It’s so easy to become distracted from your working day with the browser constantly open and the Internet always available to you. Leaving your Outlook client on all day is another massive distraction too – which is another story. Turn that off straight away!
If you are looking for ways to be smarter when it comes to putting some focus on your day, Read it Later could be a handy little application for you to know about. In short, it stops you from becoming distracted from what you were doing, without losing a piece of useful information, which could just disappear into the ether.
Read it later is a simple, free application, which has just had its second birthday and comes in three flavo(u)rs – Firefox, Iphone, or any other browser. You are surfing away – trying hard to meet a deadline, and of course you become distracted by an unrelated blog post or other snippet of information that suddenly takes you completely away from what you were trying to achieve originally.
Get into the habit of clicking the Read it later button, which installs into your browser… stop being distracted! What will then happen is that Read it later will file away the URL you were just going to look at for easy access later. You can continue to focus on what you were doing – safe in the knowledge that during you allotted ‘follow up’ or ‘spare’ time even – you can go back and examine the link…
Reading your filed away URLS…
If using Firefox, you can click on the ReadItLater dropdown on the right of Firefox’s search box to expand the list of items you’ve added. ReadItLater conveniently sorts the links by oldest added (you can change this), so you see the stuff that’s been hanging out there the longest at the top. You can quickly filter the list by tag, page name, site, or URL, too.
One of the really cool features of ReadItLater is that it automatically saves links to your Firefox bookmarks in a folder you specify. So if you’re already syncing your bookmarks across computers, your reading list goes to other computers.
In addition – at Being Smarter, we send the list to an RSS feed, which we can then view in Google Reader when time allows.
This is an excellent recommendation for business people serious about putting more focus into the day. It’s a great habit to get into reaching for that Read it Later button…
Demo for you below if you like the sound of it… watch it and then go and be more focused… like its million other users!
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