Mahdi Taghizadeh I'm who I'm!

Clean up your digital life!

Once upon a time there were only limited everyday tasks for geeks such as checking emails and in recent years, checking feeds. After Web 2.0 revolution these tasks number has been dramatically increased. Nowadays you have to check your Twitter, Friendfeed accounts several times a day (and for someone several times an hour), manage multiple messengers like Yahoo! WLM, GTalk, Skype, etc., posting various resources to sites like Delicious and Digg, and many other hidden tasks which can consume your time and energy everyday. In this situation busy persons like me would fall in this trap and waste a huge amount of time everyday. What can we do? In recent weeks I tried to manage such stuff and ‘clean up my digital life’! It could help me a lot and so this idea came to my mind to share these experiences with you too. Here’s a list of suggestions and tips to mineralize your social web activities such that you lose the least:

- Follow less people on micro blogging systems: I saw some people who follow thousand of peoples on sites like Twitter and Jaiku. Are all of them your friends or people who you may be interested in their words? Do you read all of their tweets everyday? Of course not; so reduce your following list number. Follow only your real friends, prominent community guys and valuable news/resource twitters. Keep this number under 100.

- Use desktop clients for Twitter and Friendfeed: If you’re a fan of Twitter or Friendfeed, try to use a good desktop client to check updates and posts your own updates. Checking for updates via browser is confusing. My favorite client for Twitter is TweetDeck but unfortunately it doesn’t yet support Friendfeed; to check both Twitter and Friendfeed in one client you can use Twhirl.

- Clean up your messenger friends list: You may have dozens of friends in your messengers who are not real friends and you’ve added them once or they’ve did and you accepted and added them back. Most of them are only like spammers to you and you may receive many offline and online messages from them everyday (and most of these messages are kind of ‘Send to All’). I suggest you organize and clean up your friends list and keep only those whom you chat to frequently. Remove all others. There is another point, If you want to no longer receive messages from them you’ve to ignore and mark them as spammer and this decision depend on you. My personal solution was creating another messenger ID and adding all my required friends to that account again. I’m satisfied with this solution and my list is so clean now! [Tip: There are many short IDs available on ymail.com (for Yahoo!) and live.com (for WLM). Try it!]

- Use less messengers at a time: Many of us have multiple IM accounts such as Yahoo!, Live, GTalk, Skype, AIM, etc. but is it necessary to put all of them in startup and being singed in everywhere? I guess not; Reduce the number of your online messengers to two at most. You can have other messengers installed but use them only when you need.

- Clean up your feed reader: How many feeds do you have in your feed reader? How many of them are really important and interesting and you read them? I guess this ratio is 100/50; I mean if you have 100 feeds in your reader, only 50 of them may be useful and important and other 50 feeds may be ignorable. It’s my own experience before organizing my feeds, I was marking many of my feeds as read prior to read their content. You learn which feeds are your favorites after about 15 days of adding them to your reader. So if you feel you don’t use a particular feed’s content, remove it and let yourself focus on other important titles.

- Use bookmarklets and extensions to bookmark links: If you’re a fan of bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us or Digg, you can use Firefox extensions, toolbars or bookmarklets to easily post links to your account.

- Waste less time to check emails: I have both Web based and POP3/IMAP email accounts and to check them all, I had to open Outlook and a browser tab several times a day and perform a repeating send/receive action to see if there is new mails. This process wastes about 5 minutes each time and if I repeat this 6 times per day I lose half an hour for nothing! What did I do to solve this problem?! My favorite sidebar is Yahoo! Widgets; and my most favorite widget is Informer. There are a lot of works you can do with Informer but here, I want to talk about email checker sensor. You can add as many email accounts as you want including Yahoo!, Gmail, any POP3 or IMAP account and this widget which sits above your task bar checks for new emails in selected period of time and shows the number of new emails; if you hover it you can see latest emails subjects as well and if you like to see it you would click on account name to open browser or favorite email client. Yep! You save your time ;-)

- Keep your desktop clean: A desktop full of icons consumes more memory and you get puzzled soon with all these icons. Only keep necessary shortcuts on your desktop and let your eyes enjoy a beautiful desktop wallpaper!

These were my own experiences and you can find your own tips to easily manage a better digital life, so share them with me ;-)