I don’t know if all of the people who refer to Inbox Zero have ever watched Merlin’s talk or how they practice it, but I’ve gotten quite good at my Gmail version of it. My system is simple: using a combination of stars and not-in-email lists (Todoist, issues, etc) I keep everything out of my inbox following a triage session (which I do a few times per day).
For “read later”, I currently use Pocket (although, I own Instapaper too) which has similar features - and is supported on all of my devices (making capture very easy).
I put the Pocket app on the home screen of my iPhone, and enabled the ‘unread count’ badge. Those who know me (and have ever seen my phone), know that I’m fairly obsessive about eliminating those little red circles. This helped me form a habit to process a bunch of my Pocket inbox whenever I had a few free moments.
My goal was to triage (note: this doesn’t mean read) 100 articles per day. I set Pocket to show me the oldest first so I could work my way through the backlog.
Be relentless. If you’re like me and want to consume ALL THE INFORMATION, there are probably articles in your list that are no longer relevant. Delete them.
It may be that you have hundreds of unread articles in your read later queue that are all things you just want to read for the sake of reading. For me, however, I found that my backlog consisted of several types of articles that I was able to skim and act upon to remove them from the queue:
Finally, a lot of my queue tends to be technical articles (performance tricks, coding techniques, new releases, etc). The thing is, without a specific project associated, there isn’t anything actionable for these. Currently, I tag them with the language/framework/etc and archive (skimming first if they’re quick). In theory, they’re still in my archive for someday. In reality, things change quickly and I’m far more apt to just search when I need to know.
Everything else - which is long form articles that I actually just want to sit and read - gets “favorited”.
Now, when I get the chance to sit and read, I open Pocket to my “favorite” queue and enjoy!
]]>Lately, I’ve been re-testing that theory and have surprised myself with the results:
I’m living in the browser.
OK, not entirely. But my currently running applications include: Firefox, Emacs, Terminal, Adium and iTunes (sorry, songbird).
The frequent, attentive readers among you know that I’ve been tinkering with “Single Site Browsers” lately as part of this experiment - because, if I’m using Firefox for development - I don’t want “other stuff” cluttering that. Well, a recent article on lifehacker made me rethink my approach.
The article outlines a way to have “permanent” tabs(i.e. tabs that automatically reload when you restart yoru browser) that only appear as a favicon (thus saving screen real estate). My current lineup looks like this :
That’s gmail (personal and work), remember the milk, google voice and google reader.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been trying out this system and have found little reason to want to switch away from it. There are some properties that appeal to me: my application list is entirely cross-platform (substitute pidgin for adium) and free software. Application management, setup and configuration is minimal and I have to do very little application switching throughout the day. In fact, with my external monitor, I can fit everything on one screen where I can see it.
Ditching a desktop mail reader was obviously the biggest shift. But in the case of gmail, rtm and google reader there are a few things in common that make these “work” for me as desktop replacements: offline mode (thanks to google gears), extensive keyboard shortcuts (better than their desktop equivalents), regular updates / improvments and APIs / methods for extensions.
Here’s my current list of Firefox extensions, let me know if I’m missing any great ones:
How much of your life do you spend living in your browser?
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