idea_capture

An interview with Scott Ginsberg, author of "Hello, My Name is Scott"

Starting week I'm extending my interview series with the top experts in the field by sharing productivity insights and stories from people who are influential and successful, i.e, highly productive. I'll start with highlights from my recent coversation with Scott Ginsberg (site, blog).

I found out about Scott via his book Hello, My Name is Scott, which takes an happy accident (leaving his nametag on after an event) and extends it to a unique perspective of the world, one of my absolute favorite topics. (It's why I got into productivity consulting in the first place.)

I recently came across Tim Ferriss's [1] entry How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning, which motivated me to post an "aha" I recently had about processing RSS feeds. (What I took away from the Scoble video was how selective he his in deciding to read a post, how he makes that choice, and that he uses feeds for "relationship work" - networking - so he can be smart when talking with someone. However, I didn't get much on how to handle so many feeds.)

I want to share the results of a little experiment I did over the last few months using my My Big-Arse Text File. I've been using this semi-structured text file to track my consulting activities for the past two years, and it contains a mixture of things like:

• consulting activities,
• networking connections [1],
• lessons learned (see Some thoughts from tracking "lessons learned" for a year),
• contact information,
• idea capture (see Pickle jars, text files, and creative idea capture),
• book notes (see How to read a lot of books in a short time),
• blog topics,