Productivity Tips for the Mobile (Social) Knowledge Web Worker – TweetBot, Pocket, Evernote

One of my favourite activities within the Social Web realm has always been that ability to keep up that playful spirit of finding opportunities time and time again to fine tune my overall user experience using social networking tools, whether internal or external, in order to find new use cases, or productivity tips, that would help boost my performance in allowing me to get work done in a smarter way, not necessarily working harder. And since lately I keep traveling quite a bit and spend more time on the road than at my home office, I thought it would be a good time exploring how I can improve my overall knowledge Web worker experience using various social networking / productivity tools while on the road. And, after plenty of experimentation I think I may have hit a magic formula that I have grown to become rather fond of in the last few weeks and that I think I am now ready to share it across with all of you folks who may be interested in finding out what’s all the fuss I have been making about it all along: TweetBot + Pocket + Evernote = Mobile Productivity Heaven!

As you may have noticed, over the course of the last few months, I have been blogging a couple of times on how increasingly tough it’s getting for yours truly to keep up with a reliable Internet connection, while on the road, or at home, so I have learned to treasure AND maximise the time that I remain connected to the Social Web to grab all of the information that I need and eventually continue working offline trying to find new methods of improving that offline productivity. And, like I have just mentioned above, I think I may have found that brilliant combination that will certainly help me along quite nicely. 

So, I thought, why not share it across over here in this blog, for other folks to perhaps learn a new trick or two, or maybe expose that method across and see if other folks have got other, improved, methods of maximising that online exposure to continue working offline. And here I am! Thus, let’s go for it! Let’s see where it takes us …

As you may well remember, at the beginning of the year I mentioned how I was planning to stop spreading thinner out there on the Social Web and focus on what I then called The Big Three, that is, the three major social networking tools that I would be focusing on to get my work done: IBM Connections (Mostly for work related stuff), Twitter and Google Plus. 

Well, while I am eagerly awaiting for Google Plus to finally land with its own native iPad App, which I think is coming up pretty soon, perhaps even to mark its first anniversary, who knows!, and while I have been enjoying tremendously the latest version of the IBM Connections App on iOS devices (More on that one shortly, too!), I guess it was time for me to fine tune my Twitter experience, while on the move. And, boy, have I found a superb option right there?!?!

Earlier on in the year, I blogged about how Janetter is my all time favourite Twitter desktop client  on the Mac (By the way, it works in Windows, too!) and how I kept looking for a counterpart for my iOS devices, specially, for when I was travelling not bringing along the MacBook Air with me. And I found it. And I bought it. And I enjoyed it. And I started loving Twitter again while on the move! That absolutely essential Twitter App for mobile devices is called Tweetbot and I can tell you that after having tried several dozens of Twitter mobile Apps it’s just as good as it gets. For real!

Perhaps at some point in time I will create another blog post along the same lines of the one on Janetter and share Top 10 reasons why I heart Tweetbot big time as my default mobile Twitter client. But for now, I’ll go ahead and share across the main reason why I love that App: having the opportunity of going through an extended catchup of my timeline. You know, when I am on the road I am usually stuck on queues waiting for things to happen. Waiting for public transport, at airports waiting to check-in, or while boarding, waiting for meetings, at conference events, workshops, seminars, summits, etc. etc. you name it.

So I keep finding myself with plenty of time to go back in time on my timeline and catch up with my favourite source of news, insights and information on what’s happening around me, work related or not. And I try to make extensive use of it to keep up to date with what’s happening. In most cases I won’t be the kind of person who would be tweeting a lot, unless I’m live tweeting at a conference event, of course, but just reading through the tweets, diving into the Social Flow(s), trying to maximise the time I remain connected to see what’s happening and what I may need to pay attention to. And Tweetbot allows me to do that beautifully. If you haven’t tried it out I can certainly recommend it. 

Then, once I bump into those golden gems that I would want to dive into, but that I didn’t just have time to explore further there is a second feature that I truly love from Tweetbot which is just fantastic. Oh, by the way, Janetter also has it, in case you are wondering. And that is a super user friendly integration with another one of my favourite productivity tools that I have been using for a while now: Pocket (Formerly known as Read It Later). Pocket is pretty much like Instapaper, except that it is free. It’s a service that allows you to save links to Web sites to view at a later time while offline! And I must admit that I don’t know why but the overall user experience, and, specially, the flow is far more attractive than that one from Instapaper. So I stuck around with it and I am glad now that I have, because I am enjoying it big time!

Pocket has got a bookmarklet, too, that I can use from my favourite desktop browsers, so I can still continue making use of it while using the Mac, but it also has got a fantastic iOS App that provides a superb user experience of fully interacting with the app while reading all of that offline content. It allows you to both search for it, as well as tag interesting items, you can star (mark as favourites) articles, mark them as read and a whole bunch of other nifty capabilities. Like I said, highly recommended!

Essentially, the way I use it in combination with Tweetbot though, while on the road, is that I have the latter configured to save items to Pocket with just a single tap, tap, of my fingers and off it goes, so within a matter of minutes I end up with several dozens of articles to read offline for when I am no longer connected. And off I go! Just brilliant! 

Then when I am offline, which seems to be happening far too often nowadays with all of that business travelling, I fire up my third favourite productivity tool at the moment, which has become, essentially an extension of my physical memory for everything that I do and that I would want to annotate further, should I want to refer to it at a later time. Got a new idea that I have just come up with and want to write it down, there it goes. Have I got an interesting news article, blog post, Web clipping, thought, insight I would want to bring forward on to an upcoming blog post of mine, there it goes again. Have I got a quick thought I would want to jot down through audio, not a problem, there it goes one more time. Like I said, I truly meant those words that this particular productivity tool has become an extension of my memory. Of course, I am talking about Evernote. 

There are plenty of great use cases that I have developed for Evernote, as a personal productivity tool, over the course of time and I will perhaps detail some of the most compelling ones on another upcoming blog post, but one of my favourite ones, at the moment, when combined with Tweetbot and Pocket is that ability of creating a note where I just draft blog posts from stuff I have bumped into through Tweetbot or that I may have saved into Pocket. Then, when I am back on to a steady Internet connection, I just sync those updates into the Evernote servers, get to my MacBook Air, launch both Evernote itself and MarsEdit (My default offline blogging client that I have been using for years now!), copy and paste from one to the other, fine tune the post, proof read it, add links accordingly and voilá! Blog post will then be published! On to the next one! Yay!!

And there you have it! All set on to new productivity levels as a mobile social knowledge Web worker. It’s just too funny though, because, just the other day I was talking to one of my good friends at another event, who is also a heavy twitterer himself, and he was surprised how this year I keep taking extended breaks from Twitter and he kept wondering whether I was having enough of it all and decided to give up on it altogether or not. No, not at all. Far from that. What’s happening is that since I keep struggling with staying connected while on the move, I have made the decision to shift towards offline working, where I possibly can, and I sense I have now found that magic formula that would still allow me to remain productive, while catching up with things and then share across what I have learned, which is essentially what folks would be able to find out with these blog posts that I keep sharing across over here every so often. 

And it is thanks to that magic formula of Tweetbot + Pocket + Evernote that I have finally been capable of taming that growing pain and frustration of struggling to get work done while I am on the road, but there is still something else out there that has allowed me to improve those offline productivity bursts even more and into levels I never thought possible. This time around though nothing to do much with software, but with hardware accessories. But that would be the time for another blog post coming up next! 

Ready? It’s coming … But before we dive into it can you have a guess about what it may well be? Folks who may have seen me face to face in the last couple of weeks may have noticed already what I am referring to, since they, too, loved both of those accessories, but what do you think? Any ideas what they may well be? 🙂

Stay tuned! Coming up!