds that will let me chop out about 25 more. Now’s when the fun starts… I’ll let you know what I come up with.
I’ve just really gotten into using Bloglines and can’t understand why I didn’t use it before!
Things I’ve done to help organize my online time:
Setup my bloglines account
Started moving my e-mail to Google Mail. I don’t have to worry about deleting anything, their spam filtering seems to be pretty good, and I can filter my mail into their respective labels
For files, I setup a new folder for each school year. If I need something from last school year, I copy (not move) it into this year’s folder. That way I have a nice record of things I’ve created or used by each year, and I can archive each folder without worrying about losing anything. I used to do my e-mail this way, with a different folder for each year-month (in the format 2005-10) and put all e-mail received into a folder, but with Gmail I don’t have to worry about that anymore.
Just went through a similar process myself.
Here’s a tip that’s worked really well for me. Create a few folders in Bloglines called @incoming, @outgoing, and @sleeping. These folders function as small “quarantine” areas. @outgoing is a blog’s last chance to catch my attention. @incoming is a holding spot for everything “new” I subscribe to. @sleeping is for those blogs that aren’t publishing much, but I really want to know when/if they do kick into gear again.
I’m also playing with @watchlists…this is where I store my Technorati searches, ego searches, job listings (Indeed.com), weather reports, etc.
I’m also trying to discipline myself to use Bloglines clipping features to hold stuff that I want to look at more in-depth later on.
Still new to “serious” blogging/interactivity/information-{input{processing}}-{customization{art}}/living…
I’m a poet so this is a wonderful challenge!
The last comment opened me up to exploring more of BlogLines features!
Don’t know how I added you to my BlogLines Feed but there you are and, among other reasons, this quote decided me on visiting often:
“Every reader is a writer, every writer is a reader.”
~Alex
I forgot to add http://del.icio.us/ to the list! I’ve begun to use it in the past few weeks and I’m really liking how easy it is to save bookmarks. Since I may be on 4 or 5 computers a day, I need web based services, and using del.icio.us for bookmarks and bloglines for an RSS reader makes that a snap.