For years, I've had an on-again off-again relationship with Evernote. As someone who is terminally unorganized (my doctor says I only have 40-50 years left to live because of it), my biggest problem was finding a way to make all of that data ubiquitous so I can manage it easily and everywhere. I'm back on again with Evernote, primarily due to the introduction of their Chrome extension, Clearly.
For some time, I'd used Readability as a way to get the data I wanted into whatever I was using as a note-storage vault. Using the Readability bookmarkelt, I could easily trim pages from ad-flashing, comment-choked nightmares into slim documents containing only the information I cared about. Someone had even combined the Evernote Clipper bookmarklet with the Readability one making for a one-click solution. But, it never really worked perfectly and, as stated before, Evernote never had enough love from me to make it long term.
But, Clearly DOES work extremely well! And because of it, I've taken another hard look at Evernote and have fallen in love with it. I'm inside this tool every day now, sometimes 5-6x each day...either updating my journal or trying to get the hundreds of notes I already have squirreled away into a neatly organized mess.
As with most tools, once you start power-using it, you start to see the potential to use it to solve other, apparently unrelated issues. Such is what lead to this idea I'm about to outline...
As with most geeks living in the 21st century, I suffer from information overload. I'm subscribed to about 50 different sites via their RSS feeds and use Google Reader to keep up with it all. But, I've found the way I do things to be too slow and cumbersome. My primary issue is with Gawker sites like Lifehacker and IO9, the two sites I feel compelled to visit every day. I have no idea what the issue is with these two sites, but I can have Chrome open all day long, with dozens of tabs generally in view at any time. The instant I open more than two pages from Gawker, my whole machine crawls to a halt.
Now, it's very likely it's some combination of my extensions and the proxy at work as I don't experience this issue too often elsewhere. But, seeing as most of the visiting of these sites occurs when I'm in between tasks at work, it's a pain in the ass I had to find a solution for. I also had the problem that it might not be something appropriate for me to read at work, so I'd fill up my inbox with things to read later...and then never get to them.
Additionally, if I find an article I like, I'm likely to want to save it. Since coming back to Evernote full time, I've been using Clearly to snip them up. If what I want is going to end up in Evernote anyway, it seemed to make some kind of sense to just figure out a way to eliminate the middle man.
And that's where If This Then That comes in. IFTTT is a site that will automate your social media for you. For example, I've got a task setup that will fire every time I post a status message on Facebook and send it to me as an e-mail. Since Facebook's search leaves a lot to be desired, plus I wanted to have an archive of things I posted there, this process makes my social network history much more manageable. (Recently, I've started switching these tasks over to put the items in Evernote instead of sending an e-mail.)
The secret sauce in this task is IFTTT's ability to react to an item being starred in Reader. When I do that, IFTTT posts that article into an Evernote notebook named RIL (for Read It Later, see what I did there?). I can then go in at my convenience and just read the articles in Evernote. As an added plus, they're already in Evernote, I just have to drag articles I want to keep into the appropriate notebook when I'm done reading. Or, if I don't want to keep it, I just delete.
One last tidbit: most sites will only post a summary of an article in RSS. Some, like Lifehacker, will offer the full articles on a separate feed. If they don't, you can try WizardRSS. It's a site that will pull full articles instead of summaries from the site and give them as their own RSS feed. It doesn't work on every site, but it gets enough of them that I watch each day.
I've been using this method for about a week and a half now, and I have to tell you it's made my RSS surfing so much more efficient. For example, when I'm done looking through a particular site's articles, I always mark the whole site as read so I easily know what's got new stories when I come back. The problem is, if I found an article that I had the slightest interest in but didn't want to read it at that time, I'd just leave it unread in Reader. Messy, messy! No more, I've moved all of those waiting to be read articles into Evernote and I'll get to them when I get to them.
Now, Reader is generally empty except for the few new items. I can scan through all of my feeds in a matter of minutes and star just the items I MIGHT want to read. I can then read them on my phone or computer at my convenience. I gotta tell you...it's made me so efficient at getting through my news I run out everyday and that's something that's NEVER happened before!
No comments:
Post a Comment