Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Work Habits

By

Lately I’ve been doing some reflecting on my daily routine with all these “cutting edge” information gathering and personal publishing technologies that seem to have taken over much of my life. It’s hard to believe that I’m coming up on three years since I made my first tentative post to Metafilter and started down this most excellent and time consuming blogging ed-venture. It’s also hard to believe how different my process is when it comes to the news and information of the world. Used to be I’d buy the paper version of the New York Times and listen to CNN. Not anymore. I’m feeling the need to document that process a bit because I know three years from now it’s going to be vastly different again. So, for posterity, here’s my daily routine.

  • Check e-mail–this is always my first stop, even though 80% of what I get is spam. Even still, I’m finding it difficult to keep my inbox down to 2-300 messages, and a couple of weeks ago it was up to 600 before I did some serious pruning. Is that sad or what?
  • Bloglines–Usually in this order: News feeds from the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington Post; EdBloggers, all 72 of them; other bloggers like Doc Searles, Josh Marshall, dailyKos and others; search feed results from Feedster and Google and others on things like “journalism and weblogs” or “rss and education”; any posts from my students that I scan and sometimes respond to.
  • Referer list–I usually look for new personal or ed blogger sites that might be referencing this site and spend some time poking around.
  • New York Times–I go back to the Times and dig around in the rest of the paper, read some sports stuff in more depth, look at the whole opinion section, and scan “On the Trail.”
  • Political sites–At some point I’ll hit The Note and some others to see what the campaign news of the day is.

    All the while I’m either Furling or making notes in Manila or trying to wrap my head around all of this stuff I’m taking in, way more than any mere mortal like me can handle. And it does beg the question, what do I really do with all of this stuff? Some of it sticks, I know. But much of it just gets filed and forgotten. Still, at least I always have something to talk about at dinner parties…
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