How can one stay reminded of useful tips, instructions, and other references on a routine basis?

Question

As I spend my Sunday on this three-day weekend finally catching up on a lot of reading—most of it technical in terms of software and web development as well as web design—I find myself posing the following question:

This is an excellent article/tip/resource, I will bookmark in my well-organized and overly-categorized list of bookmarks in Safari (which is backed up with Xmarks). Hmm, how can I remember to come back to this later when I actually need or should reference it for a given task or project?

Answer 1

I'm using http://www.instapaper.com/ for this. It has a nice iphone/ipad client with offline downloads. You can also consider https://www.readability.com/ (reeder integrates with it) or readitlater.

Answer 2

I use check lists. Whenever I work on a task, I make sure I go through the check list. I always have the check list open and easily accessible. It became a habit.

When I encounter something useful, I add a pointer/link in the appropriate check lists. It is common to add it to more than one checklist.

If you have a limited number of "types" of tasks, you will have a limited number of check lists.

Answer 3

Excellent question! If it strikes you as important, document what you want to spend time on in a to-do list, bulletin board or checklist. These could be electronic or virtual, but have a routine of spending at least 15 minutes a week (or whatever you want to commit) to review, and update the content of your "list".

You might consider bookmarking the things you want to follow up on in a temporary bookmark category, and once you have come back to it and spent more time with it, you can then move it to the proper category. This forces you to revisit it at least once, to clean out your temporary category. Create some kind of workflow routine, and stick to whatever procedures/timelines you feel works for you.

Answer 4

If You are reading technical stuff, You probably will be able to generate tags for each bookmark, describing topics that this document is covering. If You are for example in different stages of web development, You could just check the contents of different tags ant quickly judge if there is something useful.

At some point You will gather big "library", so I guess none system will help You to determine if You aren't skipped something useful.

Answer 5

I use readitlater (as someone has mentioned) but also google calendar - I sent up a future event reminding me to revisit particular videos, or articles and the like.

Answer 6

I use evernote for any kind of note taking. I can write and access my text/pdf/voice/camera captured/web clipping notes anytime anywhere, and it's cross platform so that I can use PC/Mac/iPad/iPhone/web.

Answer 7

I use a simple spreadsheet for this purpose. I set up categories - which might inlcude the type of action I want to take with an item - in a series of worksheet tabs. Then when I have an article or web page etc I want to remember I copy and paste the url into a worksheet cell, and if necessary make a brief comment in an adjoining cell. The spreadsheet stays open while I work through my reading so the process is very fast. I also save the spreadsheet to a dropbox folder so that I can access it from any of my computers. By using a spreadsheet I can easily adjust the material I have documented as well as adding additional comments, sorting the entries and so on.

Answer 8

Diigo bookmarking service also has a "Read Later" category you can add websites to.