I'm supposed to be working on my ECCV paper right now, but I decided to procrastinate by streamlining my eLife. It's pretty surprising how many cool Web 2.0 tools there are for keeping yourself organized. With each new tool I discovered, I would usually think "great, now if only I could also x", and almost every time, with a little bit of searching, I managed to find another tool that accomplishes exactly x.
Here are some things that absolutely everyone should do:
- Use an RSS reader. Hopefully you already do this. You should not be checking and re-checking dozens of sites for updates. I use Google Reader, but there are plenty of others. There are some slightly less obvious uses of RSS too. For instance, if you find yourself repeatedly searching Craigslist for something, you can subscribe to the search as an RSS feed instead.
- Do not subscribe directly to RSS feeds that have hundreds of items each week (Digg, TechCrunch, etc.). This, as they say, is like drinking from a firehose. If you are checking these sites for articles on a particular topic, use FeedRinse to filter the RSS feeds using keywords. Otherwise, use AideRSS to filter out the less important items from each feed. AideRSS appears to use a ranking algorithm similar to Google's PageRank to measure quality.
- Use some kind of calendar application. I recommend an online one like Google Calendar, as I use different computers in different locations. With Google Calendar, you can add events by entering text like "meet with Xander at 3 PM on Tuesday" into a field, and this event will be added to your calendar, even if you don't know anyone named Xander. Even nicer is that several sites, like TripIt, communicate directly with your Google Calendar, so you can keep all of your scheduled events in one place without even entering many of them manually.
- Collect data on yourself. You need to know how you are spending your time and money. RescueTime is pretty good for the former, and Mint is good for the latter. Both of these require virtually zero data entry on your part. Actually, here's a tool I would like but was unable to find: something that punishes you for wasting time or money, or rewards you for being good. The website stickK is sort of close to this, but requires too much manual effort.
And because no such tool exists, I am writing this blog entry instead of my ECCV paper. Oh well, at least I'm producing something instead of consuming, even if it is of little value.
