Black Belt Productivity

Today, I followed a link to a video interview with Robert Scoble (aka the Scobleizer) that show how he digests the content from his 600+ RSS Feeds every day. The video was shot by Tim Ferriss (of The 4-Hour Work Week fame). It is located on Tim’s blog here [How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feed Each Morning].

I found a number of great tips from watching this video.

1. Do not read your RSS by feeds, rather read them combined into a ‘river of news’. I use NewsFire for my RSS Feeds and I have created a Smart Folder that only collects the New feeds into my list. NewsFire downloads the content to my hard drive so that I can still read all of my feeds whether online or offline. But I do all of my reading from that ‘Item is New’ Smart Folder.
2. Create a list of keywords and authors that are important to you. Find what keywords are important to you. Some of mine are ’security’, ‘windows’ [broad, I know], ‘encryption’, ‘moleskine’, ‘circa’, ‘productivity’. Also, find some authors that you like to read [Brett Kelly, GTD Wannabe, Frank Meeusen, Matt Cornell, Jason Womack, Marc Orchant, etc are some people that I will read almost anything from.]
3. As you are processing your RSS ‘New’ list, scan each item quickly for your keywords and your authors. There is no way to read every word that is written in your Feed listing, well, unless you only have 5-10 feeds, maybe. Go through a keyword search basically. Look in the title of the post, look at the author for one of your favorite authors, then start line scanning the body of the post for your keywords. If enough keywords are found, or it one of your authors, you have a post to delve into more deeply, either at that moment, or mark it for later reading, which is what I usually do.
4. Look at the link density of the post. When you find a post that you want to spend some time with and really absorb, I like to do a quick scan of the number of links that are in the post. A low number of links (0-5), I will usually tackle at that moment. When the outgoing links start growing (6 or more), I know that I will be hitting a lot of different sites while reading that post. I see that a lot in my IT feeds, especially the ones that deal with Information Security. Since this is a new field for me, I have to do a lot more research to get up to speed with what the post may be talking about.

While watching this video, it also gave me a little more insight into Tim Farress’ 4-Hour Work Week concept. There is a lengthy (50 mins) interview by Scoble on there. Both Jason and I watched it, and were very impressed with the concept. I am planning on getting his book with my next Amazon order. Also, there is another video interview with Ferriss and Scoble talking about How Scoble Absorbs 10,000+ E-mail. It is also a good viewing when you have the time.