My “Four Buckets System:” How I Organize, Read, and Act On 537 Articles a Day

August 14, 2010

Related: Quick Tips

Like a lot of folks in the social media space, I follow a lot of blogs, Twitter feeds, YouTube accounts, and other content. According to Google Reader, I average 537 articles a day. I don’t just skim them, I actually have a pretty well-defined system for organizing, reading, and taking action on many of the articles. I call it the “four buckets” system. Here’s how it works.

Organize

I subscribe to feeds in Google Reader — a very versatile feed reader that can even subscribe to pages without RSS feeds and let you know when there’s been a change on the page.

My feeds are organized into a dozen or so folders. Each folder name is preceded by a number so they sort in order of priority. In this way, if I don’t have a tonne of time, I’ll just start at the top and be assured I’m getting what I need.

• 1 Top List
  My #1 priority feeds – blogs and Delicious feeds from my closest friends, MacZot, Lifehacker’s Gmail category, a couple of public radio blogs, The Oatmeal, and so on.
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• 2 Daily Business News
  Some technology and social media news sites: Mashable, Techcrunch, MarketingProfs, Techvibes Vancouver, eMarketer, and more.
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• 3 Friends
  This one’s self-explanatory. In addition to blogs, my friends’ Flickr feeds, Delicious feeds, and YouTube feeds¹
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• 4 Companies I Follow
  This is where I put official company blogs. Besides the blogs of the main online players, I also try to subscribe to the blogs of the makers of software I run on my system. This is a great way of finding out about updated versions.²
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• 5 Weekend Reading
  This is where I put my fun reading – stuff I want to follow, but know that if I read it on a weekday, my productivity level would dramatically sink. Stuff in here includes: Holy Kaw, Improv Everywhere, Noise to Signal, Photoshop Disasters, the Ryerson Review of Journalism, and more.
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• 6 Sharpen the Saw
  I use this category for content that helps me improve my skills.³ Copyblogger, ViperChill, Zen Habits, and similar sites fit in here.
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• Other topics: I’ve got some miscellaneous topics as well that I don’t visit that frequently but still want to keep track of.

Read

For whatever reason, I’ve always found it difficult to stay focused while reading feeds in Google Reader itself on the desktop. That’s why I do most of my reading when I first get up (and, sadly, usually before I even get out of bed) on my iPad with the most excellent Reeder app (Gizmodo review | iTunes link). It’s $5, but well worth the money.

First, Reeder is beautiful. A light grey background, thoughtfulness paid to typography and leading, and intuitive controls to help you move through a river of news. A forceful swipe down pulls up the next article, while you’re scanning the headlines a left-swipe marks it as read and a right-swipe ‘stars’ the article.

More importantly, as you can see above, when you click the Forward icon, a menu flies out where you can send the article to any “bucket” you have set up (see below). In my case, I use Note (Google Reader shared items), Delicious, Read It Later, and occasionally Twitter.

Here’s a video demo of the app:

Act On (the “four buckets”)

It’s not enough to just read, though, if you’re not going to do anything with the content. I have four “buckets” into which I place articles that I am going to use or want to store. Here’s how it works:

• Bucket 1: “Act On Today”
  Star: This is my highest priority flag. I’ll ‘Star’ posts that I plan to take some kind of action on, like use it as background for a blog post, remind myself to call the author, read in more detail that day at work, and so on. I’ve set Google Reader to first open on the Starred page. This means when I sit down at my desk and open up Google Reader, it first shows me a list of items I had flagged to take action on today. I try to clear the Star list by the end of the day. ((Sometimes I Star a whole whack of stuff; in those cases, I rely on the Postrank plugin to help show me which items are gaining the most traction.)
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• Bucket 2: “Share With Others”
  Share on Google Reader: Items that I don’t need to act on, but want to share with people who may follow me, get shared on either Google Reader (business topics) or my Posterous blog (fun stuff).
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• Bucket 3: “Don’t Lose This Information”
  Send to Delicious: If there’s an item that I don’t need to act on and doesn’t warrant sharing with people, but I still want to keep track of it in case I need to reference it again some day, it gets put in my Delicious account (subscribe to my Delicious feed). What I especially like about Delicious is the ability to add “tags” to items, making them easier to find again. What was that site with great Facebook stats? I just do a quick search on my Delicious page for the tags Facebook and stats and up it comes.
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• Bucket 4: “Read This Later”
  Send to Read It Later: Sometimes there are articles I want to read at my leisure, don’t need any action, and I don’t feel like sharing the content with anyone. They get sent to my Read It Later list. Read It Later is exactly what it sounds like – a place to store articles you plan to get around to reading one day. They’ve got a great mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Blackberry, and have extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari.

This might sound like a complicated system but once I got into the habit of flagging things in this manner, the number of articles I could process increased, as did my productivity in using them.

What system do you use to keep track of all your feeds?

1. YouTube doesn’t make feeds of its users’ videos easy to find. Here’s how to subscribe to feeds in YouTube. [↩]
2. If you’re a Mac user, the excellent AppFresh is a great automated tool to update your software. [↩]
3. The phrase is taken from the Stephen Covey book Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and means continuous improvement. [↩]