Lloyd Morgan

I’ve written about information overload before but have never really done anything to combat it my own life. Not for the want of trying, mind you – it’s just I’ve never found a method that works for me.

GTD is the closest I’ve ever come to actually utilising an information management system full-time, but I find it too structured – even when not adhered to as rigidly as some purists demand.

However, my dabbling wasn’t a completely failed attempt at Getting Things Done: one of the core GTD principles is the crux of my new system for managing the information I come across on a daily basis: moving tasks out of the mind by recording them. Simple yet effective.

But how to record? I’ve tried and failed with many methods – with del.icio.us being the closest I’ve come to finding a  permanent solution – but I eventually discovered that ‘bookmarking’ was not the method for me.

I want to save websites or articles on obscure and interesting topics, that contain great quotes, or sometimes I just want to save a video that I want to share with some friends at a later date. I don’t want to write a full-blown post on the item here, but if I don’t I’ll have to spend half an hour tagging each page in order to find it again 12 months down the line. Now it seems I’ve come across a method that works… and it’s been staring right at me for almost 2 years. Blogging!

Taking the structure from two of my more regular reads – kottke and BoingBoing – I’m now ‘bookmarking’ with LoneGunman. All it takes is a quick sentence or two explaining the entry, a quote, and a link. Eureka, you’ve got yourself a searchable, elegant bookmarking facility that you can control. So far I’ve found it to be extremely effective.

Take a look.