Artist’s Productivity: Information Processing

by Joel Falconer

You’ve learned to empty your inbox in minutes and shift your focus to the day at hand. But we live in a world where we’re barraged with information, and the term ‘information overload’ is very real and it’s very bad for your mind - its ability to think and consider - and especially for your daily productivity.

I like to ensure I am taking in all the information I need to, without wasting my day surfing the internet or watching television. Many of my friends, who also keep themselves well-informed, ask how I manage to process so much information every day—to the point that most of the time they’re sending me a link, I’ve already read it—and still accomplish all my tasks.

I do use two tools quite heavily for information processing, outside of my inbox, but so as not to limit the usefulness of this article I won’t focus on the specific tools too much. The features I’ll refer to can be found in any good equivalent. But, for the curious, they are both free - NetNewsWire and Flock.

The Right Tools for the Right Job

NetNewsWire is a Mac OS X newsreader. It was made free a few days ago by Newsgator, along with their Windows counterpart FeedDemon and the Newsgator Online service which allows you to sync your NetNewsWire and FeedDemon RSS feeds between multiple computers. I haven’t used FeedDemon, but I hear it’s quite good. You can check out this excellent, and now free, range of products at the Newsgator website.

NetNewsWire’s power-processing features and synchronization abilities mean I depend on it. It also gives me statistics on which blogs I read most frequently and which ones I don’t look at for days or weeks at a time; it’s a good way to pare down the number of sources you have to consume.

You might not need to change your browser to Flock, but if you want to deal with information effectively you will require some kind of newsreader such as NetNewsWire.

Flock is an open source web browser, and its slogan is “the social web browser.” I am not a huge fan of social networks like Facebook, but Flock allows me to deal with social information quickly without wasting much time on it, and it allows me to store clippings from around the web and blog them as I go.

Flock is a perfect companion to a good information processing system as it can send information around the web intuitively, from Twitter to del.icio.us to Facebook. I say companion because I find its RSS reader to be inadequate; then again, I’m a bit spoiled in that department. I just rely on Flock’s features when I need to manipulate information that I don’t get from my newsreader or inbox (which, the way I’ve got things set up, is rarely).

Being able to process information quickly and efficiently is a necessity for the productive individual. The right tools for the job are a must.

Choosing Information Sources

I only have one feed subscription in my feed reader that is exclusively a current affairs feed. I get this feed to make sure I have an idea of what’s going on, but don’t spend all my time reading about current affairs. In the past this was a huge time drain. I make sure that my world news feed only gives a one-sentence summary and I only ever click through if I think it could be news that significantly affects me, or something I’m doing.

I do subscribe to several niche news feeds, on topics such as blogging, independent music, and so on that inform some of my blogs. Aside from that, my feeds are all practical ones - such as Problogger.net.

One of the most important things you can do in your fight against information overload is select your sources carefully. Only let the most vital information get to your inbox, newsreader or browser. Despite this process, I’m subscribed to a few hundred feeds. I’m not breaking the rules, it’s just that I write in so many different areas online and off.

Every time I subscribe to a new feed, I place it in my Pending folder. In two weeks I review my reading habits statistics and if I’m not reading 75% of posts or more, I unsubscribe.

Minimalism in incoming sources is the first key to productive information processing.

Dealing with Entries Quickly

NetNewsWire has a main folder called “Latest News” that displays all unread items from all feeds. This is where I spend most of my time as it means I don’t have to constantly switch folders - I can just power through the entire bunch.

When reading feeds or web pages, I operate on the three second rule. If I can’t figure out why I’m reading something or what useful purpose the content has, I go to the next entry or website. Three seconds is usually ample time and it often only takes one or two.

If there is an item that’s going to be useful but requires closer reading, flag it (or you can star the item if you’re using Google Reader), and come back to it after information processing. For now, we’re just trying to machete our way through a few thousand new posts each day.

If the item is short, then I read it then and there. If there’s an article that doesn’t look useless but doesn’t deserve to be flagged for later review, I read one or two paragraphs to get the basic gist of it and move on. You don’t miss anything important this way, and if you ever do, the important stuff will eventually catch up with you (through email perhaps).

Don’t slow down to a crawl out of fear that you’ll miss something essential. If it’s essential, again, it will come to you sooner or later. It’s only a newsreader, after all, and it can’t mean life and death if you neglect to read the minutiae of any given blog post.

Entertainment and Downtime Can Blow Away Your Day

Entertainment and downtime are essential and without them, your newfound productivity skills will grind your mind to a burnout. But when you mix feeds and sites you read for fun with those you read for work-related knowledge, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

I used to read Boing Boing and Neatorama from my newsreader. I really love these blogs in an unhealthy way, and of course I eventually noticed how much of my allotted work time was being spent on these blogs. Boing Boing, as you may know, is published many, many times a day and you could spend all day every day reading the blog and following its links.

At first I just put these blogs in a separate folder that I didn’t touch until the end of the workday, but when I started using the bulk unread folder, this plan stopped working. Eventually I just put them in Flock’s RSS reader, which I only touch when I’m not busy.

Don’t make the same mistake, because there’s nothing that’ll ruin efficient information processing more than mixing business and pleasure. That said, they’re great sites and I recommend that everyone in the world should subscribe!

Processing Flagged Items

When you’ve processed your unread inbox of feeds, it’s time to either move on to your flagged items or set a time to do so. Either way, the best way to deal with flagged items is to not leave them sitting around for months, but turn them into actions as soon as you can.

If it’s simply a matter of absorbing the information, read the article or use whichever techniques you prefer for learning and absorbing it so that you can unflag it and move on.

If there are suggestions within the article you wish to adopt, turn them into actions for your to-do list. We discussed this strategy in Artist’s Productivity: The Empty Inbox, and it’s no different here. Check that article for suggestions on task management software. The temptation is to say “I’ll come back to this when it’s time to take action” - don’t. Clutter is bad for productivity; break it down into actions in your to-do list and if necessary, leave the link as part of the item’s Notes (most task managers have equivalent functionality).

This will lead to a much higher likelihood of getting the ideas implemented and prevent the Flagged inbox from becoming unused because it’s too full of ‘important’ information that you haven’t gotten around to processing for months.

Actionable feed items are plentiful if you’re reading good quality information, whether you just want to figure out how to get away from the office or you’re going to dive into a sea of social news sites for promoting your blog.

If you want to keep an item around because you feel it has long-term value and you’ll be coming back to it every few weeks, months or even years, easy! Just keep the focus on getting it out of your information processing hub. A del.icio.us account is fantastic for this, and is a good way to keep an offsite backup of your browser favorites too. NetNewsWire allows you to send an item to del.icio.us without leaving the program.

Information: Processed

There you have it: you’ve gone from reading the newspaper and two magazines, three television channels and a hundred websites to one single inbox with the help of a browser and, even more so, a good newsreader. Sure, television can be a temptation at the end of the day and reading a magazine is a good way to relax, but when it comes to information for the work day, nothing beats this efficient, centralized method.

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