CharlesSieg.com

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$25 banquet table.  $3,000 Steelcase Leap Worklounge chair.  The desk has been around since 1995.  It has duct tape smoothing out a worn edge.  The chair replaced a 10-year old POS and was a "reward" to myself for meeting a sales goal earlier this year.  I have another unmet goal which, when achieved, will probably result in a new desk.  It's a big goal, though.  I suspect the desk and I will be together for awhile.

Why spend $3,000 on a chair?  It's a really, really comfortable chair that I don't mind sitting in for extremely long periods of time.  When I launched Renkara Media Group, I spent 16 hours a day in my chair.  Trust me, it's one of the best investments you can make.

I should also note that I had wanted the chair for several years prior to buying it.  Technically, I could have purchased the chair at any time.  But I'm all about delayed gratification.  I wanted to tie it to a very specific goal and refused to give in and buy it until I met the goal.  Meanwhile, my crappy old chair was a constant reminder that I had not yet reached the goal.  Just as my arms are slightly uncomfortable rubbing against the duct tape on my desk, reminding me that I have not yet achieved my next goal.

“Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.”~Jean Cocteau

Sent from my iPhone

Sent from my iPhone

It's been a great week.  We shipped a new iPhone app called iComedian™ Best Bar Jokes.  We wrapped up a major client consulting project and are making headway on another.  My youngest son Connor had a very healthy 4-month doctor's visit and got his next round of immunizations.  Chicago is having fantastic early fall weather and Ahu and I have been out walking or running in it every day this week.

This is the new CharlesSieg.com.  It used to be Forkbender.com (and that URL will still arrive at this website) but I don't have time to post to two blogs and, due to good advice from friends, I'm going with my own name as the brand versus the "forkbender" thing.

I came up with the "forkbender" domain after seeing The Matrix and watching the kid bend the spoon with this mind.  I think forkbender.com came online around 2000 or 2001 so it's been in good use for about a decade.  Yes, a decade of blogging.  I always think of the internet as a "new" thing but the reality is that I've been working on web applications and other related projects since 1996 or so.  In 2011 it will have been a good 15 years.  I remember when an ISDN line was considered "high speed" internet.  Anyway, enough reminiscing.

I have a lot of articles to post here regarding the current quest to determine where we will move to in 2011.

As you may have noticed, I am still using Posterous for this blog.  I switched a few months ago.  I almost switched back to WordPress but have gotten used to posting every little thing to Posterous via email and having it autopost to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.  I'd hate to have to manually set all of that crap up in WordPress and then have to maintain it.  Posterous, like my Mac and my iPhone "just works" and I can spend my full blogging time on writing instead of goofing around with WordPress.

Oh, and my raid group downed the Lich King last night.  Yeah, baby, yeahhhhhh.

I wanted to write and share how I collect and process the myriad articles, tweets, and other tidbits of information that come my way every day.

I am a huge fan of Getting Things Done (GTD), which is the name of a book written by David Allen and a popular method of organizing tasks, projects, and information in your life.  Without going into too much detail, there are five steps in this workflow:

1. Collect
2. Process
3. Organize
4. Decide
5. Act

There's a great summary of the workflow here:  http://lifedev.net/2007/02/gtd-cheatsheet-the-workflow/

This discussion focuses on the first two steps: collecting information and processing it.

My primary sources of information are RSS feeds and Twitter feeds.  I currently have 91 RSS feeds that I subscribe to and 23 people on Twitter that I "follow".  A typical day results in several hundred tweets and articles that enter my information space.  All of my RSS subscriptions are managed by Google Reader and Twitter feeds are, shockingly, managed on Twitter.

Both of these types of information have advantages and drawbacks.  With news articles from RSS feeds, I get the most in-depth information.  Most articles are somewhat verbose and have good, useful details.  However, since I subscribe to a lot of feeds which cover the same topics, I get a lot of duplicates.  For example, MacWorld and AppleInsider will often write articles on the same topics...but not always.  Twitter tweets are about 95% useless garbage and 5% gems.  So about 1 in 20 tweets will be something truly awesome and the rest are tweets about random crap that no one cares about.  But that 1% is worth sticking with Twitter for.

I do not, however, go to Twitter.com to read tweets or to Google Reader to read my RSS feeds.  Rather, I use applications on the iPhone and iPad for reading both of these sources of information.  I use Osfoora (iPhone) and Osfoora HD (iPad) for reading tweets.  I use Reeder on both iPhone and iPad for reading RSS feeds.  I like having one application per source - Osfoora and Reeder - which has both iPhone and iPad versions so I don't have to learn to use more apps than I have to.  All of these apps are paid apps and all of them are worth every penny to me.

However, there is one other major feature which both Osfoora and Reeder have: Instapaper integration.  Instapaper is a magnificent website and iPhone / iPad application which takes web pages and presents them in a very readable format.  Instapaper is like iBooks or Kindle for web pages.  It is optimized for reading and it works offline.  More about Instapaper later...

Collect

The best thing about using these apps on my iPhone or iPad is that, since I always have at least one of these devices with me, I can peruse tweets or news whenever I have "useless" time.  "Useless" time, to me, is time spent standing in Starbucks lines, waiting for coffee, waiting for someone to run in and make a bank deposit, waiting to check out at a store, etc.  Time which otherwise is lost staring at a wall or looking out a window.

When I have these applications open, I'm not really reading, I'm scanning.  I don't have time to read every tweet and every news article that comes across my RSS feed.  So I scan the headlines and the tweets.  However, when I find something that merits further reading, I tap a button and say "Read It Later" and my article or tweet gets collected into Instapaper.  The key here is scan, find something interesting, and collect it into the inbox known as Instapaper.  Using these two apps, I am able to scan hundreds of articles and tweets in about 10-15 minutes total per day, collecting only the ones which hold important information.

Process

At the end of the day, I process the inbox.  My preferred way to do this is to fire up Instapaper for iPad and read the day's articles there.  When Instapaper launches, it downloads readable, optimized versions of the articles and web pages that you collected earlier.  Once downloaded, no further network connectivity is required.  You can hop on a train or get on a plane and read all of these articles offline.  The Instapaper reader ignores whatever stylesheets, ads, navigation, and other clutter that were present on the original web page and reformats the meaningful text into a nice newspaper-like format.  It's like reading your own personalized newspaper.

From this Instapaper "inbox" you can perform the GTD processing workflow steps.  For non-actionable items, Reference and Incubate items are sent to Evernote (these items are outside of the scope of this article).  Other non-actionable items are archived (trash).

For actionable items, if they take less than two minutes, I do them immediately.  An example of this is something I found in an RSS article about something I want to buy.  I'll just go to Amazon.com, buy it, and then archive the item.  Done.  Other items may be delegated, deferred, or added to a project plan, all of which go into Things (also outside this discussion).

Summary

In the end, my information workflow is all about GTD and tools.  Information comes from Osfoora and Reeder and goes into Instapaper.  Information comes out of Instapaper and goes into Evernote for long-term storage or into Things to become someone's task.  Simple.  I calculate that I spend less than 2 hours per week distilling several thousand articles and tweets into the useful, critical, urgent information I need to run my business and my life.  It would just not be possible without GTD, without the tools, and without the mobile technology I use to do it.