My personal information system

Shelf of my notebooks (1/2 dozen more somewhere)

After my last post, I started thinking about all of the pieces of my personal information system.  It turns out that it is surprisingly complicated.  I have tried many social media services, online information services and quite a few desktop personal information products.  I have abandoned a lot of them because they take more time and energy than they are worth.  Some I have abandoned include StumbledUpon.com, digg.com, delicious.com (imported to Evernote), filtrbox.com (now owned by Jive), Jigsaw.com, sparknotes.com,  pluck.com, me.dium ( I was an employee at the time), plaxo…

When I thought about how many I have quit using, I started thinking about how much was left. And of course, I made some notes (yes, in the margin of a notebook).  After a couple of minutes, I decided I needed to start over with two full pages. Below is a scan of the map of my Personal Information System–click on it to embiggen. I use RSS feeds (Google Reader) daily and LinkedIn, but they don’t seem to fit because nothing I use integrates well with LinkedIn and articles in my RSS feed that I want to keep become Evernote notes.  It is still pretty complicated but (I think) I currently value all of the pieces.

Dr. Skippy's personal information system