Being a blogger means some pretty different work methods than other types of work. Just think of GTD contexts for example. If you are a blogger you have @computer and @computer and @computer, if you specialize in some area, you might also have @computer. All in all, in some cases you will need special methods, or use available options differently. Here are 5 tips for Google Reader productivity geared especially toward bloggers.

Using tags

My primary use for Google Reader is to find stories. About 60% of my posts are about things I haven’t read before, out of the top of my head, the other 40% is about interesting stuff I read about. I write for 5 blogs at the moment and all of them require special types of content. One requires longer stories, the other requires shorter stories, one requires posts about web development and css and so on and so forth. Tags are a great way for me to indicate which blog the story could go to later. This enables me to go through all new items quickly and categorize them.

The great thing about tags is that you can also use them for personal interest. If I come across a story about the new Gibson guitar, I will want to read it later, I can just label it “personal” or something similar.

Sharing is networking

Sharing is a great way to stay in touch with your readers, let them know what kind of person you are and show people what kind of stuff you like. For example, Hack Your Day is all about productivity right? Well, apart from writing the blog I also play guitar and sing, I like guitars and so on, so the best way for me to communicate that is to share these kinds of stories. I can’t really blog about them on Hack Your Day, but if someone likes the blog enough to look into the author, they’ll see what other stuff I like, they may discover that they like similar things. Due to that they may refer other people to me, they may want to work with me and so on.

The new note options also enable you to share your opinion with you shared item. Since in your notes only the post title and your notes are shown, in theory you could also cover the item like a blog post. If you’re a popular blogger your readers will be interested in anything you have to say, so giving them as much as you can will make you even more popular.

Using stars

Many people I know use stars very unproductively. They star a load of items to read later, only read about 30% of them, and then keep many starred until the end of time. If you are a blogger, Google Reader is a professional tool you can use, so use it productively, give those stars some meaning.

If you don’t use the tagging system I described or if you only have one blog the best use of stars is to indicate articles you want to cover in the future. Once you’ve covered it, be sure to remove the star though so you can get an accurate reading of how many sources you have left.

However if you do use the tag system, there really is no point to using the stars like this, since the tags serve the same purpose. Once you’ve covered the story, just remove the tag. You can still use stars pretty well though for a multitude of things. I use them to indicate upcoming applications. There are quite a few apps which I love and are either in closed beta, or are still in production and I want to wait some more with a review. In these cases I add a star so I know I need to come back and check up on them later.

Reading by importance

Many people have hundreds of subscriptions and complain that they need to go through thousands of rss items daily. You’re a blogger, going through items does not make you money and is not at all a productive use of your time! I would more accurately describe it as a total waste. I just missed about 3 days and I went through about 150 items, which means 50 a day, which I don’t see growing all that much.

The secret to productive reading is categorization by importance. I have a local news page in my RSS feed which produces around 50 items a day. These however are not important so if I have read my important onces and I feel tired, there is no need to read these.

I suggest creating three folders, “daily”, “important”, and “other”. This is the combination that works best for me, let me show you how I use them. Daily items are ones that I read every day obviously. This would be Lifehacker for example, Freewaregenious and so on. If I find that more than 50% of a site’s post are worth covering (extremely rare), they get into the daily folder.

The important folder is for sites who produce some great stories, and I do read daily, but I don’t mind if I skip some stories. These sites typically produce 20% - 30% cover worth stories. This of course doesn’t mean the rest aren’t good, they just wouldn’t fit on any blogs I write to.

The other folder all the other feeds I like, but I don’t necessarily read all the time. These could be news feeds, blogs of friends, twitter feeds and so on. These are the feeds that are very fun to read, but produce no extra worth for my blog(s).

If you use this tip you will find that you use your time much more productively. I understand that its fun to read a lot of blogs, thoughts, ideas, news, but when you really get down to it, the good old 80-20 rule applies. 20% of the items contribute to 80% of your blog, while the other  80% hardly contribute anything.

Using trends to establish what to read

Google Reader has some built-in statistics which may seem like a “just for fun” option, but you can use it to your advantage. As I’ve said above, it’s important to spend time with the truly important feeds, and usig the data in the trends page is a great way to establish importance.

The best way to establish what you need to read is to initially use stars to indicate items you want to cover for any of your blogs. In the trends section, you can then take a look at the number of stars from each subscription, the more stars, the more important.

Update frequency could also indicate the importance of a blog since this raises the chance of you giving something a star. It also enables you to take a look at how many posts you create on your own blog on average. Hack Your Day has 0.8 posts daily right now, which tells me I need to write more, I would like to raise that to 1.5 at least.

There are other types of data you can take a look at. If you email yourself (or others) all the stories you want to cover the emailed data is quite handy. You can also take a look at the most inactive feeds and simply remove them.

You can also take a look at when you read feeds most, by time of day, day of the week and last 30 days, which can give you a good overview of time management. I read the most items on Tuesday, don’t ask me why, and indeed this shows me that I am not using my time right. I want to work on blogging roughly the same amount each day, so a very flat graph would be my ideal data set, showing that I spend the same time every day. This urges me to take a look at how and when I work, so I can optimize my time usage.

Firefox 3 introduces a new bookmarking system which utilizes databases to store your history, favorites and so on, so you have much more power and control over them. Recently I reinstalled my system and decided to go with a fresh (not restored) Firefox, so I can organize myself better.

In fact, the best way I think you can go about organizing your bookmarks in a new install is if you do it the GTD way. When you arrive at a web page, spend 2 seconds and decide if this is worth a bookmark or not. Most likely the first pages you visit will be, since these will be pages you visit often anyway. In this case, just press CTR+D to bring up the bookmark menu.

Keep the name, or modify it to something more easily understandable. Remember, bookmarks are for you, so it’s ok to abbreviate, use acronyms and so on. Choose a folder and choose some tags. Tags are new in Firefox and can be put to great use. SInce I write to a load of blogs I can bring up all the bookmakrs for admin pages easily, while still keeping these in the same folder. When you’ve saved your bookmarks you can also go back and enter a keyword for them. Just right click on the entry, click on properties and enter something easily remembered and short.You can then type that into the url bar to go to the site.

The key to keeping organized is consistently following the rule to decide at each page what to do. Take the time to organize your bookmarks into tags and folders. This will create some extra work now, but after a few days of browsing you will have the most important sites covered and the work you’ll need to do from then on will be minimal while you will be much better organized.

I know that there are certain definitions for each of these, but let me tell you my views on how I use them, and how I think using them leads to productivity. Usually you can only use one of these, occasionally two, like in Wordpress, but you can usually substitute one of them by using folders, or other structure elements.

Categories

I think categories are the simplest to use, I just think of them as folders. I try to limit categories as much as I can in many cases I come up with a pre-fabricated category list. It doesn’t matter if you add to it a bit, but you should keep it as simple as possible.

The biggest problem I see is that people try to use categories to search for specific things. If you are looking for one specific article on the site for example you should not be able find it using categories. From user’s point of view it doesn’t make sense for two reasons. First of all, users can just use the search box or use tags as you will see later on. Second of all, if someone is looking for all Productivity posts, how would they be able to find them if all my categories are post specific?

Therefore categories should be used sparingly, splitting your content (or data) into well defined, easily identifiable groups that have something in common.

Tags

Tags are the ones you can use to individually “categorize” data. My post on how sleeping helps you in productivity would fall under the categories of lifestyle and productivity. I would (and have) assign it tags like “sleep” for example.

Tags should give you the answer to the question “what is this article about?”, sort of like keywords. Categories give you the answer to “What is the theme of this post?”. Tags enable you to search for content specifically, even though you don’t exactly know what you are looking for.

Tags can contain a lot of information, especially if you have the flexibility of a tag cloud like on del.icio.us. I hate having a flood of info, so at first I wasn’t happy using tags. I ended up with hundreds and never thought they’d make sense. Then along came tag clouds. The more I have of a tag the bigger the font and i can even choose to cut off unique tags. This truly helps in productivity, and organization, because it lets you tag your stuff with a lot of info, but allows you to view the most important ones if you need to.

In reality if you have a huge spike for one tag, say the word you tag second most is “shoe”, with an occurrence of 40. If your most used tag is “games” with 250 occurrences, you should consider making it a category.

Labels

Labels are a bit weird because different apps use them differently. I would say that most applications use them like tags, but this is sort of a gray area. If I would have the option to use all three at once, I would use labels just as I do in real life. I would label my posts with “important”, “general”, “specific”, and so on, to give me an idea of some other characteristics.