Productivity for librarians #ili2011

01 Nov Productivity for librarians #ili2011

Last week at Internet Librarian International 2011 I gave a presentation on productivity for librarians. I’m a fan of the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology and like to utilise online software to help organise my work and increase my productivity. I thought I’d give a brief overview of some of the tips I’ve picked up along the way as well as sharing some of my favourite productivity tools.

The main tips I wanted to share included:

• Filtering email – use labels or folders; keep inbox purely for incoming messages (not storage or actions to follow up); establish rules for different types of items
• Filtering RSS – organise feeds using folders based on topics or priority (I have an A* feeds folder); weed feeds on a regular basis; don’t be scared of the mark all as read button (this is something I still need to work on!)
• Filtering tweets – use Twitter lists to focus on certain topics/areas (e.g. work colleagues, librarians, favourite tweeters); use saved searches to follow tweets of interest (for example, I currently have #chartership, #mlibs, and #cpd23)

Software and tools I like to use include:

• Nirvana – to do list
• Evernote – note taking and storage
• TripIt – travel organisation
• MeetingPad – meeting minutes on iPad
• PlainText – distraction free writing on iPad
• Nozbe – to do list which syncs with Evernote and Dropbox
• IFTTT (If this then that) – service which can be used to set up to transfer information from one place to another

The full presentation is embedded below:

I really enjoyed speaking on this topic as it helped me think about my information processes in more detail (though unfortunately what I discovered was that it needs work to make it more streamlined). I had some interesting discussions with other productivity tool geeks too, including Emma Cragg whose previous blog post and presentation on this topic I found really useful.

I’m testing out a few productivity tools (currently beta testing new software IQTELL) and am always up for trying others – do you have any recommendations?