I have no idea why I didn’t realize or think of this sooner, but delicious offers rss feeds based on any tag you have in your library. So, I decided to take advantage of that. I simply tag an item I’d like to read later as “toread“. I then subscribed to this RSS feed in google reader and I’m all set. This is beautiful for a few reasons. First, I’m already using all of these tools heavily and don’t need to install anything. Second, I set a period of time aside most days for google reader. I find it very useful to have my toread items in the same view. I discovered that if I have these somewhere outside of google, I wouldn’t go there very often and the number of unread bookmarks grew way too large for me to even think about diving into all. So that’s it!

Also, check readability out if you haven’t yet. It makes reading much easier on the web by removing all the extra clutter that goes along with almost any website. It also converts the text into an easy to read font and sets a background that is easy on the eyes. What tricks do you have?

I am convinced that it is something that I should be doing because of two very important reasons; I am struggling to do it, and I am happier when I put forth the effort.  I’ll give you a little background on myself.  I have two young children, a full time job, I freelance, and have many hobbies.   Nights are quite different from what they were when I was a bachelor.  When I get home at night, typically I help make supper, clean up, play with the kids, and get them ready for bed.  By time 7:30 rolls around and the kids are in bed, my wife and I want to spend time with each other (well, at least that’s what she’s been telling me).  This, by no means is worse than the way things used to be, they’re just different.

I still need time for myself with this schedule, and that is where the beauty and silence of the morning comes in.  My wife once told me that she notices that I’m much happier when I wake up early.  I have been thinking about why that may be, and thought I’d share.  I think the first and biggest reason is that I have time in the morning to be still.  There is a lot of craziness that goes on throughout the day.  I am completely guilty of hitting the snooze alarm for an hour and waking up at the last possible moment and rushing to work.  This involves inhaling breakfast,  getting to work just on time, giving my wife a peck instead of really kissing her, and drinking crappy coffee from our diner rather than the stuff I make.  I get to work frazzled, and I think that that frazzleness many times carries on throughout the day.  Compare this to a morning when I wake up early.  I have time to think, make coffee, sit, and do whatever it is I decide to do that morning.  The unfrazzled morning seems to set the tone for the rest of the day.  Another amazing thing is that when I wake up early and accomplish something, I tend to be more motivated throughout the day.  There are things that I have accomplished in the morning that I am pretty sure I would not have done otherwise.  Mornings involve exercise, playing guitar, writing or doing web work.  Mountain biking is my favorite morning activity followed by reading.  It’s been tough finding time and motivation to do these things  later on during the day.

So, with all of those benefits, why in the world wouldn’t you do the same?  Yes, it is tough, and yes, I am definitely struggling to rise early every morning.  But, with all good habits, this one is hard to start, but easy to maintain.  I have found that accountability has been the most powerful tool by far with rising early.  Forget setting your alarm clock across the room or buying one that is louder.  Your subconscious is way more powerful than you give it credit for.  I have placed 3 different alarms throughout the house and have turned off every single one of them and went back to bed.  However, having someone text you in the morning or give you a call has proven to be much more powerful.  I just received a text this morning from yetbiker, “Almost 5: kick today in its’ butt.” followed by a call from johnlewisii.  How could I not wake up?

johnlewisii over at sixmonthexperiment, others and I have started tweeting about this with the hash tag #5amclub. It’s been great seeing what others are accomplishing.  I’ve found that it’s also super-motivating and an excellent accountability tool.  Even though the name implies it, don’t think that it’s limited to 5amers.  If you’re waking up early before work or your normal morning schedule, tweet away!  So, join our club.  Arise early, and tweet!

Resources

• How to become an early riser on Zen Habits
• How to become an early riser by Steve Pavlina

The problem is this.  There are tons of different feeds available for pretty much whatever you are interested in.  When I first started using Reader, I subscribed to almost anything that had an RSS icon in firefox.  Things quickly got out of control and it wasn’t until recntly that I found a system that works for me.  So here was my typical pattern.  I’d have well over 100 items in Reader, and I would despearately try to get a handle on it by trying to knock off as many as I could.  I’d wind up spending a lot of time “reading”.  As you may know, Reader has a little checkbox for each post “marked as unread’.  I would do this for the stuff I was planning on reading later.  So, later in the day I’d check it again and would come across the items that I already had marked as unread.  Maybe I’d read them, maybe not.   Before I knew it I had 1000+ items in google reader.

I’m sure there is someone else out there with this problem.  The predicament with this situation is that posts are getting reprocessed. As David Allen would suggest this is a big no-no.  I used to love reading things from my RSS feeds, but it quickly became a huge chore for me.  Rather than reading for pleasure I started to read to see if I could get Reader back to 0 again.  You may be thinking that I’m just going to tell you to start unsubscribing from feeds.  That wouldn’t really make for a great blog post, would it.

What I do is go through and assign a block of time once a day or so for reading my posts in Reader.  No more casual “oh, I’ll just check to see what’s been update”.  If I find something that is very interesting, but I don’t have the time to read it right away, I tag it in a nifty little service called read it later.  Their explanation of the service is excellent:

Eliminate cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest.
Think of it as a ’staging area’ for bookmarks.

With this awesome little firefox extension, there is a little checkbox that gets integrated with google reader.  You can check it or hit the i key (more Reader shortcuts here) to read it later.  Also, make sure to have the integrate into google reader check box checked within Tool -> Addons -> Read it Later Preferences -> Google Reader.  This may seem like procrastinating, but it’s not.  When you have time later, you can read the checked articles without having to worry about zeroing out google reader.  I have found that when I do this I actually process the posts much better and definitely enjoy the reading I do more.  I also get a lot more read in a shorter time period.  No more reprocessing.  If you would like to learn more about read it later, a good post on it is here.

I have also found the Better Google Reader firefox plugin extremely helpful. There is a skin called minimalistic that is great.  You can hit the w key to hide the top search bar.  I also use the u key to hide the left navigation.  What you have left is simply a list of the posts.  Then j and k to navigate through them.

So that’s it.  If you have any tips or tricks on conquering google reader, please let the world know in the comments section below.  A big thanks to whomever runs this blog for the sweet Google Reader icon.

In all honesty, my organizational skills were not what they are now.  However, by utilizing tools like remember the milk, google calendar, evernote, etc. I have been able to bring some fun and efficiency into what otherwise bored me to tears. This is all about why remember the milk rocks and why you should try it out if you haven’t already.

Remember the milk is essentially an online task management system.  But it’s so much more than that.  Many people have utilized it’s rich api which has brought about a ton of programs that interface with Remember the Milk’s servers.  You can use your iPhone / iPod touch to update tasks, see them on OSX’s dashboard, update tasks via twitter, view your tasks in gmail, etc. etc. etc.  I’m not going to go into how to use remember the milk too much because they do an excellent job on their site explaining.  Instead, I’ll share my personal experiences with the service.

With RTM, I can create separate lists.  I have two main lists, one for work, and one for home tasks.  Before having tasks set somewhere, I used to get overwhelmed with work.  Having all of these little tasks hovering around in my memory would get me stressed out, and as a result I wouldn’t get as much done both at home and at work.  RTM allows me to EASILY add tasks and complete them. Now I can easily see what I have to do when, what the priority, and look at everything I have done in the past week, month, year, etc.  It is very powerful.

Customer Service

This is the main reason I decided to write about remember the milk. About a month ago I wound up wiping all of my tasks due to wonderful Window’s Mobile…I’ll spare you the details. I don’t have their pro account, but I wound up contacting their customer service department and begged that my tasks get brought back to life. I think the email conversations will tell it all…

Hi Eric,

I apologise for the delay — I just wanted to let you know that I have an engineer looking into this. I’ll let you know as soon as I have an update.

Thanks!

Regards,
Emily

Hi Eric,

We’ve now restored the tasks affected (I believe there were 27; if this doesn’t sound correct, please let me know).

Hope this helps!

Regards,
Emily

Oh my goodness…thank you so much!!! I have been spreading the remember the milk love for quite some time now. Expect a pro account from me, a tweet or two, and a blog post!!

Wow.

Thank you again!
~eric

Seriously, I don’t pay for their service, and I’m sure they spent some time restoring those tasks. She even apologized for the delay…which was only about 4 – 5 days! So, hats off to remember the milk and their EXCELLENT customer service.

Remember the Milk programs I use on a daily basis

As you can see from my delicious RTM tags, I’ve spent a bit of looking around for different programs.  There are tons of different programs available and I have tried out a lot of them.  Since RTM’s site is very user friendly I tend to go to their site for task management rather than a separate program.  Here is a list I use.

• I’m a big keyboard shortcut guy, so I found this little usersstyle that displays all of the keyboard shortcuts for remember the milk.  In order to use that, you must be running firefox with the stylish extension.  Stylish is basically a program that allows for custom CSS to be applied to sites.
• I also use this stylish extension called Smaller Tabs, smartlists only which pretty much is self descriptive.
• Remember the milk for Windows mobile is quite nice but only because it’s fun for whatever reason to check things off on a touch screen.  That’s pretty much all I use that PDA for.  This requires a PRO account