King  Gary 

In today’s world of information overload, it’s hard to keep up with all of the news going on in the blogosphere and the world. For me, there are several ‘containers’ where I keep information stored so I can refer to them when I want, including Gmail for email, Google Calendar for my schedule, Google Reader for my feeds, and a lesser known online service, ListMixer, which I use to save links temporarily (think of del.icio.us, but the links only exist for a maximum of 30 days). As of last count, I’ve got the following number of items:

• Gmail
  • Inbox: 1 unread
  • Starred: 4 emails
• Google Calendar
  • 17 events or to-do items for today
• Google Reader
  • 3 unread items
  • 23 starred items
• ListMixer
  • 50 items

Slow over time, this stuff piles up, even though the oldest item out of all of these containers is from less than a week ago!

Starring items to give them priority

Out of the four of these containers, both Gmail and Google Reader gives me the ability to ’star’ certain items, allowing me to save them for future referral, or to remind me to read them the next time I open up my account. This is great when using it in combination with keyboard shortcuts, because then I can quickly sift through the items and marking those that I want to return back to with a star. Also, in essence, ListMixer is like starring a website for me to look over again as well.

Using labels to give context

In Gmail, I also used the labels feature to label my email. But, for emails that required immediate or daily attention, I gave them a special label that was all in uppercase text, such as B5MEDIA or EBAY PURCHASES, to remind me to look at them at least once a day. I also sometimes use Google Calendar as my to-do list, as the ability to quickly drag events from one date to another is very useful for chronic procrastinators who often delay that ‘clean the xyz’ item for far too many times, but when I need a really accessible to-do list that takes no time at all to call up, I turn to High Priority, which is a great to-do manager for the Mac which sits in your menu bar (that thing that sits at the top of your screen.)

Checking my containers

I checked my containers for items that I starred whenever I remembered to do so, which ended up being not that often - so I often ended up with at least several dozen items starred, waiting to be read and followed up on by me - until now. It’s a simple solution, but it works great for people, like me, who likes to procrastinate things that seem less important than those that are obviously important, such as work-related tasks.

Emptying out containers, one-by-one

Now, instead of slowly cleaning out my containers little by little, but never having them completely empty, I set a weekly deadline for me to empty them out completely. At the end of every Friday night, I’ll go through each container and act on actionable items, and discard anything that isn’t needed.

I’ve created a folder in my Firefox bookmarks called ‘perpetual’, which contains bookmarks for all 4 of the containers that I listed above - Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and ListMixer - so that they’re all grouped together like that. I don’t like having ‘orphaned’ data just sitting somewhere in one of my accounts in an online to-do list manager like Ta-da List, and I forgot about it a few days later, letting it linger there indefinitely. It could’ve been a great business idea! Which is why I also use Google Docs & Spreadsheets to store that kind of data, but which I check less often since I tend to use it less (damn - my life really does seem to revolve around Google a lot these days!)

It’s the little things like this that really puts everything back in motion and it gives a nice sense of accomplishment at least once a week, because now I have a reason to clean out my containers - I want to make my own deadline!

If you have any other tools that you use to temporarily store information for near-future retrieval, please post them in the comments. I prefer to have a minimal number of tools to use so that I don’t have to refer to as many of them, but I’m sure this differs for others.

Popularity: 20% [?]