Contacts now works more like the rest of Gmail, so if you know how to use Gmail, now you should automatically feel comfortable in Contacts too

It’s all good stuff, but improving the look and feel of Contacts (as well as Gmail itself) has brought even more light to the disparity that exists between mail, contacts and the Task functionality Google provides.  Keyboard shortcuts, configurable with tags on a full screen  – both GMail and Contacts look really good.  Tasks are still a little pop up with a beyond skinny interface and feature set.  It looks really bad in comparison.

In fact it looks so bad, I don’t believe for a moment that anyone at Google is happy with the red headed step child that pops up in the lower right corner.  When you consider the promise available with a tight integration with the other Google tools, the Task implementation is the biggest untapped opportunity they have.

I’ve said it before, I would love to have a tight GTD oriented task management tool built in to Google that would compare favorably with OmniFocus.  They have everything in hand to produce a killer application.  I’m guessing it already sits on a desktop somewhere waiting for the blessing to be rolled out to the public.

I use Google’s Reader to consume RSS feeds from different sites. I’m not very disciplined about keeping the list empty – so now and then I take a deep dive and try to catch up*. My practice is to flag items for follow up by ‘star’ interesting posts and then come back through later and post items to my Delicious account. For most feeds, I commonly flag one of every five or six items.

I just finished reading Seth Godin’s feed. I reversed my normal ratio. Pretty much everything he posts is thought provoking and requires follow up.  That should be the outcome everyone online should strive for – including myself.

PS: I know this is pretty much universally considered a poor practice – but to date I haven’t been able to simply ‘mark as read’ an entire feed. A weakness of mine.

Shortlink

For example, The Trends page lists how I consume feeds – and how I do not.  The smart feed reader should include this page in their weekly review.  You can keep yourself productive by following these simple steps:

1.  Unsubscribe from feeds that have not been updated in x months.  I am settling on nine months.  After that point, it’s safe to say the author has moved on.

2.  Unsubscribe from feeds I can’t keep up with.  The New York Times is a fire hose that I can not keep up with.  There are many news outlets that can filter that to the news items I value and I should focus my attention there.

3.  Investigate the obscure.  This is the real long tail.  If I want to present a unique perspective on the world then I should find the niche no one else serves (or subscribes to).