Which of these reminds you of the internet?

“Surfing the web” is a horrible and inaccurate metaphor. The artful physicality and subtleties of catching a wave have little to do with the hunched, glassy-eyed aimlessness of link-clicking.

The information on the internet is as vast as an ocean, but the waves don’t break that clean. The staccato click of the mouse and sudden jumps from web page to web page make browsing more like “sucking on the machine gun of the internet” than “surfing the web.”  Maybe, “standing beneath the mudslide of the internet” or “dumpster diving the internet” would work better.

Actually, the perfect word for what I do on the internet is also written on the button that I press to do it.

(For those of you who don’t know, StumbleUpon is part internet community, part really cool button that you can install on your web browser that sends you to web pages that match your interests. It has also surpassed television as most addictive piece of technology I have ever come across.)

Stumbling is aimless. Until now.

By having a creative outlet (a blog), a desire to share good information, a few pieces of technology, and a systematic way of collecting info, I turned previously aimless Stumbling into useful research. (If you just want to know the basics, you can scroll to the bottom of this post.)

Having An Outlet

Having a creative outlet and a desire to spread good information, is an essential part of why this new system is so awesome. For those of you who can’t imagine how they would use the info they take in by Stumbling, I encourage you to go cold turkey. Take in a sunset or a walk through your neighborhood instead of a digital image of a cat with a funny caption. This system won’t help you.

You don’t have to have a specific use in mind for every image, video, or piece of text that you Stumble across, but you should at least believe that one day, you may want to share it, even if it is only with your future self.

These are some recent changes that have caused me to increase my creative outlet:

• I cultivate my writing “chops” by writing several quality pieces a week.
• I quit drinking.
• I quit cigarettes.
• I am creating a blog that will have 10,000 readers by the end of 2009.
• I am saving money to travel to Argentina next year.

By telling all my loved ones and readers of my earlier blog that I committed to these changes, the changes happened. (We’ll see about Argentina and 10,000 readers.) I am not drinking booze or smoking cigarettes. I am writing nearly every day.

As a side effect, my Stumbling got worse, but, at the same time, the information I was blearily soaking up became more useful. Anything I now stumble across has the potential to become material.

The Parts of the System

As someone who has always been accused of being (or praised as) a day dreamer, I cling to systems that will help me stay organized and productive. Little did I know that one of these systems would one day help transform this…

…into something useful!

But first, a GTD Digression

I have been obsessed with time-management and productivity systems for the past five or six years. The system, or rather the collection of methods, that has really changed my life is know as Getting Things Done. It is so popular here on the webs that it is known simply as GTD. David Allen wrote the book in 2001, and I highly recommend it, but you can also find a lot of clear explanations of GTD just by googling it.

For the time being here is a super-brief overview of some of the relevant parts of GTD:

What is “stuff”?
Allen often refers to stuff as any “open-loop” – tasks, information, or objects, that need to be dealt with in someway or another.

How do you collect?
It is up to you, but usually there are only a few “buckets” – your email inbox, a paper or electronic list, or a physical inbox on your desk or by your door. If something doesn’t fit, you can just put a note reminding you to deal with whatever it is.

What does processing entail?
Processing entails going through your inbox(s), top to bottom, and either filing, doing, delegating, or deferring each item. There’s a lot more to processing, and many great tips on how to do it efficiently which I won’t go into here.

The overall idea is to create a system that you trust to capture everything and reveal to you, on time and on demand, what needs to be done.

Their are two difficulties with collecting the stuff that you stumble upon:

1. It is difficult to capture just the part of the web page that you want.
2. It is time-consuming to label or file each bit of stuff so that you know what it is about later. If you don’t, you waste even more time later, revisiting the web page and probably getting distracted.

I won’t go on in depth about my previous efforts to clip and collect stuff from my internet wanderings, except to say that none of the add-ons or systems I adopted were simple enough. Here are some of the things I tried:

• the built in bookmark feature of Firefox,
• social bookmarking sites like delicious,
• an add-on that would create shortcuts on my desktop called DeskCut,
• and, best of all, an open text file to paste interesting stuff in.

None of it worked, mainly because of the two problems above.

A third problem was getting access to my collection of stuff when I wasn’t at my own computer.

All three were solved when I installed the Google Notebook extension and created a “notebook” called “INBOX”. Suddenly, I could highlight anything on the page, click my right mouse-button, select “Note This” from the context menu and, voila, I sent it to my “INBOX”. I rarely need to write comments on the clips because they are readable at a glance. If I do, the comment section is already selected by default and I just need to type a keyword or two.

All this without leaving the page I am viewing.

How to Turn Stumbling into Research (the nitty-gritty)

1. Have a purpose or the dream of a purpose – If you don’t have any reason to collect the information you are subjecting yourself to, that is OK. If you can’t imagine ever having a reason for saving or sharing whatever it is you’ve stumbled upon, then please consider trying to go cold turkey.
2. Sign up for a Google Notebook account – It’s free.
3. Download the extension – The link is for Firefox. There is an extension for Internet Explorer as well. (But you should just get Firefox. It is also free.)
4. Create a notebook called “INBOX” – or something similar.
5. Continue Stumbling. You don’t have to stop!
6. Start clipping – When you see something that you want to preserve, highlight it, and click the right mouse button. The menu that comes up (known as the context menu) will have a “Note this (Google Notebook” option. Make sure that what you clip goes into the “INBOX” notebook.
7. Get into the processing habit – Every few days, or before your inbox has more than 25 or so things in it, open Google Notebook in a full window and go through each clipping, one by one.
8. Create meaningful categories – I use other notebooks to file my stuff. Examples: Blog Content, Gardening, Recipes, Argentina, Writing Tips, Blogging/Business/Marketing Tip

A note on steps 7 and 8. Processing your inbox and creating a filing system for all the stuff you save off the internet is different for everyone. Here are some tips on how to do it.

• Imagine how and why you might use the item your filing - If you know what key words will pop into your head when you are looking for a particular bit of stuff, use those words to label or file your stuff.
• Don’t create too many categories – If you have a category for Writing Tips, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have one for Poetry Tips too.
• Don’t create too few categories – The purpose of categorizing and filing is to be able to pick things out from a pile, not create piles.
• Try labels – I’ve read a good number of productivity geeks’ blogs that advise doing away with folders (or in this case notebooks) in favor of using labels. The idea is that folders aren’t necessary when you can easily search things. I have not moved over to the labeling system of organization because I like the idea of having all my relevant stuff in one place and my fear that I might use a whimsical label that I’ll never remember.
• Avoid a miscellaneous category – Miscellaneous really means “I don’t have the energy to figure out where this goes.” I think it is better to leave something in your inbox than to consign it to the miscellaneous abyss.

Using Google Notebook in this way feels like science fiction to me. It is an extension of my brain, one that allows me to reliably gather information, without being drowned by it.

My mind is free to wander, to float about, and sometimes even surf.

everybody loves GTD, honoring distraction, productivity tips, the creative process, useful technology