This is a follow-up to Gini Dietrich's excellent post on how to leverage your time in digesting all the information it takes to be an expert or authority figure - especially in blogging.
I do it a little different than Gini - but accomplish similar results.
First, I subscribe to over a 1,000 blogs on a wide variety of subjects, including hiring, retention, culture, work/life balance, speaking, leveraging social media and networking, etc. This subscription load results in 300-500 blog articles daily.
I spend about an hour a day skimming blog titles, reading a few in-depth, saving a few as pdf documents to read later, printing a few as reference material for my various talks, or saving the articles for future reference or blog topics through a bookmarking service. This hour also includes skimming various newspapers, books, and magazines I digest daily. In addition to this scanning/skimming process, I will typically comment on about 8-10 relevant blog articles by other bloggers.
Layered on top of my voracious appetite for reading and knowledge, I write for about 7 different blog entities, including our blog properties, the Bizmore Business Resource Site, and Vistage. Our Blogs include our Hire and Retain Top Talent Blog, Career and Job Search Blog, FREE Job Search Resources Blog, Vistage Chair Blog on Leveraging Social Media and Networking in Finding New Members, and the Vistage Leadership Community Blog. Writing blog postings takes about 2 hours per day.
You might ask - how does he manage this:
I use a blog reader - Google Reader -but I enhance the ability to read blog postings through an add-in to firefox called Feedly which syncs with your Google Reader Account. Feedly gives you the ability to view blog posts in a magazine type format and then distribute those into social media sites.
I use the Delicious Bookmarking service to save blog postings worth referring back to at a later point. Take a look at how I organize my bookmarks for research and information sharing by clicking here.
I use a free software tool called Print Friendly to either print blog postings in a neat format without graphics or to save them as a PDF (when I want to refer to them in presentations or in research).
Finally, I use my Google gmail account to send from Feedly any blog postings I think a particular person in my network might be interested in learning more about.
Feedly, Google Reader, Delicious, and Print Friendly help me keep my sanity around information overload. The tools also enable me to use my reading as a source of inspiration for presentations and blogging.
One final thought - rather than keep journals or scraps of paper on ideas, thoughts, projects, blog articles - I use a Microsoft Office Tool called OneNote that allows me to organize my information in virtual file cabinets and file folders. I can also copy any information from a website with one click into OneNote. There are a number of these tools available that include both software based tools and virtual tools.
After about 3 years of searching for productivity enhancing tools and software to make my life easier as a writer, presenter, speaker, publisher, author, blogger, consultant - I've settled on the tools mentioned in this post. The key is leverage. As Gini I have demonstrated, there are different ways to achieve the same productivity goals.
What's your favorite productivity tool you would like to share with other Chairs?
Barry
