One of the biggest questions I get is how I manage to do my job and seem to stay on top of the blogosphere, Twitter, employees, breaking news, and competitors. Assuming you believe I'm actually doing my job, I thought I'd share how I stay on top of all the rest.
Personality-wise, I have big-time ADD so I use some tricks to maximize my attention so I can stay on top of tons of massive amounts of scattered information across the market. Specifically, a custom dashboard that that works on each side of the firewall to surface relevant movement from those two worlds.
Interestingly, given social software's increase in content types and fast cadence of interactions, it can sometimes result in a flood of unstructured, conversational content. That's exactly why focus, also called "attention" in the tech world, is a very important component to staying productive. Increasingly, it will be critical to not only wrangle content streams from both within and outside a company, but to make all that information digestible and actionable. So, if you can algorithmically process those streams to direct your focus in order to maximize your attention, you're way ahead of the pack. And, that is exactly what I am doing.
Within Jive, I use Clearspace to keep me plugged into the company. But my attention needs to be just as plugged into the market. To do that, I am currently using a mashed up widget dashboard powered by Netvibes, Yahoo Pipes, AideRSS, Dapper, and a few others (Justin will be posting about some of geeky details on his blog today). I used to use NetNewsWire, which is a great feed reader. However, I have outgrown a tool that simply displays feeds as a list. I needed something that would process the incoming data to help prioritize and direct my focus where it should be.
The big idea is not the specific technologies I'm using, but rather the notion of using "conceptual programming" tools that allow me to rewire the web to work for me. Instead of bouncing around like a pinball, I pull all of the information streams I need into a single source. Then, I take one step further and algorithmically process my sources to uncover high priority information, which saves me time and catches things I might otherwise have overlooked. Besides using Clearspace as my single collaboration platform, nothing has made me more productive than my dashboard. Now...wouldn't it be nice to have both my dashboard and Clearspace mashed into one thing. Hmmm.
There. Now you know. Back to work!