This is part of a wider re-evaluation of my online life. I’ve been blogging and writing online in various forms since 2002 (actually, since the mid-90s if you count Geocities, forums and bad Manic Street Preachers fan sites…), but you’d never guess it to look at this place. Most of my best (and worst) work is pseudonymous and some years old now, or has been taken offline for various reasons, or is behind privacy walls due to its personal nature. I don’t want to drag everything out from behind those locked doors, but I do want to make sure that in future I don’t end up in this position again. For me, that means creating a single space in which I can have a multifaceted identity, where those facets meet and combine to create new insights, and where I can draw my various threads together in a way that makes some sense.

This has been a fantastic opportunity to go dig back through this site, and see how my ideas have changed over the last few years. It’s also been a great spring-cleaning exercise. I’ve taken down posts that were pointless, or didn’t belong, or that now make no sense; I’ve tried to be kind rather than brutal, but really no one is ever going to read old linkspam or listen to imported Audioboos here, because I didn’t put the effort into making them valuable in this context when I first published them. That’s a useful lesson for the future.

I’ve scrapped my metadata scheme and started again. When I started this blog I had no idea what it was going to become – my categorisation system was very ad-hoc and was more a way of learning WordPress than actual useful data. That’s changed, now – my categories are built around broad subjects, and my tags narrow down to more specific topics. There are RSS feeds set up for each category: Metamedia for news and journalism, Story for narrative theory and storytelling, People for communication, psychology and community, Games for play, gaming and talk of Zombie LARP, Political, Personal and Wordweaving, just in case I find the guts to publish creative work here again.

The clean-up is also giving me the opportunity to find new ways of doing things. Link-blogging, for instance, if all I want to do is share a quote or a headline, is easiest and best done for me on Twitter, or very occasionally Tumblr if what I’m sharing is right for that space. I still haven’t found a perfect solution for links, but I’ve been exploring Delicious, Pinboard, Evernote, Diigo and River to see how they all work, and learning about running a server in the process.

Finally, I’ve published more prominently a list of blogging principles. I first wrote this back in 2009 – I’ve updated it by adding a couple of new thoughts, but taken nothing away. It remains a useful guide for what I’m hoping to achieve here, and – crucially – it gives me permission to experiment, to play, and to do stupid things in public in order to find out what happens next. I think that’s the freedom I need.

I’m going to be shuffling things around to include a few more categories – I want there to be spaces here for thoughts about journalism, news and the media, current affairs, narrative theory, game design, and maybe some personal, fiction or creative projects too. I want a more accessible linksblog, and a more media-rich site, so far as that’s practical. That means making sure that people who only want to see some of that can do so sensibly, and a bit of a redesign to find a way of presenting things so that it feels comfortable. So over the next few weeks – maybe months – maybe longer – I’ll be experimenting. Let me know what you think.

It’s been an interesting one, because it’s forced me to quantify the things I do to try and work efficiently. The things I’m sharing here make me sound like some sort of uber robot journalist geek, which I’m not, really, but trying to follow these principles helps me pretend.

Your job is not your admin

• Every job has a tedious admin phase you have to deal with every day. But that’s not your real job – it takes time away from doing what you need to do.
• The most basic ways you can be more awesome involve cutting down on admin time and increasing the time you spend actually working.
• I keep track of what I do to work out which tasks take up time without contributing anything meaningful. I’ve used Rescue Time, Remember The Milk, Epic Win and custom Google Docs to track this in the past.
• Once I’ve worked out where there’s time to be saved, I start working out how to save it. This is useful admin time.
• It’s always worth learning keyboard shortcuts for any program I use daily. It saves small chunks of time over and over again.
• I use a To Do list for big stuff that needs it rather than day-to-day routine things – I’m using Remember The Milk at the moment, but I tend to rotate list apps every few months because otherwise the novelty wears off and I stop using them. I’ve used 2Do, Google Tasks, Outlook Tasks, Doomi, enormous spreadsheets and Epic Win in the past.

Repeated tasks can be automated

• It’s worth a day of my effort to automate something that takes me more than about 20 minutes a day to do. If it’s an interruption or a flow-breaking task or something I will have to do every day for a year, it’s probably worth more.
• I think of certain tasks – finding sources on Twitter, for instance, or researching a topic for a story – as building a re-usable resource, not a one-off event. It takes much less effort to build a Twitter list or filter and aggregate a few RSS feeds the first time around, so you can go straight back to your sources if you’re doing a follow-up.
• I use a lot of dashboards. The new Google Analytics beta lets me customise and keep half a dozen ways of slicing web data at my fingertips, so I can answer common business questions in seconds not hours. iGoogle combined with custom alerts by RSS lets me filter the entire web for certain subjects. Hootsuite and Tweetdeck let me monitor social networks in similar ways.
• I use macros to automate tasks in Excel and Word. I use Google Docs with various APIs to build a few regular reports, occasionally combined with ScraperWiki. I build a lot of very specific spreadsheets where I can plug in data in a certain format and get back insights very quickly. I try to build things that can be re-used or re-purposed.
• If there’s a boring repetitive task, there’s almost certainly a plugin or a script somewhere on the internet that’ll help you make it faster or easier. Sometimes those are more work to rewrite/implement than it would be just to get on with it. Other times they’re lifesaving.
• Greasemonkey can be astonishingly helpful in saving little annoyances (and big ones, sometimes). For instance, I love this script that automatically pushes the “access analytics” button in Google Analytics. It saves one click – but it saves it three or four times every single day.
• After all that – I do very little coding. I mostly borrow other people’s code and put it to use in new situations.

All information can be filtered

• Twitter lists, search operators and even individual users if they’re focussed on a specific topic of interest. The -RT search operator is fantastic. Topsy‘s advanced search is also amazing powerful. And it has an API, which I haven’t yet worked out how to use to best advantage.
• RSS folders in Google Reader (or a similar reader service) and combinations and filters using Yahoo Pipes. Postrank is an awesome service that helps you filter popular and engaging content from feeds. Combining Postrank with Pipes gives you neat automatic filters.
• Google alerts, especially using advanced search terms – you can use site:youtube.com with keywords to build a video alert service, for instance.
• Google custom search – great for checking whether anyone’s covered a particular story, or for working out who on your beat is talking about a certain subject – just give it a list of links.

Interruptions can be limited

• I use rules in Outlook to limit the number of times I see email alerts – I have several set up to filter out various levels of noise, including a white-list for emails most likely to need urgent responses. It was well worth the time spent setting these up – if every pop-up on-screen is only 5 seconds of attention, I’ve still saved more than 5 minutes a day.
• I use rules in Gmail to sort incoming mail by priority, and use the email game to deal with it all in small bursts, quickly and efficiently, when it’s convenient rather than when a mail comes in.
• I turn off email notifications for sites I visit every day anyway. I set up as much as possible to come via RSS (where I can filter it using Yahoo Pipes and categorise it in a sensible folder) or via Twitter (where its immediate impact is limited to 140 characters).
• When I need to focus, I stay away from Tweetdeck completely. I have a 2-column view in Hootsuite with nothing but mentions and direct messages, so I can see anything requiring urgent responses at a glance. I turn my iPhone off.

Waiting kills productivity

• If a task I do regularly is governed by a set of rules and involves waiting for something to happen, I do my best to automate it away. I win twice.
• If I’ve got to do something that involves waiting, I plan for the wait: go take a break, stretch, do a simple time-limited task.
• I have a  folder of RSS feeds from folks who write short, and I read a couple while Iwait. And I have Reeder on my iPhone, for long out-of-the-office waits (some people call them “commutes”).
• I save up several stop-start tasks and use them as a “distraction loop” – taking each one in turn and switching when a wait starts.

What do you do to hack your workflow? What tools do you use to simplify the stuff that doesn’t matter and help you spend more time on the stuff that does?

I’m going to be talking about Zombie, which last night sold out its ninth event in just five hours – talking about how we generate emergent stories, what systems we use to encourage and nurture and later curate stories born from player activity, in a community-oriented and word-of-mouth focussed way. The talk is called The Story Machine. I’ll post up my notes and slides after the event, but here as a teaser is one of my favourite images – drawn by the lovely and long-suffering @gshowitt.

The Story Machine