Time management: optimized feeds, mail, twitter and phone.

I spend a lot of time behind my PC, during my workday but also in the evening. My new years resolution this year was to “optimize” and remove some clutter, saving time in the end.

This is what I did:

Organized Google Reader

A read a lot of blogs. Started with pure Java centric, it has become an important central part of all my knowledge gather. Blogs such as LifeHacker, PM Hut, 5whys, and many more resulted in a large aggregation.

Since March 26, 2007 you have read a total of 171,897 items.

From your 157 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 5,232 items, clicked 94 items, starred 5 items, and emailed 0 items.

LifeHacker has an excellent blog about organizing your RSS feeds: which resulted into following:

Organized by Priority

Cleaned up Twitter

I was following some funny, but totally useless spammers which cluttered my tweetwall, such as @mbaeten .
Got rid of those and used the Find Friends tool and started following some new. Let’s see if they make the cut next year.

Cleaned up phone

Removed all games which I ended up playing in bed while being insomniac.

Flashed my HTC Desire with Cyangenmod, for a better exchange calender integration, auto-update everything while on wifi only and created a priority call filter which only allows incoming calls from very few people while sleeping…

Cleaned up GMail

Unsubscribed from every newsletter who mailed me in last 6 months. Subscribed to their RSS feeds instead, if they had any. I got about 50 mails a day I needed to archive on my personal mail.

With the saved time, I wrote this blog.

So it has payed off already