Since I got a ton (15k+ ) hits from when #lifehacker, linked here, I thought I’d go through the process that I’ve been using.

Remember:

A-list: read every word, mostly actionable. Lifehacker, Cicerone, Lenderama, Bloodhoundblog, Blown Mortgage, Weblog Tools, Personal Brainding are some examples, there are 40 in this list…starting today, I will probably get it to 35 weblogs.

B-list: High quality, I want every word, not necessarily today. Lifehack (dustin wax), Awake at the Wheel are two good examples of that. Comics go here, so does the Dilbert Blog.

C-List: Optional reading, nothing new or novel or necessary, and the stuff that I’ll get elsewhere. Think Seth Godin, Personal Finance Blog, Music Blogs, most friends blogs. This is getting to be the biggest list, and I’m getting to where I don’t read it all anymore.

D- List: Deliberately Avoid. Not necessarily because of quality, but because the information will show up elsewhere. The best stuff about Google or Apple appears so many places so quickly after Google or Apple says it, why bother? Productivity hacks show up in #lifehacker. Anything political winds up here because life is too short. When I open reader, I ‘mark all as read.’ This keeps me from having duplicate subscriptions, I can subscribe, and sometimes stuff will fall out of….

Newly Added: Newly added where everything I subscribe to goes. With this system, I can subscribe to dozens of feeds, and not worry if i’ve subscribed before. If they get marked as read by d-list, that’s what happens.

What you see here is the ‘newly added,’ section of Greader. It’s the stuff that I’ve found in the next month or so. Every day on the 18th, I make a decision on that stuff…does it go into my A list for useful stuff, my B list for interesting stuff…my C list for stuff that’s purely optional, or my D list, for stuff that gets ‘marked as read,’ and that I’m deliberately avoiding.

Freelance Switch- Total A list. The content is uneven, and I intend to guest post there soon, but when it’s good, it’s a worldbeater. Has the highest high notes of any blog I’ve found this year, and is the most frequently enriching. YOU MUST SUBSRCIBE. THAT MEANS YOU, TERI. I always demote for every ad, so Athol, you lasted a long time. You’re friggin entertaining, and you were the last non-actionable blog in the “A” list.

Ink an Vellum is good writing to be sure, but I don’t see it as an every day need to read. It get’s C-listed.

Men With Pens: Tough Call. I’m going to put them in the “B” list, and also leave ‘em in newly added so I keep my eye on them. They would benefit from shorter, more infrequent posts because there’s repetition involved, and I’m repetition tolerant. I didn’t make a decision last month on them. From the b-list exits Indexed. Highly entertaining, but never necessary.

Problogger moves to the “C” list because Darren is on content repetition mode. Not that I don’t admire or can’t benefit, I want to have FEWER feeds to reed each month.

I can’t Believe I’m Still Single: makes the D list. Nothing against it, but the content is not novel, and not enriching enough to read on an iterated basis. I’m not the audience, I don’t think.

Ikeif – B list. Mostly because Keith is a good guy and a friend, and a kickass programmer. He has links, and if you’re a #programmer, you’ll want to include his links as he has some big damn ambitions for building code repositories/best practices.

Official Gmail Blog: That goes Dlist. Why? Because the content is are rebroadcast on lifehacker, so it’s in the mark as read pile

…OK, you get the gist.

One of the things that my Social Media Presence has lacked is some goal.  My goal is to collect both people that want to hear what I have to say, and subscribers.   

I’ve spent a lot of time just bantering with failure enablers, without doing something that will grow my brand. 

And that has to change.  Because while everyone knows blogging is not prospecting (it may be lead generation activity, but it is substantively different than the behavior of prospecting–SEMANTICS MATTER).   Social networking can be prospecting…for people that are willing to listen.

What I must do is make sure that EVERYTHING leads to one or two pages (set up for A/B testing as kindly  suggested by Greg, more PHP to learn), and that those one or two pages are the best representation of me–and what I want–that they can be, tested, vetted, refined, perfected.

So away I go with a big damm ambitious SMP.

I’ll post about it in BHB or Cicrone next week. 

Schedule

Batch process.

focus,.

lather,

rinse

repeat.

[1] Reader in the morning.  I don’t need to do it anymore.  I am somewhat of a morning guy, not so much of an afternoon guy.   One of my habits was to wake up, do my morning routine, and then go through my 400++ feeds.

No more.   Not in the morning, not now, not ever.  Why?  Because it is not good to spend your best energy (I have about 5 productive hours) doing tasks that can wait.  I’m enthusiastically reading blogs, and commenting.

In the low energy afternoon, I can get roughly the same results.

But…in the afternoon, i’m not going to write as good content for lost, I’m not gonna make the same Podcasts or videos.

So…by relieving me of that obligation in the mornings, I can get more GOOD stuff done.   Maybe someday I’ll stop reading feeds, too…because I’ve got all the information I need to build a business, I just need to ACt.

Epiphany #2:

Lakers Celtics.  I watched a little bit.  Used to be, I loved watching sports, the NBA playoffs in particular.  Basketball played at its finest level.  Well, something happened (besides a buckeye loss) in the national championship game.  

Namely:  I saw the emotion people were investing in the game, my friends.  And I thought to myself, “in life, what ELSE are they this excited and passionate about.”   Then I thought, “what am I this excited and passionate about?” 

Last two games, despite them being close, I simply went to bed not curious in the second half.  I don’t regret it, and I think that the chain has been broken.   It’s not that joy is removed, it’s that the vicariousness of the joy has been and now it’s time to replace it with something else.

When in life do we hi five?

When in life do we scream and shout and are jubulant? 

Not often, and sports is a poor substitute. Let’s find ways in life to give high fives.

John Igoe talks about my stuff…

Exceeding in this market is not just about holding on and hoping to survive is all about bending the world to see your will and remaking the world the way you want it to be. listen

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Tim Harris is finally learning to blog, folks.

http://timandjulieharris.com/2008/06/02/top-10-ways-to-make-money-now/

We are all in trouble if he storms the RE.NET.

Seriously.  I was in Columbus when he toyed with our market.

So why try?