Having worked independently for 18 months now, I thought I’d write about some of the technology tools I’ve discovered to make my life easier and my work more efficient. In this installment, I’ll tell how I manage my reading.
Like a lot of people, I need to do a lot of reading to keep current. Nearly all of my reading is online these days, and I tend to get to it in snatches of a half hour or so, usually early in the morning or late at night.
The constant stream of newsletters and RSS updates that cross my desktop don’t live by my schedule, though, so I rely on three tools to help me organize content and find it when I need it. They are Google Desktop, del.icio.us and Firefox, and I wouldn’t want to be without them.
Google Desktop is an incredibly powerful product that indexes nearly every word on your computer. With it, I can find files by keyword with almost instantaneous speed. The shortcut to bring up the search box is hitting the Control key twice. That brings up a small
But I find the hidden value of Google Desktop is the information it indexes in hidden and cached files that would never be visible otherwise. This is an invaluable tool when you’ve discarded something you never thought you’d need and then suddenly find yourself wishing you had that information back.
For example, last week I was listing some rental property on Craigslist.org. I wanted to find the original listing that I had used last August when the apartment was last rented. I never bothered to commit that information to a document, but Google Desktop was able to pull it out of cache memory: it literally found the page I had viewed on Craigslist when I posted the ad nine months ago.
This feature is also useful when traveling because it essentially gives you access to web pages when disconnected. Many times I’ve been able to fish information out of my computer that was on a website I visited weeks or months ago but which was still available to me because it was cached.
Which brings me to how I use these tools to manage my reading. Much of my news comes in the form of links in e-mails and RSS feeds. I use Firefox’s tabbed browsing feature to open these links in tabs (Control-click on a link does this automatically), which I can look at later. At some point during the day, I’ll go through these tabs and tag them to my del.icio.us account using the bookmark extension, a plug-in that basically replaces Firefox bookmarks with a del.icio.us back-end.
Saving a page on del.icio.us is as easy as striking Control-D and typing a tag. For articles I want to read later, I the tagl “readit.” Later, when I have time, I’ll select the “readit” tag from the del.icio.us browser plug-in and choose the “Open in Tabs” option. This automatically opens every item with the readit tag in its own tab. If I’m about to hit the road, I can shut the lid on my laptop at this point. When I open it on the plane, all the pages are still there. What’s also cool is that with Google Desktop, these pages are automatically cached for retrieval offline, so I can actually read web pages on the plane, even if I haven’t read them previously.