I'm re-constructing my process for collecting, sorting, using and archiving content from the numerous feeds, websites and links I go through during a day.<p>The amount of things that I have coming in can be overwhelming and I'm trying to find that balance point where I sort and retain useful things, without spending a huge amount of time on it.<p>How do you do it? Any tips you can share?
The best process for me at the moment seems to be using 3 tools in the following way. The 3 tools are: Google Reader (through a mac app - Gruml), Instapaper (a bookmarking service thats great for text) and Diigo (a bookmarking service).<p>- I go through Google Reader once a day scanning for useful things. Anything that I can't go process in a few minutes or don't want to deal with immediately I save.<p>- Anything I come across during the day (from emails, friends, colleagues, etc) that I want to look at later also gets saved.<p>- I save things in two ways: articles/text to Instapaper, and everything else to a 'temporary' bookmark folder on my browser.<p>- When I have some time, 3 to 5 times a week, I'll read through the articles on Instapaper. I'll archive the articles after I read them on Instapaper, deleting any that weren't useful.<p>- 2 to 4 times a month I'll go through the 'temporary folder'. Deleting anything that isn't useful and and using diigo to archive everything that is.<p>- The key thing so far for me is to make sure I relentlessly remove anything that I am reasonably sure isn't useful especially from my RSS reader.<p>Its not as simple as I'd like it to be, mostly because I'm using two archiving services. I like instapaper's ability to easily convert articles into a readable format. At the same time for organizing and archiving everything else diigo works great.
I mostly use Google Reader. I use the shareaholic firefox extension to add non-RSS sites to my Google Reader shared items, so I can search for them later - I don't share publically.<p>To a lesser extent: evernote, readitlater, and firefox bookmark folders.<p>My mantra: don't archive what will still be there tomorrow, and don't sort what you can search for.
Shameless plug - but worth checking out to solve your problem - we've built a website called Thinkpanda which lets you save notes, links, files, rss feeds and even etherpads in "collections". All your collections are a click away and we even aggregate content from all your collections (and those you are following) into one meta-feed.<p>We're starting off targeting the academic market (students, researchers) but have found it pretty useful for organizing interest-based links and having general discussions as well.<p>Check it out <a href="http://thinkpanda.com" rel="nofollow">http://thinkpanda.com</a> and any feedback is appreciated!
To organise my music and video collections and save information from surfing the web and the 77 RSS feeds and 160 podcasts I subscribe to, I use a partition which is structured as follows:<p><pre><code> multimedia
downloads
torrents
ebooks
to read
to keep
music
to select
to keep
speech
to hear
to keep
text
video
to see
to keep
</code></pre>
The "to keep" directories have subdirectories named after authors, bands, genres, movies and podcasts. The "text" directory is for saved web pages as well as normal text files.
Evernote. I heard the hype and ignored it for a while. I tried it a few months ago on a whim and have been hooked ever since.<p>We come across a lot of data. Lots of it is interesting, but we don't need it right now. I save dozens of articles a day in Evernote and search it first when researching a topic I'm interested in. It's likely I've saved some great posts on the subject, but haven't gotten around to reading them yet.