Self-Organization

In an effort to get myself organized I have been trying to find ways to cut down on the amount of time I spend looking for articles and topics to blog about on my various other blogs....we all know I am not looking for this blog, since it sits unattended most of the time.

I have found that I can now have my Google Alerts sent into Google Reader.  So now not only are the blogs I’m following all in one place, so are my keyword news alerts.  When I open Google Reader each morning it is like opening a personalized newspaper!  This has cut down on the clutter in my email inbox also. 

I’ve also learned that I can add my Shared and Starred Items from reader to my blogs, you can see that I did that here a while back.  This now allows me to just share or star an article in Google Reader, rather than having to go copy and paste it into a new blog post for my own blog.  I have always felt that I shouldn’t do that anyway, but when I want to share an article with my blog readers, sharing just the link is usually not a good idea.  Most links disappear eventually, and well if someone comes to my blog and finds nothing but disabled links on several entries, they probably won’t come back.  The boxes on my blogs with my Starred and Shared items only hold up to 10 article links, and are refreshed every time I add to them...thus alleviating the problem!

Then I started thinking about my email issues....I mean, I have WAY too many email accounts...hell I am not that busy or important to need that many different email addresses.  However, when I started trying to eliminate some of them, I soon realized WHY I have them all and that actually NONE of them could be deleted.  So now what, if I take the time each day to check each one, I would get nothing else done.  So, I forwarded ALL of them into my one main email account with GMail.  I even set up that account so that when I get emails from the other accounts I can respond right there from my main account but the ‘from’ field will have the email addy that the original email was sent to!

This is nothing new, and I have had this set up in the past.  However, about 8 months ago I decided to give Outlook 2007 a try (I hated it, and quickly went back to checking Gmail online).  While I was trying it out though and sending test messages to and from my different accounts to ensure that all were forwarding into Outlook correctly I noticed that when I’d send an email from one of my secondary account addy’s from my main account that it showed BOTH email addresses in Outlook.  It would say something like

From: mm cancermoonwolf@gmail.com on behalf of Mary Morgan tailoredlifecoaching@gmail.com

Well, that wasn’t good, so I went in and stopped ALL my accounts from forwarding to my main Gmail account, because I thought what was the point if my personal email addy was going to show up anyway.  Well, recently I decided to put it all back to forwarding in to my personal account.  I just don’t care anymore, if my personal account shows up also!  But, at least I do know it happens, so if in the future I have something to send and make up an email addy that is ‘not associated’ with my real name and personal account, then I know not to send it THROUGH my personal account!

Since I do alot of blogging that could be classified as Advocacy or Activism I have looked at whether or not I could combine some of my blogs....but thinking at this time that just wouldn’t work.

I have gotten my Tweetdeck columns more refined now, which saves me time in searching for certain people that always have good tweets.  And, with twitterfeed I have set up many of my blogs and some that belong to others to auto tweet when posted to.  A couple of people ask me why I auto tweet other peoples blogs....well, because I read those blogs everyday, and was tweeting all their articles anyway, so why not automate it....a few minutes are saved and I have more time for other things!!  I also have my facebook and myspace accounts set up in tweetdeck, so that I send to all three at same time if I want.  And I linked my Twitter account to my Facebook account so that the auto tweets are posted to Facebook too.

All in all I think my self-organization project is working well.  I have been making slight changes over the last few weeks, but overall....I am saving some time in what I am doing!!