How to keep up with all your Online Information
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Today most of the Internet users have at least two e-mails, one social network account and a RSS reader, and sometimes even more. This is a typically profile of an user with too much information and no time to keep up with all of them. So, what can be done do save time and effort, and follow your favorite author or blog? Categorization, filters, and schedule. Three concepts to help you not to go crazy with this amount of information.
There are several online applications and desktop softwares to assist you organizing your data like password, blog feeds, tweets, Facebook, and many other things that you have online. I’ll show here apps that I’ve used and recommend, but feel free to give your opinion about others.
Passwords, notes, identities…
It’s not a easy job to remember all your passwords and accounts, and if you’re careful as I’m, you should use one different password for each account. To solve this issue, I use and recommend 1Password from Agile Solutions. An amazing Mac application and iPhone app for fast automatic form filling and a secure way to save all your passwords, notes, identities and even personal information like passport, ID and driver’s license.
If you like to save notes, Evernote does the job quite well. There are several features for quickly save notes and sync them over your computer and mobile.
Tweets, Facebook updates and RSS in one place
Save time with applications like Socialite to have all your information in one place. Socialite is a powerful tool to gather all information, news, updates, feeds in a beautiful and easy to use application.
“From news on Digg, photos on Flickr, statuses and photos on Facebook and Twitter updates, to full Google Reader RSS syncing, Socialite keeps all your social networks in one convenient place.” – Socialite page
Don’t waste time with several applications, each one with just one feature, grab apps like Socialite and keep up with your updates in one single place.
Categorization, filters, and schedule
Don’t kill yourself opening dozens of links on Twitter, reading hundreds of articles, answering thousands of e-mails at the same time, prioritize your day with scheduled moments to do one thing at time.
Filter your feeds with only the necessary, don’t try to read 300 blogs of technology, choose 10 to 30 of your interest and put them in folders of daily reading. The others put in folders to read later – make your day worth reading important news. And don’t try to read them all at the same time.
Create categories so you can chose what to read and focus your attention in one subject. If you starting reading all kind of information at the same time, you’ll probably forget what did you read at the first time.
Things like that help you to keep up with your information daily. You’ll probably save time and effort when prioritizing what you have to do and scheduling when you have to do. Keep in mind to always give yourself 10 to 15 minutes of rest at each hour.
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