Jeff Miller's Big Idea Creativity seeking form

I'm going to try a life hack experiment. I've found some interesting videos on MSDN Channel 9 that I would like to watch, like this one about Windows PowerShell. But, I don't have the time to watch them all right now. So I'm going to post them by using the Silverlight embedding feature of the Silverlight video player they use to batch them up and review later. And, as an added benefit, anyone that is interested can check out the collection too.

This technique can apply to more than just Microsoft videos. Certainly, YouTube or UStream.TV could benefit from this approach.

I'll be sure to tag the post with an appropriate topic-oriented tag, but I may also include a media-oriented tag like "Video" or "Video to Watch" so I can navigate them using my Drupal blog's taxonomy features.

So, without further ado, here is the embedded video about PowerShell:

Enjoy!

Twitter's "Real" Value?

A lot of the value I get out of Twitter is the "microblogging" aspect in which people post a quick link to a useful or meaningful or funny web page. Sure, Twitter can help you stay up to date on those you "follow," but it's also a great data mining tool. In the same way blogs allow you to plug into the brains of interesting people, Twitter allows you a micro version of this technique. In some ways, Twitter has some advantages over blog reading/writing:

• Twitter limits your post to 140 characters, so you have to be concise. This might (not guaranteed) cause you to keep your message to just the bare essentials--there's no room for fluff!
• Twitter forces the writer to be concise, so reading a Twitter "micro blog" post is quick and easy.

Time to Consolidate Those Inboxes!

As GTD creator David Allen recommends, I'm constantly striving to consolidate my inboxes (having as many as I need and as few as I can get away with). Rather than subscribe to a ton of email newsletters and clutter that inbox, I prefer to let Google Reader take care of the information I want to keep up with.

Twitter, in effect, is just one more inbox to deal with. It's yet another stream of incoming data that you must process. As with any inbox, an honest evaluation of its value and how it might be consolidated should be made.

The Problem: I Can't Read That Right Now...

If you follow very many people on Twitter, the amount of traffic that streams by your consciousness is mind-boggling. There's not enough time to read all of the "tweets," let alone all of the pages they point to.

The Answer: ...But I Can Save It For Later

As pointed out in a comment by Morten Skogly, you can access the favorites of any user as an RSS feed. This can be useful for really tapping into someone's brain. Instead of hearing all of the noise they put out, you can use them as a filter by monitoring what they value.

Just use the following pattern for an RSS feed of a Twitter user's favorites:
http://www.twitter.com/favorites/username.rss

Substitute the actual name of the user for "username" in the link above.

Taken a step further, you can subscribe to your own favorites using the same technique. This allows you to quickly tag something in Twitter as a favorite, while using Google Reader (or other news aggregator) as your "command center" for all things RSS! So tag your favorite tweets using the star, and it will show up for your later review in Google Reader.

Here Are My Favorites

My Twitter favorites RSS feed can be found here:
http://www.twitter.com/favorites/xagronaut.rss

You can follow my Twitter postings here:
http://www.twitter.com/xagronaut

Feedback

Do you have any life hacks using RSS and Twitter? Let me know! Just leave a comment!

Timothy Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, appears on FastCompany.tv's WorkFastTV show hosted by famed blogger Robert ("Scobleizer") Scoble:

A follow-up interview after the show appears on Scobleizer's kyte.tv channel:

Remember The Milk is a site that manages your tasks. In a long list of task management tools, this one stands out by offering a high degree of integration with other systems by exposing its API, providing email "posting" capabilities, and a very helpful tagging system.

Over the course of my academic and professional careers, I have been forced, out of the pain of disorganization, to get "organized."

The Amateur Academic Years

In high school and college, this usually meant a trip to the office supply store and a set of new folders or a binder or both. I would resolve to keep better track of my assignments by writing them down in a consistent way, and I would stay on top of them by reviewing it often. But it never stuck.

Paper Goes Prime Time

Shortly after I started my professional career, I learned of the Franklin Planner (now the Franklin Covey Planner) from a colleague. Its impact on my organization habits was compelling. I now had a central place for tracking just about anything, and a method for taking notes and indexing them. The prescribed daily period of "Planning & Solitude" both forced me and enabled me to stay on top of the tasks and notes I had entered into the system. What's more, the consistent form factor (5.5"x8.5" 7-ring paper) allowed me to collect a long-running archive that I could reference at any time. Not that I did it that often, but occasionally, it proved critical in finding contact information or directions I had long since purged from my active set that I carried with me.

Still, it was strictly paper-based, so it had its disadvantages. It had no backup and it required being with you all the time so nothing would slip through the cracks. (Franklin Covey did, however, offer a small notepad version called the Satellite that was about the size of a checkbook and could be carried with you. The paper was punched to fit a classic binder just like the full-size paper, so it easily integrated back into the system.)

The Digital Transition

Eventually I acquired a Palm III and Franklin Covey planner binder that would accommodate both the Palm and the classic paper. I still use this binder today, although I currently fill its PDA slot with a Palm Zire 72s.
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I won't bore you with all of the phases in between other than to say that I tried an iPAQ for a while, I have struggled to keep Outlook in sync with whatever PDA I was currently operating, and now things like
Google Calendar have entered the picture.

More Change on the Horizon

All of this has been to say that, yet again, I feel as though my habits, techniques, and tools for organization is about to change. Along with my more recent adoption of GTD (Getting Things Done) as my planning method, I've been contemplating using Remember The Milk as my primary task manager. (Its lack of Outlook synchronization--until now--has made it a non-starter for me. I must have desktop/PDA synchronization to make it work.)

None of these changes have happened in a vacuum, nor could they. I've even learned some things about the difference between tools and techniques (what you do with or without your tools).

Should I take the Smart Phone Plunge?

In the face of an impending phone upgrade, I'm forced to consider another possible change--do I retire my Palm and go for an advanced phone/PDA with a data plan? I hate the idea of having my PDA be tied to a particular wireless carrier, but having an increased level of integration for my personal information is compelling.

Just as Merlin Mann of 43Folders.com proposed in his post about choosing a new phone, I think I should prepare for the phone (and PDA?) upgrade by making a list of all of the features that it must have to support even my current organization methods. I'll probably post more on that later.

Feedback

Do you have any thoughts on the ups and downs of digital organization? Tell me what you think.

The Processing phase is where you evaluate everything in your "In" boxes and make decisions about what should happen next with each item. This page aims to offer tips and ideas for effective use of the Processing Phase.

The Collection phase is where you get everything in one place--out of your head and into a central mechanism (usually an inbox). This page aims to offer tips and ideas for effective use of the Collection Phase.

Getting Things Done (often called GTD) is a time/life management approach descibed in a book by David Allen entitled "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity."

GTD topics

Thoughts and Tips for the 5 Phases of Workflow

• Collection
• Processing
• Organizing
• Reviewing
• Doing

I have read (or at least purchased) a few books in my lifetime about managing time and being organized. Here's a partial list:

• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Managing Your Time (3rd Edition) by Jeff Davidson
• Time Management for Dummies, Second Edition by Jeffrey J. Mayer
• (The original) Getting Things Done: The ABCs of Time Management by Edwin C. Bliss and Malcolm Hancock
• Organize Yourself! by Ronni Eisenberg and Kate Kelly
• Tiptionary by Mary Hunt
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families by Stephen R. Covey

This "book" (in Drupal terms) includes content described by a number of phrases, all of which apply, at least in part:

• Getting Things Done/GTD
• personal organization and productivity
• life management skills
• life hacks

I'm cataloging this content here as an experiment. Partly with Drupal and partly with a non-wiki publishing format.