Managing the information stack

I try to keep Life 1.0 in a somewhat organized chaos. When it comes to my computer, there are a lot of things on it (source code, programs, documents, etc.) and there are a lot of things it keeps eating up from the internet (feeds, favorites, newsgroups, emails). That’s a lot of stuff to manage. So when it comes to trying to manage it all, it becomes a bit of a bear. I’m a strong fan of David Allen’s Gettings Things Done (GTD) approach and try to use it with work and hobbies and such (BTW, check out Hanselminutes from a couple of days ago for a lot of great Outlook add-ins around this). This helps organize the mess, but then there’s the problem of disparate types of data and what tools to use to track, read, and store them.

Take for example the big three. RSS feeds, Email, and Newsgroups (I won’t lump in bookmarked favorites as they aren’t as dynamic). As I’ve committed to Office 2007 now, Outlook is my email tool and it does a pretty good job (other than being a resource pig). The links from Scott’s show help on organizing things so hopefully SpeedFiler or something will help with this. Also the flag/task feature you get OOTB is a great way to follow-up on things. Any email that comes in becomes one of 4 things:

  • Something I should respond to immediately (a simple reply) so I do (then delete it)
  • Something I should follow-up later so I flag it for today, tommorow, next week, etc. This creates a task that’s link to the email. When the email is marked as complete (or deleted), so is the task.
  • Something I should delete so I do
  • Something I should file for future reference, so I do

The filing is what I might make use of SpeedFiler for, as I do have a lot of different PST files (one for projects, one for software products, one for online things like passwords/sites/domain registrations) and a lot of folders in each one (one folder for each project on the go, one folder for each piece of software organized under the company name). It all works pretty well and since about June I’ve kept my inbox down to a dozen or so messages, all marked for follow-up (as opposed to the 800 items that would just sit there until I slugged through them and moved them somewhere).

That takes care of emails but what about RSS feeds? Outlook 2007 is pure and simple crap when it comes to these (at least in beta 2). They don’t update correctly, don’t always display correctly, and seem to chew up even more resources than email alone does. That sent me back to RSS Bandit. I really enjoyed that tool but it suffers from a few problems. First is focus. When I’m just moving the cursor through the list of feeds, it sometimes decides to change focus back to the tree. I originally had it configured to mark categories read when I moved off them, but that quickly changed. It does a good job of displaying the feeds and overall isn’t bad (although it does suffer again from memory hog as it’s always running around 200mb which to me just isn’t right). I just installed FeedDemon and it looks interesting. What I like about it is the fact it tracks what I read which helps me find those feeds that I subscribed to, but couldn’t care less about a month later. Maybe FD will turn out to be my reader of choice so time will tell.

So now we have to deal with newsgroups. I read about a dozen groups along with a half dozen private Microsoft ones. That’s about my capacity as I just can’t keep up beyond that. RSS Bandit has a feature to read newsgroups which looked like a good idea at the time, but it’s threading model is horrible and it’s impossible to figure out where the thread started. There are some stand-alone newsgroup readers out there, but nothing that really jumps out at me. I was using Newshound, an Outlook add-in, but it suffers from beta block. It doesn’t support 2007 (yet).

It’s all very bothersome. One one hand, I could use something like Newshound and intraVnews as Outlook add-ins, which would give me pretty good RSS and Usenet readers all in the comfort of my Outlook. On the other hand, I could just delegate Outlook for emails and use FeedDemon for RSS and [insert cool news reader here] for Usenet.

So what’s a girl to do? Turn Outlook into the catch-all for information (like Scott has said a few times, just embed OneNote into the note feature and we might as well throw in a browser tab and we don’t need any other products) or have different tools for similar jobs. It’s all information at the end of the day, and I don’t see RSS feeds, newsgroup posts, or email as being that different in the grand scheme of things. Maybe we need a BDC for information on the desktop. 

What do you guys recommend? How do you manage your information stack?

2 Comments

  • Hi Bil,

    I'm still running on Office 2003. When I get an e-mail come in, I either:

    - Delete it if it's something my spam filter missed (SP2 on SBS server doesn't seem to catch anything near as much these days!)
    - Read/reply to it then move it to an archive (I have folders with the year, with sub-folders of Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4). That way I can search for previous items quickly and easily (I can normally guess which quarter I had an e-mail).
    - If I haven't got time to reply, but needs actioning, I flag it, and leave in my my inbox.

    NB Only spam ever gets deleted. You never know when you might NEED to quote what someone said in a n e-mail.

    We also use SharePoint Team Sites internally, and I find this a great way to store useful information. I can get to it from any computer on the Internet. I can use FeedReader to consume RSS feeds, and keep knowledgebases - for example, we have a "Developer Team Site" to store knowledge base items, RSS feeds, internal news items, announcements etc. rather than sending e-mail*.

    * Reducing e-mail is also a way to help keep organised. So we use MSN Messeger / Live Communicator for quick discussions between ourselves.

    For tracking communication with customers, we're starting to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 - although quite a learning curve - it's starting to prove useful to ensure we also resolve customer issues - rather than letting questions get lost in your inbox ...

    Hope that helps.

  • I know I probably shouldn't say this here... I use Outlook (2007) for mail and use the Wizz RSS add-on for Firefox for my RSS feeds. It's really handy and works better than most of the other RSS readers that I've tried.
    It's still information overload though and I don't know how to get out of it.

    Kenton

Comments have been disabled for this content.