Reducing Inboxes in 2005: Part IV - Electronic Input

October 25th, 2005 | Simplification

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Originally published October 2005

Overview

During my examination of how information comes into my life, I found that there was a much larger amount of potential “in boxes” than I had thought. My task was to list all of these input spaces and see if the number could be reduced, and then make sure that each of them get processed.

In this post I will tackle electronic input.

I seldom watch television, and never get my news from there. I rely on radio (National Public radio) for news, and from what I can get from the Internet. I also like to follow up on topics that catch my eye, and regularly participate in Yahoo groups as well as reading a string of blogs regularly.

At the start of this exercise, I was reading 6 separate blogging sites by going to the sites directly; I was reading my hometown newspaper on the web, my mother’s hometown newspaper on the web, and the local newspaper on the web; I was participating in 12 Yahoo groups; I was saving articles to read in my Yahoo bookmark folder; and I was saving sites that I wanted to track for reference in my Yahoo bookmarks as well, until they got transferred to my PDA.

Yahoo Groups

The first big change was to determine if the Yahoo groups were worth my time. This led to going “no mail” for three of the worst offenders - groups that routinely populated my email with hundreds of entries per day. Next I evaluated the groups on the basis of when I wanted to see the email. One group I wanted enough to have it go to my home email address; the rest I sent to an account outside of my standard email to read when I had the chance.

News

The second change was to move all the newspapers to my PDA. Using Mobipocket and Mobipocket creator, I was able to put all of the newspaper I cared to read so that it downloads to my PDA on sync.

Blogs

Next came the blogging sites. I could transfer these to my PDA, but I didn’t want to necessarily read through these sites in that medium. Most of the blogging sites have links in them I like to follow, and this is not practical in a disconnected mode. About this time I heard about Bloglines, which is an aggregator. I was able to consolidate my blog reading (and some other news reading, including NPR) here, and be notified when something updated. No more time spent looking at sites to find out if there was anything new to read.

Bookmarks

Last, my bookmarks. I keep a set of often-used bookmarks stored in Yahoo, and access them from wherever using either My Yahoo or the Yahoo tool bar. In addition, I keep a set of reference URLs stored on my PDA, which in turn generates both the random links that show on my home page, and also the full list of bookmarks I can get to from anywhere. I would take sites I wanted to add to reference and add them to a special folder in my Yahoo bookmarks. Same with things I wanted to read in more detail. So that left another in box for me to process every week.

The Solution

This has been eliminated through the use of EWizmo a free site to email yourself reminders. When I have a bookmark I want to put into my reference, I use EWizmo to send an email with the subject “Site” and the body containing the title, link and a summary.

For reading materials I send myself an email via EWizmo with the subject “Read” and the link in the body.

Both of these end up in my email box and can be processed directly into the spots they need right then.