Because of the nature of my work, I track all sorts of information flowing from the Internet. For someone who's fairly ADHD, it's a bit of a challenge to try to be consistent with what I track. Fortunately, there are all sorts of tools and technologies to help try to get a grip on what's important to us on the 'net and in day-to-day life.
Ok, I confess to being an inveterate information junkie.
For the moment, my information tracking/management toolkit contains: RSS feeds of blogs and news (and more) all organized through my iGoogle home page, Tweetdeck to keep an eye on Twitter, SkyGrid (in beta, limited availability) to keep an eye on real-time business news from multiple sources, Excel spreadsheets to manage time and tasks between my boss and myself, and a personal organization software application called uOrganized to give me an overall view of my personal and business tasks. I also use a service called Jott Assistant to e-mail myself automatically transcribed reminders and tasks via my cellphone. That's a lot, but life would be harder yet for me without these resources.
There's even more because that leaves out Outlook for work and Gmail and Google Calendar for personal use. So, I won't even mention those. (jk!)
The fact that I use so many different products/services is either an indication of how complicated our lives have become or, maybe, just my ADHD-driven need to track a lot of interests.
In the coming weeks and months, I hope to produce tutorials on how to actually USE these tools. They'll appear here and on the Arlington Public Library website.
My main iGoogle page running in the Google Chrome browser
Tweetdeck displaying my Twitter feeds
SkyGrid Beta running in the Google Chrome browserJust an FYI, my mention of any product or service does not imply an endorsement by the City of Arlington or the Arlington Public Library.