In my recent post Healthy Habits: 5 Guideliness for Successful Reading Time, I outlined the process I use to stay committed to my morning reading routine. Many of you asked for some more details about how I set up my tools to optimize my time and be able to quickly share.
Here are six steps for getting your sharing your morning reading with others.
1. Gather your sources.
First, determine where you want to gather your information from. Optimally, you will choose a variety of types and sources. Don’t limit them.
For example, I have five different international news sources that I regularly read – CNN, the Wall Street Journal, FoxNews, Forbes, and the Washington Post. In addition, I read a variety of industry periodicals and blogs.
Find a balance between a diverse set of sources that will provide both disparate information and perspective and a well-defined list that you can get through every day.
2. Configure Feedly.
There are plenty of feed readers out there, but, I chose Feedly for one reason: I find it to not only be one of the best readers, but its integration with social media drastically cuts down the time it takes to aggregate content to share with others (more on that later).
Once you sign up, simply go through and subscribe to your sources’ RSS feeds. You now have a reading list!
I recommend that you download the phone and tablet versions as well. You’ll be surprised how much reading you can get done in the grocery line since you’ll already have a queue ready to read!
3. Organize your reading list.
Yes, you could just aggregate and read, but if you want to “work from the outside in” like I recommend, then it will be very helpful if you organize your list into categories that will limit your context and provide focus.
My organization looks like this:
- Broad News – this includes all of my international and national news sources
- Tech News – this includes all of my industry news sources (like TechCrunch)
- Journals – this includes all of my periodicals (like HBR)
- Other Daily Reading – this includes all of my favorite blogs (like MichaelHyatt.com)
- Monitoring – this includes all of my social media alerts and Google Alerts for keywords like my name
At this point, you now have a working reading list, and, so long as all you want to do is consume information, you’re ready to go.
If you want to share information, too, keep reading.
4. Gather your accounts.
Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ . . .the list goes on and on. If you don’t have the three primary ones, go sign up now.
5. Configure Buffer.
Buffer is the secret that makes social media manageable. By integrating Feedly with Buffer, I can share content that my followers will be interested in with the click of a button.
Take the time to configure each of your social media accounts and set up your publishing schedule. Buffer will now space your updates out at the intervals you’ve determined.
When I first started using this system I would queue all of my content in the morning and schedule Buffer to publish content three times a day – in the morning, afternoon, and evening. I now publish content 10 times a day because it’s so easy to keep the queue full. I’m able to share a lot more relevant content because the process is so simple.
Yes, social media is literally as easy as reading and flagging interesting content for publication. Feedly and Buffer simplify the process so that it’s literally one click away.
How do you share information with your social networks?