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Get More Information in Less Time

Written on October 21, 2008 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Time Management

info Best-selling author Seth Godin recently wrote a blog post called The growing productivity divide. He described some must-haves for your tool kit in today’s knowledge-based economy.

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We recommend you check out his full list to see how you stack up. Today, we’re going to highlight three tools for getting the information you need.

Your daily reading regimen

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george Reading is so important. Warren Buffett says so. I remember one of the patriarchs of the venture capital industry telling me that he was aghast that many of his young staffers read only The Wall Street Journal every day. He told them they needed to expand their horizons and read at least one additional daily paper.

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Seth Godin suggested that you should read at least five blogs a day. There are so many resources online to keep up with content that’s important to you. Don’t get stuck in either the real or the virtual world. Read online and offline!

RSS

He also asked if you have an RSS reader. We might ask an even simpler question – do you understand what an RSS feed is? If you don’t, don’t feel bad … but learn what an incredible tool it is.

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marylynn There are a lot of sites I like to keep up with. What I love about RSS feeds is the content comes to me; I don’t have to go to it. With my RSS reader, they’re all in one location so I can easily scan the headlines. It saves me a lot of time.

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Lee Lefever of Common Craft fame has a great video tutorial that explains RSS in Plain English.

Problogger Darren Rowse also has a great explanation of RSS on his site if you prefer to read about it.

Alerts

Do you know how to set up a search for a certain word, phrase, or subject? Alerts help you collect information without having to go get it. We have an article that provides a number of applications to set up alerts.

One great way to test out alerts is to set one up for your web site or your name. For example, we have an alert set up for biggsuccess.com and bigg success.

Subscription

You can get the tips and tools you need to be a BIGG success by subscribing to The Bigg Success Weekly – it’s free! And when we say “weekly”, we mean it. We don’t abuse the privilege you’ve trusted us with. Subscribe now and get our free Bigg Goal-Getters Workbook!

Search for the information you need

Seth Godin also emphasized that you must be effective at searching the internet. You can use some shortcuts to get to the content you’re really looking for.

For example, quotation marks around the phrase you’re searching helps refine the search. If we type bigg success, Google will search for every instance of the word bigg and the word success. When we tried this yesterday, Google returned 20,500,000 pages.

By typing in “bigg success” with the quotation marks, Google searches for that phrase as one term. So it only returns instances where the two words are together. That search “only” returned 19,500 pages.

The Smartest Searcher has a post that discusses even more techniques to refine your search further.

You can get more information in less time if you know how to use technology to keep up with the content that’s important to you. It’s an essential skill in today’s knowledge-based economy.

Next time, we’ll discuss leadership in crisis. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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Warren Buffet’s Single Piece of Wisdom

Written on July 8, 2008 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Personal Growth

A bigg salute to Josh Whitford, who writes the Unconventional Marketing blog, for inspiring today’s post.

Josh read the The 4-Hour Workweek, written by Tim Ferriss, and decided to accept the challenge to contact a famous person. Josh chose Warren Buffett.

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He wrote a letter to Buffett asking him for “his single piece of wisdom” and sent it along with a self-addressed, stamped postcard. To Josh’s surprise, the Oracle of Omaha responded a couple of weeks later. Buffett simply said,

“Read, read, read.”

A typical Buffett answer – short and to the point!

It’s interesting advice because a poll by the Associated Press – Ipsos showed that one in four Americans hasn’t read a single book in the last year. At least, that’s how the news reported it – we look at that and see that three out of four Americans did read a book last year!

In fact, the last Gallup poll that we saw on this subject showed that over half of all Americans have read more than 5 books in the last year!

Read, read, read … for the sake of your career (and finances)

We hear about the “haves” and the “have nots”. A study by the National Endowment for the Arts [pdf] showed the impact of reading on a person’s well-being – reading less leads to lower reading proficiency which leads to fewer (and lower quality) career opportunities.

For example, according to the study, “Proficient Readers” are 2.5 times more likely than “Basic Readers” to earn at least $850 each week. This study also showed that 44% of Basic Readers lack a full- or part-time job, two times the percentage of Proficient Readers.

So, Warren Buffett said it well … read, read, read.

Read, read, read … to expand your imagination

"When I was young … okay I’d like to think I’m still young … so when I was younger, I used to just read non-fiction, and specifically books on business and investing. Then I took a literature class with a phenomenal professor – a short-story class. It made me use my imagination in a way I didn’t do when I just read books that I thought were more practical."

And as Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than intelligence.”

What’s nice about reading, rather than watching, is that you are the director. You create a vision of the story – the characters, the setting.

"Just think about how many times you’ve read a book that gets turned into a movie. So you get all excited and go see the movie … and it’s not as good as the book! For me, a great example is Stephen King’s book, It. I scared myself more reading that book than watching the movie!"

It’s much more interactive mentally and the skills carry over to your professional life.

A simple commitment to reading that’s worked better than a college degree
We have a friend who worked his way up in a small business. In fact, he ended up buying the business from the owner. After he bought it, he wished he would have gotten a college degree. But he didn’t have the time – he had a business to run!

So he made a commitment to himself – to read one business book every week. He reads the best sellers and he talks to friends for recommendations. He has that done for years now. He knows more about business than just about anybody we know.

Do-it-yourself knowledge … that’s what Warren Buffett is talking about.

What are you reading?

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