As a person who browses the Internet everyday, I have to say that there are so many contents created every day. As a result, I have to come up with ways to handle all these information without overloading my brain. In this post, I would like to talk about the tools I use on a daily basis and my workflow.
RSS
RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary, is a way to summarize contents on the Web. It is essentially an XML document that presents title, body, date, and etc. of the contents.
I think there are several reasons why I use RSS. First, it’s kind of a subscription service, so you can get notified when new contents were published at the websites you follow. Therefore, we don’t have to waste time browsing those websites one by one every day. The contents are pushed to you. Second, it combines multiple sources of information into a single one. This makes processing information extremely easy.
To utilize such a great tool, you have to use a service that helps you maintain your subscriptions. Personally, I use FeedBin, which is a paid service. You can also use other services such as Feedly, which is free and quite popular. Self-hosting service is also available.
Pocket is a read-it-later service. It is basically just a container for all the information which you would like to save for later. Pocket is useful when you see some useful information and don’t have time to read it. You can just save it to Pocket and check it out later.
Evernote
Evernote is a note taking app. However, it can also serve as a place for information storage and retrieval. It has features such as notebook, tagging, text search and etc. These features make it a reasonable choice for the above-mentioned purpose. Also, since Evernote is very popular, you can share information to Evernote from basically every app and browser you use. Maybe other note taking app is better for content creation, but Evernote is the one to choose for information sharing.
My workflow
Now that I introduced the tools I use, I would like to share my workflow with these tools. First, I subscribe to websites of my interest on FeedBin. When I browse my RSS feed, I’ll save valuable information that I have read directly to Evernote. For things that I need to check out later, I save then to Pocket. And when I process those information in Pocket, I’ll see if I need to save them to Evernote. For things outside my RSS feed, I just save then to Evernote directly. Eventually, every piece of information is stored in Evernote.
Some thoughts
I think knowledge management is really about grouping many sources of information together. As you can see from my workflow, I try to group everything together with RSS first. And Evernote is the place where I group all the valuable information in the end. With these great tools, I can save my time processing information and be more productive.
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