I’m quite proud of the amount of content I read each day. On average I go through anywhere from 50 to 75 articles on various topics gathered from a number of websites and feeds from around the Internet. With this many pieces to go through, I had to assemble a solution allowing me to:
- Identify articles I want to read
- Remind myself to read them when the opportunity arose
- Identify if the article is worth sharing with others
- Share those articles with the right locations in social media
To accomplish this I’ve settled on three main tools:
The steps I needed to configure in my tools to make the solution workable were:
- Configure feeds I want to review each day in Feedly (this only needs to be done once for each feed)
- Configure a recipe in IFTTT to create new tasks in Todoist whenever I mark an article as Saved for Later in Feedly Pro
- Add a Label to Todoist called “@Share”
Each day I then work the solution:
- I open Feedly Pro and review the headlines of the articles captured from the previous day.
- On each article of interest, I mark the article as “Saved for Later”
- Once I have finished reviewing all the titles I mark the feed as Done in Feedly Pro which clears the remaining articles and resets my counts to zero
- When I set an article to “Saved for Later”, IFTTT automatically creates a new task in Todoist under a project I have called “Articles to Read” with a due date of Tomorrow. This way I have a full day to review the articles before my karma starts to get penalized in Todoist (I’ll explain this later).
- As the day progresses and I have a few moments, I open Todoist and go to the “Articles to Read” project and click on the link to the article that IFTTT automatically attached to the task that was created when I saved the article.
- I read the article and decide if it’s worth sharing.
- If the article is worth sharing I update the Todoist task with the label @Share and postpone it’s due date until the next day
- If the article isn’t worth sharing I mark the task as complete and move on to the next one
By using this process I’m able to move through my articles quickly and efficiently from any device.
At other points during the day I want to share those articles worth sharing, so I open Todoist, and filter for the @Share label. I use an extension for Chrome for sharing web posts to Buffer which has already been configured to post to my most common social media destinations. I click on the extension, add a description, and send it on it’s now scheduled way.
Now about that karma thing. Todoist gives you a point system based method of measuring how successful you are at getting your tasks done. One of the aspects of “karma” in Todoist is if you have tasks overdue for more than four days, you lose karma. I’ve found it to be an excellent incentive (it would appear I’m more personally competitive than I thought) to keep tasks moving and finished.
There is a significant power to defining automated solutions to match how you work and what you want to accomplish. Time spent understanding your productivity requirements can make all the difference in the world and keep you on top of your game.
You must be logged in to post a comment.