Get More Information in Less Time
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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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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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!
Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00246-102008.mp3___
(Image by svilen001)
