Content Consumption & Sharing Workflow
I find myself awash in an ever-expanding sea of content. This is in part thanks to the web's empowerment of self-publishing, combined with social networks making it incredibly easy to re-share what my community feel is valuable or interesting articles. Like many people, I encounter this in different contexts, be it via twitter on my mobile while traveling, or via facebook at home on my tablet, or my RSS reader on my desktop machine.
These articles typically fall into 3 categories:
- uninteresting, low relevance, or poor quality
- sufficiently interesting for a single read, or perhaps re-share
- extremely interesting and valuable, something I can envisage wanting to be able to read again, and therefore find at some point in the future
Articles tend to come to my attention via:
- Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
- Feedly (my RSS reader - which sync's across devices)
Much of my content consumption is on the go, and so I then pass any content of interest into Pocket, which servers as my backlog .. my 'reading debt' list
It's meant to be my 'to-read' list, however it's in need of a big old clean-out, which is itself indicative that my workflow isn't really working for me... or maybe my content consumption habits in general need some attention.
From Pocket, I transition anything which is still interesting into Chrome (see note below), which is finally leads to the last part of my curation process into the following categories:
- Archive with searchable content: into Evernote - via the web clipper chrome extension.
- Archive bookmark into my private list on Pinboard.
- Archive bookmarks into my public list on Pinboard - which is then served on to a page on this site via the Pinboard widget.
- Inspirational - into Stache, which is a more visual bookmarking app - where I peruse when needing something inspirational, but I'm not sure what.
- Backlog - using the OneTab chrome extension... if I'm honest, whatever goes in here, rarely get seen again, so I should probably ditch this phase.
I then re-share particularly interesting content, back into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. As my content consumption habits are very 'spiky', I use the fantastic Buffer app, to manage the scheduling of the re-sharing of that content. I just put it into the 'buffer' and it'll go out in the next time-slot configured for each social network.
Additionally there is my own content, which is typically either editorial content, to be shared on this blog, or maybe photos - I described my photo workflow earlier this month.
Putting this post together reminded me that the main reason I transition content out of pocket and into Chrome, is because I don't want the URL to be a pocket one e.g. https://pocket.co/sMj3fJ ... so maybe it's time for me to look at alternatives to Pocket.
Putting this post together also made me feel that this workflow is a bit convoluted, so I'll maybe have to consider revamping it - and would love to hear about your workflows please (@bseymour)