I think Google + is what Facebook should have been. But it’s years too late. When I set up a G+ account, I figured several of my friends and family from FB would follow me on it, but only a few did. They are still using just FB and not posting on other social media sites.

I found G+ to be pretty interesting, at first, but now it’s sort of old hat … I don’t see anything on it that I didn’t see first on FB, techmeme, or Twitter. There are a few good discussions but they are buried amongst too much self-serving crap.

And then there is the annoyance of notifications. Everyday I get notified once or twice that 5 or 10 people have followed me. But a few days later my follow count is back to about what it was, suggesting that they only followed me to get me to follow them, and then unfollowed me when I didn’t. It’s the same follow game that’s played on Twitter, and it’s just annoying. I send all my Twitter notifications about new followers to the trash can — I began doing this sometime ago, after discerning that it’s just “spam bots” or social media “zealots” that are following. But, I can’t do that with G+, so I am just deleting it altogether.

I think quitting G+ will help me get a bit more focus in my life, along with deleting my posterous and tumblr accounts, and training myself to spend less time on the few social media sites I will keep (FB, twitter).”

Admittedly, the Tumblr and Posterous accounts were not actually distracting me, because I haven’t posted to them in a long while. They were experiments that didn’t pan out.

But, I suspect my subconscious still had to deal with the occasional question of “why not post to Tumblr/Posterous today?” So, hopefully deleting them frees my mind up a tad bit more.

Do you have any social media accounts that are more distracting than useful?

In Danny Sullivan’s summary of Google Zeitgeist conference, he quotes Google cofounder Larry Page as saying

There are no companies that have good slow decisions. There are only good companies that have fast decisions.

Larry had apparently deduced this from analyzing data from lots and lots of corporations. He apparently also had in mind that Google had not acted fast enough regarding a recent Motorola decision.

But, does his quote make for sound advice? It seems to me, as an outsider looking in, that Apple makes slow and thoughtful decisions. Do they perhaps miss some opportunities? Sure. We are Always going to miss some opportunities. Every one of us, from individuals to the most successful companies.

And Ray Dalio, head of the world’s most successful hedge fund, also focuses on making slow, but correct, decisions, as noted in this highly interesting interview of him.

The key of course is to make the Right decisions … sometimes you can do that with due speed, but often it takes a thoughtful approach with a lot of weighing of pro’s and con’s.

Back to the point about missed opportunities, Jeff Bezos emphasized, in this Bloomberg discussion of the Kindle Fire, that Amazon focuses on opportunities:

Bezos says he doesn’t think defensively.

“Everything we do is driven by seeing opportunity rather than being worried about defending,” he says. Given Apple’s inroads into the media business, that’s hard to believe. Bezos is magnanimous toward Jobs.

“On a personal level we have a tremendous amount of respect for Apple and Steve. I think that’s returned,” he says. “Our cultures start in the same place. Both companies like to invent, both companies like to pioneer, both companies start with the customer and work backwards. There’s a like-mindedness.” Pause. “Are two companies like Amazon and Apple occasionally going to step on each other’s toes? Yes.”

In thinking back over my 62 years on this little planet, I’d say that I sure could have benefitted from being more focused on opportunity than on “defense.” I can think of way too many opportunities that I let go, thinking that they would come again, never to see them again. And, sometimes I let opportunities pass because I didn’t see them at the time. Sometimes you are not going to see an opportunity if you don’t have an opportunity-mindset.

That’s it for today. Lots for you to think about (for example, did Larry Page draw the wrong conclusions from the data he looked at, because of one recent experience? If so, how would you avoid doing it yourself? Are there opportunities in your life that you have just been overlooking? [You have to take some time to really think on this one.} And so on.)

Here’s what the bookmarklet looks like in my Chrome browser (sandwiched in between the Gmail and another bookmarklet):

Basically, Instapaper takes a page that looks like the following

and turns into one that looks like this:

The latter is so readable on an iPad or iPhone that it makes reading a pleasure, instead of a challenge as it is with many web pages. The downside is that Instapaper gathers up only the content without any of the readers’ comments … so, when there are insightful comments, I miss out on those. Often, though, the comments add no value, so I only occasionally miss out on anything worth reading.

And, I can save a page to Instapaper from within the Safari browser on my iPad or iPhone, because the bookmarklets sync with those in my iMac’s Safari browser (I have basically the same bookmarks in Safari and Chrome).

Even better, a lot of apps have a “Save to Instapaper” feature built in. This includes two of my other favorite iPad apps: Reeder and Zite.

Reeder syncs with my Google Reader feeds, and is what I generally use to browse through my feeds. When I see an article that looks interesting, I just click a button and the link is saved to my Instapaper account. Zite, a relatively new but fantastic app, grabs headlines from several other sources, and has turned out being a marvelous supplement to my Reeder feeds. And, within Zite, when I see an article that looks interesting, I just click a button and the article is saved to Instapaper for me.

I typically save anywhere from 10 to 30 articles to Instapaper each day. When I sit down with my iPad to read those, I may delete a half-dozen of the articles without even bothering to read them … what I thought might be interesting to read no longer interests me in these cases. That’s actually a nice feature of a “Read Later” approach … you ultimately wind up reading only what really interests you, instead of things that seem appealing only for a short while.

My account with Instapaper is a premium one, for which I pay the very small of $3 per month. I can get almost all the same features for free, but I have chosen to support Instapaper because it is so valuable to me. It truly is the most useful app I have.

Instapaper has other nice features. I won’t go into all of them, as you can read about them at their site, but I like the ability to email a link to Instapaper, the ability to have the articles formatted for my Kindle, and the ability to send favorited articles to Evernote. I especially like the fact that the iPad app lets me choose a font and font-size, and to also select the width of the reading area. (Typography specialists will tell you that the optimum reading experience is one in which each line has between about 50 to 70 characters … I prefer a line width that gives me closer to 50 characters than to 70, as this makes it easier for me to speed read.)

Bottom line: if you haven’t tried this app out, I highly recommend you give it a try.

I had instead used Yojimbo, which I reviewed a few months ago. While I have a high regard for Yojimbo, their iPad app is not free, and there is no iPhone (or Android) app. Plus, the iPad app is read-only, and since I increasingly use my iPad for composition, I really wanted an app that would let me input data from my iPad. Additionally, at the time that I began looking at switching to Evernote, I did not realize that Yojimbo supported direct input from scanners, such as the popular Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Mobile Scanner . (I had seen in several “famous geek” setups at The Setup that several use a Fujitsu scanner to scan papers to PDF documents in the computers.)

Having a good “collection app” that accepts input from scanners is something that is increasingly important to me. I have, for the longest, put off converting all of my old statements (bank statements and other records), and plan to soon get a good scanner. Also, in looking through the Evernote blog, I noticed that it also takes input from the Livescribe Smartpen. Since I’ve toyed with idea of having a smartpen for a long while, it was great to find an app that would take input directly from it.

So, I searched the web for tips on converting from Yojimbo to Evernote, and found the perfect AppleScript for copying Yojimbo to Evernote. I ran the script directly from the web site, and after a few minutes it copied all of my Yojimbo items into my Evernote app on my Mac. (I only had a few hundred items to copy, and it took about 3 minutes … if you have a lot of items to convert, it could take a long while.) This data then synced with the Evernote servers, which synced with the Evernote apps on my iPad and iPhone, and I could access (and modify) my data from any of devices.

Cool. I was happy. For two days. Then, I converted my iPhone 3GS and iPad 1 to iOS 5 and found that the apps did not work on iOS 5. This is an issue that is widely complained about on Twitter, so I checked through the Evernote blog to see what their iOS5 plans were. Their plan is to wait until iOS 5 is actually released (out of the beta cycle), and I just don’t want to go without an app that long.

So, I hunted for other options, and did not really find any, but I did learn that Yojimbo takes input directly from a scanner. Then I converted back to using Yojimbo, and went ahead and bought their iPad app. It works okay (the font is a bit small), although I am still dissatisfied that it is read-only.

It is possible that I could ultimately go back to Evernote. I really don’t like switching away from apps that serve me well, though, unless there is a strong reason to do so. (As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.) We’ll have to see how it pans out.

By the way, for those of you who have scanner (or plan to get one), just because you can scan in all of your thousands of documents, doesn’t mean you should. For example, if it is unnecessary to keep paper copies of your utility bills from 2 to 10 years ago, then it is unnecessary to keep electronic copies of them. An excellent article on which documents you should keep, and which you should toss, is this NYT article.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, including whether you recommend alternatives.

Update: In continuing to read on this, I found an interesting article on Yojimbo by Shawn Blanc, in which he discusses some data on the difference between Evernote and Yojimbo database sizes:

If I were to sync my entire Yojimbo library to my iPhone, it would be a little less than 1,000 items with a database of 86 MBs right now. Even for someone like John Gruber, who has been using Yojimbo since the beta days, it wouldn’t be a massive chore to get his Yojimbo data onto his iPhone. John’s total library is 5,500 items and 375 MBs. Not that big of a file for just about any given iPhone. A single movie easily takes up three or four times that amount of space.

(An interesting tid-bit of info: Patrick Rhone, who recently migrated his data from Evernote back to Yojimbo, went from 1,220 items and a 1.3GB library in Evernote, to 1,432 items and a 403MB library in Yojimbo. His database weighed in at one-third the size after the migration. Obviously none of his audio or video attachments were able to be transferred into Yojimbo, but that’s not the only reason the database was shored up. Evernote treats text files as HTML and uses WebKit to render notes. Patrick and I agree that, because of the way Evernote handles even basic text notes, extra size gets added due to the code which is wrapped around even the simplest of notes.)

I thought you might find that information to be interesting. Shawn also discusses the use of text files for storing bits of information. His discussion drives home the point that it is probably not smart to try to use either Yojimbo or Evernote as “everything apps.”

I got completely burned out on blogs, even my own. So much of what I was reading was “me too” writing (20 different blogs talking about the same thing), and none of it really mattered. So much useless writing is done just to get people to visit a site and view an ad.

Want an example? Here’s one: somebody had a blog title along the lines of “Would Shakespeare Tweet?” My answers:

• No.
• Who Cares?
• Does Steve Jobs tweet?

It had gotten to where I was reading less than 1% of the headlines in my feeds, because they were crap like this or “me too” articles.

So I basically gave up on Twitter, and just doing that made me feel so much better. (I still have an account and have even spent about 5 minutes on it so far this year, but I basically consider it a bad use of my time.) And, although I had trimmed my RSS feeds, I trimmed them even more. I now rely heavily on a few key aggregators: Memeorandum, Techmeme, Arts & Letters Daily. I kept a few other major feeds, such as TechCrunch and Daring Fireball. I also kept about 20 of the less-popular, but interesting and useful blogs, such as Michael Hyatt and Dan Ariely, and I regularly read The New York Times (I’m undecided on which subscription option to use).

So, now there is less “noise” in my information intake, but even when my intake was peaked, I still had a sense of not having enough (useful) information. For example, you know that somewhere in the world, someone today looked at some ancient scripture in a new way and had a life-changing experience, one that we could maybe benefit from, too. Maybe it even gets blogged. But the chances of me picking it up? Pretty close to zero.

In thinking about this, and in thinking about people who have personally inspired me, I have realized that perhaps the best way for me to find such nuggets is directly: maybe read the Bible daily, instead of hoping someone else gets an insight from it that is useful to me. Maybe read other literature that is known to inspire (I have done some of this, but way too irregularly).

I once read that Eric Schmidt said that Google is not archiving the web for it to be read by humans, but for it to be read by machines. When we reach that plateau, machines will identify trends and “nuggets” that we could never have figured out on our own.

Until then, and even after then, it’s up to us to look at how we are consuming information, and which parts of it are useful or at least inspiring.

“That Keener sure did know a lot.”

With another friend saying

“Yes, but it would have been better if he known less and had done more.”

And another one said

“Yeah, he sure didn’t do much with all he knew.”

Ouch. Obviously my conscience was talking to me.

So, I thought over my actions of the past several months and found that I had been spending a lot of time on Twitter, using it to find links to a lot of articles to read. And, I had been spending a lot of time reading articles through my RSS feeds, and reading one book after another. Yet, I could not think of a single instance in which I had really enriched anyone’s life.

I had become an information addict. Acquiring information had become a focus in my life.

I had let what could be a strength (learning new things) turn into Resistance to Worthwhile Action. While you might not be an information addict, you too probably have resistance in your life, so I want to say a few words about it.

Steven Pressfield, in his highly acclaimed The War of Art, talks about resistance as if it were something external to us. In fact, he claims that demons, and even the devil, make up Resistance, noting that their aim is to keep you from accomplishing your destiny. (Scott Peck had some of this theme in one of his Road Less Traveled books, where he talked about how he had come to view his time as God’s time, and how he had become determined to not waste any of God’s time.)

A more prevalent view is one described by Seth Godin in his book Linchpin. He devotes an entire chapter to Resistance, and talks about how the oldest part of our brain (which he calls the lizard brain) fears change, and works to keep us from changing and from doing anything it doesn’t consider to be in our best interests.

I’m inclined to think there is some truth to both views. Regardless, I do believe it pays for us to look at where there is resistance in our lives. Pressfield would say that the areas where we encounter the most resistance are the most important ones, the ones most worthy of our attention and effort.

Of course it will do no good to just acknowledge that there are areas where you face resistance. Ultimately we have to do something to deal with it. In my case of information addiction, where it is causing me to spend time unwisely, I have taken the action of abandoning Twitter for at least a month. I’m also working on getting a handle on purchasing books, to cut down to something reasonable.

Regular readers may be wondering if I am now saying that we should not be constant learners. No, I am not saying that. In fact, I was pleased with my buddy Paul Stamatiou for his article yesterday on how he switched from WordPress to Jekyll … one of Paul’s motivations was to do this just so he could learn. (I also love that Paul shares what he learns.) Many has been the time when I have taken something on just so I could learn from it. I do not plan to stop doing that … it is part of my nature. And, I still strongly believe that we have to keep learning just to ensure our brains stay in shape and so that we can develop fresh insights, instead of remaining stale.

But, ultimately there must be balance, even in our efforts to learn. The clock is constantly ticking, and, in the end, it’s what we get done that will matter, not what we knew.

I decided to try a small change to help me break an addiction to Twitter, and it has worked wonderfully. A couple of weeks ago, I moved the Twitter apps off of the home page on my iPhone and iPad, and that has been all it has taken to keep me off Twitter for since that time. When I had Twitter on my home screen, I was checking it more than 20 times a day. But, with it out of sight, it is out of mind, and I must say that I feel so much better. Not that I really have anything against Twitter, but it was getting to the point that it was “owning me.” (I may go back to it in time, or I may not … I’m undecided.)

In the post I linked above, I mentioned a couple of books that talk about the importance of baby steps. I also came across a Stanford study that mentions it:

I believe you can find this concept useful in your life. If you have a success story about using it, it would be great to hear from you in the comments.

• clean house
• organize tax info
• organize bookshelves by author
• clean Mac files and folders
• write year-end employee reviews
• clean WIndows files and folders
• clean garage

Although these are simple tasks (except maybe for the employee reviews), they can still take hours and are therefore easy to put off.

But the FlyLady has great advice that helps us get stuff like this done: do them in 5-minute bursts. For example, to accomplish the “Clean House” task put an item on your calendar that says “5-minute room rescue.” Then, spend the 5 minutes on the room you most dread cleaning. Do it again the next day. Or once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Spread it out as needed.

Of course, at some point, your mind realizes “hey, this isn’t really that bad,” and you just go ahead and do it all.

A couple of ebooks that emphasize this message well, along with other important change-making principles, are

• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
• One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

After you try this out, I suspect you’ll want to tell others about it, just like I did.

And, yes, I know better. We all know the techniques for avoiding having our precious time sucked away from us, without our using it as we should have. But, knowing the techniques and living them are not always the same, are they?

When I saw two posts today that dealt with this subject, it seemed to be an omen. So, I thought I’d link to those posts and discuss each briefly.

The first post, and the most important tip, comes from Seth Godin:

Zig taught me this twenty years ago. Make your schedule before you start. Don’t allow setbacks or blocks or anxiety to push you to say, “hey, maybe I should check my email for a while, or you know, I could use a nap.” If you do that, the lizard brain is quickly trained to use that escape hatch again and again.

Isaac Asimov wrote and published 400 (!) books using this technique.

The better you plan your day, the more you can get done. Specifically, you can get more of the important things done by planning your day.

The second article comes from Paul Stamatiou. It specifically address startup funding, but it is an excellent discussion of how some activities can almost suck the life out of you, and can certainly eat up time.

In reading Paul’s fascinating account of the difficulties of getting funding, it is clear to me that one of the best things he did was to thoroughly research the area. This sort of gets back to my previous post about what we can learn from Google about managing time: it pays to research an area before wading into it.

You may be thinking that this sounds too obvious to mention. But, again, do we really do it every time we should? I haven’t. There have been times when I have done my homework before taking something on, but there have been times when I haven’t done it and paid for it.

Anyway, these tips really hit home with me, so I thought I’d share them with you.

But, they have also demonstrated that they take on too many new projects, and often do not meet commitments they make to others on those projects. MG Siegler of TechCrunch wrote and in-depth article on this yesterday, going so far as to suggest that Google is living in a dream world. (He makes analogy with the gist of the movie Inception, suggesting that Google is even living in a dream within a dream.)

When I first read Siegler’s piece, I thought to myself “what a waste of talent … how sad.” But, as I was using OmniFocus on my Mac a little later, it occurred to me that I am behaving very much like Google: taking on too much stuff. It’s so easy to do when you have a great GTD tool like OmniFocus, which is designed to help you capture everything you think of that might turn into a task. Before you know it, you have a few hundred items, and have not adequately addressed how important and how practical those items really are.

So, one thing we can learn from Google is: limit what you take on. Our desire to have as much impact as we can makes it easy for us to take on too much. I am not saying we all need to scale back by 50%, or by any specific amount. In fact, it is good to push yourself. Too a point. The key is to figure out what that point is for you, and stick to it.

And another lesson from Google is: be practical. We’ve all been told that it’s good to dream big. And it is. But, before you take something on, you need to look at the realities of implementing it. Siegler’s discussion of Google’s intentions with Android are a perfect case in point. They started out with the dream of making smartphones, based on an open-source OS, available for free for everyone. They had apparently not considered the realities of dealing with carriers, who have their own agendas and their own self-interests to protect.

One more example, a bit more personalized: when I set up this blog, I knew I would want to share insights on life management and technology. Later, I realized that I wanted to also share insights on learning, because I believe we should learn all of our lives. So, I have shared insights on these topics for almost 4 years, and the blog has not grown hardly an iota. It has about 500 subscribers, about the same that it’s had for the past couple of years.

And I realize, in hindsight, that I have taken on too many topics. The only real way to have a successful blog is to carve out a specific niche. Technology, and technology only, for instance. Or life management. Or learning. Not all three. In essence, I have pulled a Google. I wanted to have an impact in all three areas, and thought that I could, given my background and interests. But, having too many topic areas thins the blog down. People who come to the site to read a technology article (say on the iPod Touch as a PDA), are not going to continue to browse around on the site because they see it is filled with “other stuff.” So, instead of having impact in three areas, I have no impact in any of the areas.

In conclusion, each time you do your weekly reviews (you are doing them, aren’t you?), be sure to spend enough time asking yourself, for each item, if you should really be spending time on it. Ask yourself how practical you are being in taking it on, and what the barriers to success are.