Resources are those things you draw upon to do your job, live your life, deal with problems. If they're not people, then they are tools - and proper use of tools is one of the things I work hard at.

Today we are inundated with digital resources - the world has done a "data dump" of all its information and is constantly adding to it. How do you deal with such a wealth of resources? How do I deal with this wealth? That's the subject of this essay.

I've watched and participated in the growth of the distributed wealth of resources on the internet since long before most people even knew such a facility existed. Before we here in the Vancouver business community had easy access to real-time (ha... getting a file the next day really isn't real time - maybe just "full time") internet access we used to dial into a server that did have such full-time access. In our case this was the local university. In fact, Wimsey, the company I ended up leading into the commercial internet age, did just that for about 400 customers of various types up until 1989 when we got our first full-time link.

At that time the most relevant and useful sources of information were software program source files and the Usenet News article hierarchy. Usenet consisted of about 5000 categories in what was originally just 7 main hierarchies: comp, news, sci, rec, soc, talk, misc.

Some systems had archives of these groups - and these archives now go back all the way to some of the initial postings from as early as 1979.

But there was no indexing for the most part - the articles and postings were simply categorized by date and "thread" - the subject line on the inital post.

In the same vein, e-mail was available but most of it was in proprietary format and needed to be "gateway'd" to the internet. Today that is no longer the problem. The problem is that everything is now on the internet and we're sinking fast under the tonnage of data. Usenet today has tens of thousands of categories and is largely given over to spam and porn. The search engines give us hundreds of thousands of pages to look through for answers, and finding the right resource for specific questions is a hit and miss operation.So what do I do today to deal with this? Read on...

In the ocean of information there are those who dive deep on a particular subject and those who float across the top peering down, and occasionally diving down to see something specific.

I'm mostly one of those who floats on the top. My interests cover a very wide range and, while I do focus largely on marketing and my technical side, I tend only to dive deep when I have to for a specific project. Then I can and do go very deep.

But how do I keep up with all the various subjects that I'm interested in? How do I keep my in-box from overflowing with mail list stuff? How do I manage spam (from signing up to all those lists) and other distractions? How do I know what is relevant and timely?

Well, the first thing I do is use the facilities of my computer to the absolute limit. We'll get into other things in subsequent articles.

Email

I get a lot of email. Literally thousands each day. Partly this is because over the years I've had several different addresses and have kept them aliased to my inbox somehow. Getting them turned off is actually harder to do than just putting up with the mail.

I also subscribe to a number of mail lists on various subjects - and used to be subscribed to a lot more - more on that in a moment.

I can't just let the incoming stuff build up in the inbox - it would take all my time looking through it for things I want to deal with - so I let the machine do the work.

This means using the rules module (that all recent email client software has in some fashion - I use Evolution which is an open source project similar to Outlook) to pre-categorize incoming mail as much as possible. In essence, I create a "white list" for every single sender I deal with. The only things that get left in the "InBox" are from people I've never corresponded with before - typically spammers and sometimes new contacts.

Every time I come across something in my inbox from someone I would ever consider corresponding with again in the future, I create a rule and have the rule put the item into a specific sub-folder. I have folders for Customers in which are specific companies and then specific individuals or categories, Friends and various categories of them, Mail Lists and various categories of them, Government and other major organizations, and activities (such as Motorcycling or system maintenance)

So instead of seeing 500+ messages in my inbox in the morning - I maybe see 50 - and most of them are spam that didn't get caught (and tagged by the spam software with [SPAM] so the rules can deal with it).

Spam that does get caught goes into a spam folder - and I look at it only if/when I have time or think I might be missing something for some reason. Items that are put in this folder are also marked "already read" so the folder does not "light up" in bold as most e-mail clients will do when something unread is added to a folder.

All the rest of the new items go into their particular folder and I then make a decision based on time as to whether I will read them or not. Mail lists are near the bottom of the time list - friends and customers near the top. The point is that I don't have to winnow through the inbox looking for these - they are already categorized and in a place where I can quickly recognize them as new when I decide to deal with them.

Mail Lists

Mail lists deserve a separate consideration lately. I'm on quite a few, and some of them are fairly high volume - one or more posts/day. I find I feel guilty if I don't read them daily - but doing so simply eats up too much time and distracts me - so I have started on a road to not only helping myself with this problem but also helping others. I try very hard to find, or have the list authors create, an archive web site with the mailings posted with a syndication feed - RSS.

This does three things:

1. It removes the mailing from my mail system so I don't get tempted to read it when it shows up (and the topic lights up - and the "new mail" icon pops up, etc.)
2. It removes the mailing from being handled by my e-mail spam detection system which lowers the load a bit
3. It helps the mailing list by lowering the number that are actually sent out, which also helps with today's spam detectors all over the planet as some are getting really annoyingly tight in their rejection policies so some mailings simply don't get to where the readers would like them.

For reading my RSS feeds I use Mozilla's Thunderbird. I could also use it for e-mail but have other reasons for liking Evolution instead. In the long run it doesn't matter. You could use one of the RSS aggreation services such as Bloglines, etc. just as easily.

In this way my mail lists are lumped in with other web sites that I want to keep up with and I can set aside time specifically for such activites separate from the "real" email I get. This at least helps me budget my time better.

Usenet News can also be read via many RSS readers - including Thunderbird. Recently many ISPs have stopped handling News at all, and I for one at this time am not missing it. Many of the subjects have devolved to specific web sites of their own now so I'm betting that the whole facility is not long for this world. In some ways I'll be sad to hear of its demise, but today there are lots of options that fill its role better IMHO.

I'll write about other ways soon