7 things, technology

Gordon recently pointed out that I have been running the '7 things I did not know last week' weekly post since January 2007.

That's… two years! And possibly the longest I have enjoyed doing something for, which makes me wonder how I managed to do that. I believe that it is because I did not set out to do something special, but shared my innate curiosity with others, via a very simple method.

The process I developed is the easiest I could think of. Whenever I learn something new during the course of the week, I send myself an email. Since most of the time this happens while I am online, this is as easy as sending a link to the page I am on. Most weeks I collect more than seven items, so I rarely have to start looking for ideas.

I have experimented with Gmail filters, labels, custom-made email addresses and saved searches, but in the end I went for the simplest possible solution: when I send these emails to myself, I stick in the subject line a special made-up word that triggers a rule that marks the email as read and archives it. I found it had to be a unique word to avoid false positives coming up in search results. Then, when I am ready to write the post in WordPress I fire up Gmail, search for that made-up word and find all the notes I sent myself on the subject. Once I have blogged them, I delete the email.

You can use the same system to track anything you like. I regularly use it to capture ideas and notes on the go, and to track the cash I spend and food I eat if I am on a diet. Then, once a week or so, I sit down and report the data if needed, extracting it from Gmail as above.

I hope you enjoy reading my '7 things' posts as much as I enjoy putting them together for you.