An Integrated Solution to Sourcing and Organizing Articles Relevant to Your Business
Written by Marina McPeak, steven wagner, Colin Thompson, and Zachariah Albers
Introduction
Entrepreneurs and small business owners are known for being busy. An entrepreneur can easily be a team of one or responsible for managing a small number of employees. As a jack of all trades, entrepreneurs must do everything from cleaning the workplace to making important strategic business decisions. Effective time management is a critical skill for entrepreneurs to have, but it’s a constant challenge regardless of how internally driven and motivated someone is. One solution we have to help entrepreneurs better manage their time is by connecting online applications. These applications help automate part of the time management process so that entrepreneurs can focus their attention on building their business.
For many entrepreneurs an essential part of their daily life is staying up to date with current events. This could include small and/or local events in a specific community or city, or be an aggregated and high-level overview of an economic region or industry. Keeping up to date on a specific economic environment is essential to making smart and informed decisions about a business operating in that space. However, the world is changing all of the time and at an exponential rate. Since the early 2000’s we have seen a tremendous amount of entrepreneurs, small businesses, and even large corporation adopt strategies that focus on disruptive innovation. This is opposed to sustaining innovations, which results in changes happening more gradually and in a predictive way.
Keeping up in a world that is changing so quickly and disruptively is a unique and increasingly time consuming challenge. What we offer entrepreneurs is an easy way to set up their own curated reading list. A list that will cater to an entrepreneurs specific needs and industry. Beyond having a system that keeps them up to date with what they need to know, our solution addresses an important aspect of time management: staying up to date with current events that relevant to a specific business.
Who can this help?
A tool is helpful to any professional working in a fast paced industry that is susceptible to quick changes reshaping the environment they operate in. For example, someone working in finance. They need to be able to keep up to date on factors that influence economic conditions, organization performance, and economic outlooks.
Rob Stark: Software Developer
Rob is a software developer who likes to stay up to date on current technology trends. Staying up to date is not only an interest of his, but also vital to his career. His industry is constantly changing at a rapid pace. Technology that is relevant today may be a thing of the past within a couple months or years.
In order to stay current, Rob reads a number of technology articles sent to him by friends and colleagues. At least that’s what he tries to do. Often times when he comes across a new article, he is hard at work and focused on the task at hand. He tries to remember to go back and read these articles, but will often forget. Rob needs a tool that helps him collect, organize, and schedule articles for him to read later when he’s not as busy.
Hunter Thompson: Journalist
Journalists are part of another profession that would greatly benefit from this tool. Journalists, regardless of their area of concentration, need to be hyper aware of the changes going on in their field. They need to keep up to date in order to provide useful and/or thought provoking insights into current events. Not only this, they need to be aware of the work that their peers and competitors are doing. This is an important part of being able to write about things in a new and relevant ways that offers a unique perspective. Journalists need to be able to organize information on a variety of topics without losing track of the vital pieces. Having a tool that helps them set reminders based on time and geolocation can offer a huge quality of life improvement for professionals, such as journalists.
Eric Dalton: UI/UX Designer
Eric is a professional UI/UX freelance designer who loves trying out new design concepts. He is always looking for inspiration and what’s new in the design world. This process of looking for new ideas and articles on design can be simplified by using the automated tool described here. Once set up, Eric would be able to see an array of articles related to the design topics important to him.
Three Steps to Using This Tool
What do you need?
In order to build this tool, you will need to access three applications that can be found for free on the app store or web. These applications include Pocket, IFTTT, and Todoist. We also recommend having a Google account that you can use to sign in to all three applications.
Pocket is a multi-platform application and web service for managing a reading list of internet articles. For the purposes of this tool, Pocket will be used to consolidate articles passed to it from IFTTT (discussed below), which will then be passed on to Todoist.
If This Then That (IFTTT) is a free multi-platform app and web-based service that can create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. An applet is triggered by changes that occur within other web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, or Pinterest. It is similar to Zapier as it allows integration with a number of different APIs from various companies. For the purposes of this tool, it will be used to connect various news outlets and information sources to Pocket, as well as connect Pocket to Todoist. For this example, Medium will be used.
Todoist is another free multi-platform application and web-based service that lets users create notes with files of any type attached. Tasks and lists can be placed in various projects with filters and tags. It also offers a premium feature where you can set custom reminders based on geolocation. This application will be used the most once this tool is finished being setup and will be used to keep track of all the articles.
Step 1
Open IFTTT and do a quick search for “Medium, Pocket”. Go ahead and select the applet titled “Save Medium stories you recommend to Pocket”. Flick the big switch to the ‘On’ position and login using your Medium (or other new app) and Pocket credentials. Go ahead and add the tag “Readings” and click ok (You can pick whatever you want, just remember to be consistent). Confirm at the bottom and you should be all set. We recommend testing this first part to make sure everything is in order. Find a Medium article, recommend it, and check Pocket (it should be there now). Note that it might take up to 10 minutes for a refresh. However, you can manually refresh the app by click “Check Now”.
Step 2
The next step is to transfer the content from Pocket to Todoist. Before using IFTTT, we need to do some quick setup. Go into Todoist and create a new project, I called mine “Readings”. Next, just like step 1, inside IFTTT do a quick search for “Pocket, Todoist”. From this list, pick the applet titled “Add your Pocket reading list to Todoist”. Slide the button to on and add the tag “Readings” (or the consistent name you chose). This will select all your articles that have been put into Pocket from our tool. Next it will ask for your Todoist project name, I picked my “Readings” project. Optionally you may choose how you would like to format the task content and note. Finally, pick the time you would like to be reminded.
Step 3
Now lets do a quick test and make sure everything works. Start by recommending a Medium article. If successful, it should show up in Pocket followed by Todoist a short while later.
Extra Tips
This tool can be manipulated to best suit an entrepreneurs schedule and industry. For example, todoist projects can be broken up into individual sections that you can assign different priorities too. Related articles can also be turned into subtasks, which encourages you to read or check out similar articles sequentially. These options go beyond simple automation, but with proper automatic tags, these advanced features can be quick and easy to execute.
Instead of using the links embedded in todoist, you should consider jumping back into pocket to read the article. Pocket allows you to read all of articles that show up in todoist offline, but that’s not all. It also allows you to highlight articles and saves those highlights for you to read later or to share with others. On iOS there is an integration with imessage, which allows you to quickly send highlights and full articles to your team. You are also able to activate text-to-speech, which means articles and highlights can be read out loud to you while you’re doing chores or commuting.
Conclusion
We know entrepreneurs are busy and that this tool can help automate part of the time management process. This allows entrepreneurs to focus more of their attention on building their business, rather than manually tracking trends and changes in their industry. From software developers that want to stay up to date on changing technology to journalists who want to keep up with current events to designers and artists searching for inspiration. This tool can help you stay up to date and organized.
