Content Management - Part 1

Dealing with tons of information is an everyday occurrence for most of us.

There’s great content, not so great content, videos, articles, emails, people forwarding info…you get it.

Having an effective system to find the “gold nuggets” in this ocean of info is something that is always on my mind.

I’m going to take a few emails to share with you my current methods, the reasons I use what I use, and how I use it.

My hope is that you’ll be able to take pieces of this and create, or improve, your own info management workflow.

Intake & Infobesity

Most of the content I consume can be categorized like this:

• Web articles (blog posts, pages, etc)

• Videos (YouTube primarily)

• Audio (podcasts)

• PDFs

• Books (digital and physical)

The good news is that I have ways to intake this information and get summaries or highlights so that I can get to the good stuff quickly.

A quick note: I’m not against consuming content for it’s own sake. But when I’m looking for specific information or to piece together something that requires multiple sources, I want to find that important info as quickly and as easily as possible.

The bad news is that there is of course a rising tide of information out there and it can be difficult if we try to consume everything at once…in fact, it’s impossible.

Two things to remember about this - don’t treat the information flow as something you have to consume all of. Treat it like a river that you can dip into and out of.

Recommended

Starting With The Basics

If you’re getting started and don’t have a good system for consuming content, I can offer a gentle push in the right direction. Get Readwise Reader.

Ok, not so gentle, but seriously, it’s one of the best tools out there and helps with content consumption and more (stay tuned for later emails).

The point is to have a simple to start with tool that allows you to capture content with a click (or via API) that can also grow with you.

Reader hits the sweet spot in that you can make use of it “out of the box” or use advanced features…but either way it gets the job done.

Before you make any choices though, write down what you want this tool to do for you.

• What types of content do you regularly consume?

• How do you find/access that content?

• What do you want to do after your read/watch/listen?

Knowing what you intend to do will help you choose the right tool that you can then plug in additional apps to extend the functionality - things like Summarily for YouTube videos and Podwise for podcasts.

This is a good first step, and helpful if you’re wanting to improve your content intake systems as well.

Stay tuned for next week - we’ll get into ways to extend the base functionality of a read it later app for better results with less effort.

Extra Extra

• I was on the road a lot this summer and a huge whiteboard for writing down my weekly goals wasn’t really an option…so I did something digital that worked really well:

One quick question 👋

I love hearing from readers, and I’m always happy to hear feedback from active subscribers. How am I doing with the Productivity Academy newsletter? Is there any content you’d like to see more or less of? Which parts of the newsletter (or articles, or podcast) do you enjoy the most?

Hit reply and say hello, happy to hear from you!

P.S. Looking for resources to improve your productivity? Check out the tools I use right here.