1. Active discovery is seeking out a solution to a specific problem you are having. For example, if you were launching a website, google searching a good hosting company is active discovery.

2. Passive discovery is following sources that you trust to report information that is important to you. Reading favorite websites, blogs, and print publications are all passive discovery.

A healthy combination of both is good information management. Active discovery is obviously essential, most of us spend much of our day seeking out solutions to problems. Passive discovery’s advantages on the other hand aren’t immediately clear. They are easily overlooked but are just as important.

The Advantages of Passive Discovery

Passive discovery has advantages that can’t be duplicated by active discovery.

1. Finding solutions to problems that you don’t know you have. In order to solve a problem with active discovery, first you have to identify that you are having a problem. This can be harder than it sounds. It sometimes takes significant imagination to realize things could be better than they are now. Not having to identify your problems yourself means solving more problems with less effort.

2. Creating an awareness of which problems have good solutions. This will sometimes save you from reinventing the wheel, but it also has much deeper advantages. Familiarity with many solutions means you can focus on the relationships between solutions. Most new things are created by combining two things that already existed.

Passive discovery’s advantages show up less frequently than their active counterpart, but when they do their impact is often much greater.

One last point about passive discovery, it is very easy to do. Just scanning headlines and digging deeper when find something is all it takes. It sounds trivial and I’ve never heard it considered “serious work.” But when I look back on what’s had the biggest impact on my work, it’s not the solutions that I was looking for, but the ones that found me.

Definition of Good Software

When selecting software tools, I want to assure the following:

• The software will continue to be available and actively developed.

• The software will be stable and free from memory leaks and other performance flaws.

• The software will be of high quality and avoid common design problems like poor OS integration and feature bloat.

Choosing Good Software

To increase the likelihood that the software I select satisfies the above conditions, I look for software in the following order:

• Stage 1. Built-in to OS X

• Stage 2. Open Source Software

• Stage 3. Free Software or Free Versions of Paid Software

• Stage 4. Shareware and Commercial Software

I suggest only moving up a stage when you have already outgrown the current stage. For example, I still use Terminal.app, despite the fact that iTerm has tabs (and I love tabs), because I don’t use enough terminal windows at once to really need tabs. I also used iChat over Adium X up until I actually needed MSN support, even though I knew in advance that one day I might need that feature.

The idea is that the lower you stay on these stages, the more your computing environment will be stable, of high quality and in continued development.

Finally, these rules are made to be broken. They are just guidelines.

All of these tools satisfy my requirements of being simple, flexible, and easy to use.

Discovery

NetNewsWire - I’ve already written 2053 words about RSS, so I’ll refrain from adding more now.

Safari - I prefer Safari’s simple, straight-forward approach to web browsing over Firefox’s more feature-rich, extension-enhanced browing experience. In my opinion, most Firefox extensions allow you to do things in a web browser that are really better served by separate applications anyway (such as writing, storing notes, and RSS feed reading).

Sogudi - Quick Search plugin for Safari.

fwit - Incremental Search plugin for Safari.

Storage

The Finder - Yes, I use the regular old Finder (with a couple of basic customizations) to manage most of my stored information.

FolderOrg AppleScript - An AppleScript folder action that, when attached to a folder, automatically moves anything placed into that folder into a subfolder named with the current date.

Refinement

VoodooPad - Danny O’Brien’s research of “prolific alpha geeks” found that large numbers of his interviewees stored their information as plain text. VoodooPad’s wiki functionality combines most of the advantages of plain text with the incredibly powerful ability to dynamically add any number of hierarchical sub-levels to any piece of text. VoodooPad is at the heart of my time management system.

Roaring Penguin’s Remind - I use Remind in conjunction with VoodooPad’s built-in “run” functionality to give follow-up dates to to-dos.

iCal - I use iCal to manage to-dos that must happen on a specific date, or at a specific time, such as scheduled meetings. iCal is missing a key software calendar feature, namely a way to automatically add reminders to all events, but I stick with it anyway hoping one day Apple will give it some attention.

I-Search - I navigate my to-do list using incremental search. This wonderful system-wide plug-in gives incremental search to most Cocoa applications.

Presentation

I am not going to list any presentation tools because these applications depend entirely on which medium you are presenting information in.

General

Apple Mail - An email client has three roles under my system: a searchable database of information, a way to manage a list of people to email back, and an application for reading, writing and sending email. These three roles commingle discovery, storage, refinement, and presentation, therefore, email will be an exception to many of the information management rules that I recommend. Later I’ll write about why I think breaking these rules is a good idea for email.

TextPander - Automatically expand user-customized abbreviations to longer pieces of text in any application. This is very flexible functionality that works as both a typing-aid and an information storage/retrieval mechanism.

Quicksilver - Quicksilver needs no introduction, so I’ll just point out that even Tog, who has written extensively about disproving that the keyboard has advantages over the mouse (although personally I think his research is inconclusive), acknowledges a speed increase when using this kind of keyboard-only tool:

“I haven’t performed or reviewed a stopwatch test, but LaunchBar [same concept as Quicksilver] should be able to outperform a visual interface for complex, repetitive switching sequences by an expert user.”

Summary

This is just a quick introduction to the tools that my information management system uses. Future topics in this series will cover both the details of how this system works, and general tips, tricks and observations about using these tools to manage information.

I chose the term “time management” for the title of this series because that’s the term that has been popularized recently by David Allen, 43 Folders and the like. But my system covers more than just managing to-dos, so I am going to introduce a new term, “Information Management,” to describe it. The goal of information management is simple:

To make sure that the information that you need is right in front of you when you need it.

This means having your next to-do in front of you when you are ready for it and pulling out that “Perfect Mouse-Trap” article, from four months ago, the second your cheese goes missing.

The Four Areas of Information Management

The first step in improving your information management is to understanding the different ways that you can manage information.

1. Discovery

   Discovery is seeking out and finding information, such as through RSS, Google, or Wikipedia.

2. Storage

   Storage is putting the information that you don’t need now, but will need in the future, somewhere where you can find it again. Most bookmarks, Ebooks, and your own not actionable notes are examples of storage.

3. Refinement

   Refinement is the process of actually doing stuff. This is the area that traditional time management focuses on. It includes to-do lists, and your own actionable notes.

4. Presentation

   Presentation is putting information into a form to share it with other people. Blog posts, Word Documents, Email, PDFs, and PowerPoint presentations all fall under presentation.

The VPZtms includes tips for managing each of these areas, but much of the trick is just keeping these areas separate from each other. Nothing bogs down a refinement system like a bunch of storage.

More coming soon.

There are three (closely-related) reasons that incorporating a new tool into your time management system often fails:

1. It is too complicated

2. It is too inflexible

3. It is too hard

Too Complicated

A tool is too complicated when it does too many extra things that you don’t need.

For example, the much heralded Kinkless GTD is too complicated for me because it is based around contexts, and I don’t use contexts.

When you are talking about software, too complicated can also mean that it uses too much system resources for the benefits it affords.

Too Inflexible

Too inflexible means that the tool has limitations that prevent it from being useful in enough situations.

For example, iCal’s built-in to-do system doesn’t give me a way to associate additional information with to-dos (such as links and my own notes), so it is too inflexible.

Too Hard

It is too hard to use a tool when you don’t use it in an appropriate situation because of the effort it requires.

When advising clients on their office arrangements, David Allen says that one of the first things he does is position their filing cabinet where they can reach it without getting up from their desk. Because a filing cabinet on the other side of the room is too hard.

Balance

These probably sounds like common sense, and they are. The idea is being able to quickly identify when and why something isn’t working. These are the distillation of the many specific reasons that tools or approaches haven’t become permanent parts of my system over the years.

The VPZtms is about striking the perfect balance. Receiving the maximum benefits of structure, without going too far in any of the above directions.

The Scope of my System

The characteristics of your work setup define which features your time management system needs and which tools are available to you.

My time management system is defined by the following characteristics:

1. I work from home, off of one computer.

   This means:

   • I don’t need contexts

   • I use all desktop software and no web software. Because the advantages of desktop software (they work better and are available offline) eclipse the advantages of web software (they are available from any computer connected to the internet).

2. My system is paperless

   This means:

   • All my tools will be software.

3. I run OS X

   This means:

   • All of my tools work exclusively on OS X (although similar software exists on most OSes).

It’s been Field-Tested

Five years ago the company I worked for asked me to start using a Franklin-Covey Planner. Like many others, I found that using a time management system helped me get more stuff done.

It has been five years since that first Franklin Planner and I have experimented with many different tools and systems since then. But for the last couple of years, my system has mostly remained static. I still try out new tools all the time, but nothing sticks.

Last week, Apple announced that Leopard will include a system-wide to-do system. I am a sucker for operating system-level functionality, so I expect I’ll be tinkering with my time management system heavily after this gets released. This means that now is a good time to describe my current system that has already been field-tested for years.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging about the time management system that has stuck with me through thick and thin and that, despite by best efforts, no new tool has been able to usurp.

To summarize the articles: after testing subjects by having them complete the same tasks with the mouse and with only the keyboard, Tog found that subjects consistently believed they had completed the task faster with the keyboard, when in reality they had completed the task faster with the mouse.

Tog states:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Tog then gives an explanation for the difference between perceived and actual time:

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

Tog’s articles are a great read, he makes points that contradict people’s instincts and backs them up with cold hard research. But, on the subject of whether the mouse is faster than the keyboard, Tog’s data is inconclusive.

A simple thought experiment will help me explain the reasoning behind that observation: imagine using a software application that is just one window. The window contains a picture of a keyboard and each letter on the keyboard is a button. Click on a button and it types that letter. What do you think would be faster for typing, the keyboard application or a real keyboard?

Most would agree that typing with a real keyboard is faster, which shows that at least the keyboard is faster for something (you may have started to doubt this after reading Tog’s articles). But what’s more important is the reason that it’s faster. The reason that typing with a keyboard is faster is a phenomena absent from Tog’s articles: muscle memory. Typing with a keyboard is faster because we have trained ourselves to the point that the minutiae of typing¹ is instinctual. We don’t think about hitting the individual keys to type a word anymore than we think about moving our hand to flip a light switch. We simply think about the result we want and the rest just happens.

Tog does not address muscle memory in his articles. In fact, his argument seems to be based on the test subjects not having committed the keyboard commands to muscle memory:

Part 1:

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function.

Part 3:

[When using the keyboard], how can someone spending twice as as long at a given task be more productive? They can’t…Under such circumstances, the user must set aside the original task of writing or editing a document in favor of figuring out what key to press and how many times to press it.

In the case of muscle memory, you don’t have to remember anything. The argument that there really isn’t anything to remember when hitting a sequence of keys from muscle memory is supported by reports of people being able to type a password without being able to tell you what they are typing. It follows that there wouldn’t be a “two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press.”

Tog seems to be making speed comparisons between a the equivalent of a hunt-and-peck typist vs. the mouse, instead of testing a touch typist. This is not surprising. The most straight forward way of performing a speed test would result in just such a comparison: take a random cross section of computer users, tell them which keyboard shortcuts they will be using, and then have them perform a series of tasks using these keyboard shortcuts followed by using the mouse.

This test will get you some great data. It will show you that the mouse is faster in many circumstances. It will help you discover a fascinating phenomena where users “forget” time that they spent “[deciding] upon which special-function key to press.” But it is a far cry from testing a seasoned computer user, who’s been using the same keyboard commands for years, completing real tasks while in flow, on the machine and in the work environment they spend 8 hours a day at.

Please note, that while Tog’s articles are based on actual research, this article is purely speculation. I am not trying to discount Tog’s observations. I am confident that the “high-level cognitive function amnesia” is a real phenomena that results in reduced speed gains when shortcuts not committed to muscle memory are used. This article was written to clarify the articles findings in the pursuit of truth.

Tog is among the most interesting user-interface experts on the web. For those interested in user-interface design, I highly recommend these two Tog articles: A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts and First Principles of Interaction Design.

1. Moving our fingers to the right keys. ↑

Before RSS I followed 5 websites. CNN, 43 Folders, Wired, and a couple of others that rotated with my interests. Then I started using an RSS feed reader and now I follow over 80 websites via their RSS feeds. That’s an increase of 16X or 1600%.

How often do we hear about increases of 1600%? That our product is 16X more efficient than our competitors? That profits are up 1600%? Numbers like that don’t come around day-to-day. Numbers like that only come around as the sign of something larger, of a fundamental paradigm shift that’s about to take place.

Right now not very many people use RSS. Only 1 out of 10 blog readers use it, a tiny percentage among a group that can benefit easily from it¹. Despite all the benefits of RSS, it has been very difficult technology to get people to start using. The RSS tagline - get new content without visiting a website’s homepage - just isn’t very exciting to most people.

But RSS can provide advantages that most people find exciting. If I were asked to list the benefits I receive from RSS, I would say I have deeper knowledge in my field, I am more current and better informed about my hobbies, I have closer connections with friends and family who have RSS feeds, and I read more interesting and inspiring content in general than ever before. That’s a list of benefits that anyone would find exciting.

RSS is being adopted slowly because people don’t associate these benefits with RSS. Which isn’t surprising - RSS isn’t marketed that way - but just as important is the fact that these advantages don’t happen overnight. They reveal themselves slowly as you manage and hone your stable of RSS feeds. RSS veterans are enjoying them now, but these time-released benefits aren’t doing anything to help RSS gain widespread adoption.

I would like to see RSS gain widespread adoption, and the best way I can think of to help that happen is to tell my story about how I came to gain these benefits from RSS. About how I went from initially dismissing RSS to considering it the most important new technology development in recent web history. Maybe this information can help market RSS or maybe it will help convince an RSS dabbler or two to take a closer look. With or without my help, the RSS revolution is coming. I’d just like it to see it happen sooner.

So here’s my story about how I became an RSS convert.

The Story

The First Look

My first look at RSS was pure OS X software fetishism. Most surveys rank the Mac-only feed reader NetNewsWire the most popular desktop RSS reader on any platform, this is remarkable considering the size of the Mac market-share. And NetNewsWire is remarkable software. The hotbed of remarkable Mac software during 2003 and 2004 was the now defunct O’Reilly Mac OS X Innovators contest. That page was the best pool of distinctly innovative Mac software that I had ever come across. Just as important as the innovative ideas that drove the software was the high emphasis all of the winners put on the user experience. These were interfaces that went beyond being functional or useful to being so well-designed that they are fun to use. NetNewsWire was the inaugaral contest winner; so it held an exceptional position in an already exceptional group. I was definitely going to try it.

The first thing I did after I launched NetNewsWire was take a look at the built-in “Sites Drawer.” The Sites Drawer is a list of feeds, sorted by topic, where you can subscribe to any of the feeds with just a couple of quick clicks. I gave the list a thorough once over, subscribing to every feed that looked interesting. Then I headed over the to the feed-finding search engines syndic8.com and feedster.com, where I added more feeds after a couple quick searches for topics I was interested in.

Soon I had very long, very full list. But I didn’t enjoy reading any of it. And, after the initial buzz of trying something new wore off, I stopped opening NetNewsWire. Soon after that a routine maintenance cleaning wiped NetNewsWire from my hard drive.

A Second Look

I continued to hear about how great RSS was, but now I had my response. I’d just think to myself: “I know what that’s about and I don’t want any.” I had tried RSS and decided it wasn’t for me. Who needed all that content?

But eventually the lure of new technology caught up with me again. This time it happened when I noticed that several of the sites I visited daily had RSS feeds. I decided to give RSS another try, this time with a new approach. Instead of going out and finding feeds about topics I was interested in, I would practice restraint and only subscribe to feeds for websites that I was already visiting. I made a rule, that I would only subscribe to a feed if I I wanted to know about every single new article that was posted on the website.

My new rule kept my RSS feed list lean and I started to use RSS. I got excited when the little red number told me that there was a new story waiting for me because now I knew it would be something I was interested in. I started to enjoy using RSS. Using RSS was more fun then using a web browser. It was like using a remote control after changing channels manually for years. Nobody ever chooses to go back to changing channels by hand, using a remote is just more pleasant. Using RSS is a more pleasant way of browsing the web.

This revelation would get me to stick with using RSS, my RSS conversion was underway.

The Potential of RSS Explodes

RSS made web browsing more enjoyable and more efficient. It was a classic geek hack: It takes a little bit of work to setup and configure but quickly repays you by getting a task done more effectively. Geeks lives are filled with these kinds of hacks. They’re the kind of thing we jab each other in the ribs about and comment about how clever they make us. But soon I would stop considering RSS a typical geek hack and start seeing it as a significant new development in information management technology, one of the most significant since the introduction of the web itself.

The deeper benefits of RSS reveal themselves slowly as you hone your stable of RSS feeds. Once I was committed to using RSS, I started seeing a slow but steady shift in the types of sources I followed. Before RSS I followed publications - Wired, CNN, Newsweek - articles grouped together by a 3rd party with a certain tone and range of topics associated with their name. The shift I saw caused by RSS was that, instead of following publications, I started to follow authors. A subtle change but one that carries significant benefits:

• You can trust an author in way that you can never trust a publication. Human beings are much more open about their values then publications.

• The author who writes an article that is highly interesting to you is far more likely to write another article that is highly interesting to you than another such article is of happening to end up in the same publication again.

• You are far more likely to read and retain an article if it is written by an author in a style that you know you respond to.

• When you follow a large number of authors who consistently write articles that are highly interesting to you, it forms a kind of radar for finding both new important information and old overlooked information. The longer you have one of these radars, the deeper and more up-to-date your knowledge of these subjects becomes.

The combined benefits of all these advantages are an increased awareness and deeper understanding of the topics you care about.

But RSS doesn’t just help you follow the topics that are important to you, it also helps you follow the people who are important to you. With the proliferation of blogs, Flickr galleries, and other social networking websites, more and more people are generating RSS feeds, most without even knowing it. Subscribing to the feeds generated by your friends and family is a great way to keep closer tabs on the lives of people you care about.

Finally, RSS is a method to get just the parts that interest you from the thousands of small bits of news that happen every day. Customized RSS feeds allow you to see only what’s important to you from local events, weather reports, items for sale, apartments for rent, job openings, software updates, book releases, movie openings, and new music releases. Before RSS, the best way to stay up-to-date with this kind of information was to read the paper and a great way to describe RSS is that it’s like having a special newspaper, tailored to your interests, delivered every day. The jobs are all in your industry, the for sale items are all things you want to buy, and the apartments are all in your price range.

How did RSS go from its origins in web content syndication to providing all these advantages? RSS has two characteristics that push it beyond its web syndication roots to being a whole new medium for content distribution:

• RSS keeps memory and update frequency from being primary factors in determining which content we follow. We can only comfortably remember to visit so many websites. Each website we want to follow requires us to learn how often to look for updates and to keep track of the last time that we visited. Websites that update infrequently or sporadically are more difficult to follow. The result is that we limit ourselves by both number and by how much difficulty checking for new updates we can handle. By removing these limitations, RSS allows us to follow a denser, higher quality set of content.

• With RSS we can choose to receive information, without giving up the choice to not receive information. A lot of the information available through RSS could also be received through email. RSS has many technical advantages over email², but the most profound reason to use RSS is that people don’t like to receive this kind of information through email. People are protective of their email. They hesitate before giving it out, especially to someone promising to frequently send them new information. This hesitation has nothing to do with whether or not they want the information and everything to do with not cluttering their email. Email is used to communicate personal messages with friends, family, and co-workers. These personal messages are both more important and more likely to require taking action quickly³. Cluttering email with less important, non-actionable information is poor information management. RSS allows you to receive this information without cluttering your email and gives you absolute control over starting and stopping receipt of the information. The result is a denser stream of quality information honed by consequence-free experimentation.

Conclusion

To summarize RSS, I could tell you about events I’ve attended that I wouldn’t have known about, about how I am closer to the cutting-edge of my industry than ever before, that my increased awareness has changed my professional direction and given me significant new business ideas, that I am more aware of the lives of my friends and family with RSS feeds. I could tell you all these stories but it would do little to help you understand what RSS can do for you. The only way you can find that out is to try RSS for yourself.

1. Almost all blogging software automatically generates RSS feeds. ↑

2. One-click adding an event to your calendar, tagging an interesting story for deeper reading later or being able to use web URLs to reference the articles later are just a few of advantages of using RSS over email. ↑

3. Please complete this task as soon as possible, pick-up some milk on the way home, here is my feedback regarding your project, etc… ↑