Tivo for your In-Box

One of the ten principles of Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World is to Manage Information Abundance.  If you’re like me, this is a constant challenge. The amount of new content being created is immense.  Every day my inbox swells with new articles, blog posts, and newsletters that I have signed up to receive.

The problem is that I like to keep my in-box relatively clean so that I can ensure I am seeing and reacting to emails I need to take near term action on. If I were to go through every email and read in real time everything of interest, I wouldn’t do much else but manage my in-box.  Just like using Tivo or another DVR with TV programs and movies – I need to “time-shift” my consumption of this content and be able to control the timing of when I view it.

Many people deal with this by using productivity guru David Allen’s method of moving the emails they can’t deal with at the moment to another folder for processing later.  I’ve been doing that for years and it certainly helps.  David  feels that this offloads the item from your short term memory and frees you up to concentrate on more pressing items.

But I find that the method still leaves me a bit frazzled. The reason being that most of the time, I open the email, I then see an article or post that I want to read, but since the time is not right, I file the email away for later.  But that still leaves me with two problems:

1. I end up with an accumulated list of things I know I want to get to and since the email is still there, I am left with a bit of stress of all those unprocessed emails sitting in that dark Follow-Up folder…
2. When I am ready to read those posts and articles I will have to open up the email again, scan and locate what I was interested in reading the first time, click to open up in my browser, and then finally read.  When you are dealing with a high volume of emails, this redundant action is a major time waster.

There is a better way to deal with this problem which eliminates these two issues.  My solution is to use an App called Pocket – essentially a Tivo for your In-Box.

Pocket allows you to save a web page to access it for reading it later.  This delayed gratification allows you to more quickly process your inbox, not have to re-read an email later to figure out what links you are interested in, and neatly organize your online reading list for a more appropriate time.  For us MAC users, we can achieve a similar result by using the Reading List capability in the Safari browser.  I in fact use both Reading List and Pocket – I use Reading List as a placeholder for web pages that I need to come back to as research for a current project or task I am working on and Pocket for general articles of interest.

But Pocket has a number of features that go much beyond Safari’s reading list feature and make it indispensable in today’s multi platform / multi app digital world:

1. Pocket runs on MAC OSX, iOS, Android, Chrome, and any web browser web. There are also third party clients for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, WebOS, and others available.  So, if you are someone who uses a number of different platforms spread out across your home and business lives, Pocket will keep you synchronized no matter what device you are using at the time.
2. Pocket also works with a number of third party reading apps – Pulse, Flipboard, and Zite being examples and is in fact integrated into over 500 apps!  When you are using one of those apps, Pocket allows you to save an article for reading later directly from within the app.
3. Pocket allows you to see your content in “Article View” – a very clean, non-distracting presentation of the article alone or in “Web View” – where you see the article within the actual web page.  Safari’s Reading List functions similarly, but always defaults to web view.  With Pocket, you can default to seeing every article in Article View if that’s what suits you.
4. Allows you to sort and retrieve by Article, Video, or Image.
5. Built in social networking – send any article video or image by email and post to Twitter, Facebook, or Buffer.  Also includes direct interface to your Evernote account for long term storage of content.
6. A separate “Archive” folder where you can park web pages for longer term viewing or retrieval so that you keep your main Pocket page cleaner.
7. Unlike some other read-it-later apps, it’s free.

If you want to manage your particular abundance of information, Pocket is a must have app.

Jay Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

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