The (Continued) Case for Being a More Tech-Savvy Lawyer: Manage Your Information Overload

To have a better legal career, attorneys — including those who are uncertain about their future prospects — need to focus on more than just lawyering and have an eye towards networking and business development. Networking and business development, unfortunately, require a lot of hard work and time. So, efficiency matters. Optimize your time and you’ll have bonus minutes to spend fortifying your career.

To have a better legal career, attorneys — including those who are uncertain about their future prospectsneed to focus on more than just lawyering and have an eye towards networking and business development. Networking and business development, unfortunately, require a lot of hard work and time. So, efficiency matters. Optimize your time and you’ll have bonus minutes to spend fortifying your career.

Previously, I suggested a number of easy, low-maintenance media outlets that could help lawyers (and bankers) be informed and “interesting” and, by extension, be better networkers. Having access to relevant information is one thing, but creating a system for efficiently processing the mass quantities of information currently available to you is just as critical. It’s also necessary to avoid feeling inundated and overwhelmed. Here is my simple system for streamlining information — all through the use of mobile — in a manner that keeps me organized and informed without triggering the Problem of Choice.

I’m going to keep this simple. Download these mobile apps: Pocket, Evernote, and IFTTT.

1. Pocket

Over the course of the day you probably receive tons of emails with links to articles that are relevant to you and your practice. Yet, you probably don’t have time to read those links then-and-there and so they just get buried in the morass that is your email inbox. Pocket can help solve this. For starters, it has a desktop client that, with the push of a button, will save the link to your Pocket account for future reading. Download that to your computer.

For mobile, once you’ve downloaded the application (and, where necessary, linked it, as appropriate to subscription-based accounts like NYTimes, FT.com, etc.), you will simply need to click on the “open book” icon on the bottom of your iPhone (or whatever the equivalent is on other devices), and click “Save to Pocket.” Alternatively, you can copy the link, open Pocket, and the Pocket app will prompt you to “Add copied URL to your list?” Simple as that.

The best part of Pocket — and where I find it most useful — is that you don’t need an internet connection (WiFi or otherwise) to read the articles that are saved there. The utility of this for those in New York, for instance, is that you can catch up on the reading while in the subway…or if the WiFi that was promised on your Boltbus or Delta flight doesn’t pan out as advertised (which, let’s be honest, is about 50/50).

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2. Evernote

Evernote was designed to be an extension of the mind; it allows you to create individual cloud-based notes and notebooks for storing any information you want. Thanks to built-in syncing capabilities, if you input information via mobile, you can then access it later at home on your desktop (and vice versa).

Once you’ve read an article in Pocket, push it over to a customized and specific Evernote notebook, tag it with something memorable, and don’t ever look at it again until you have that need to find the article that scratches the “where have I seen that before?” itch. Evernote is your over-arching filing cabinet. Pocket is your “to read” box.

3. IFTTT (“If This, Then That”)

IFTTT helps bind the various resources together through it’s customizable “recipes.” Some recipes I use to streamline information are:

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A. Save links from favorited tweets to Pocket. Twitter recently integrated Pocket to its desktop interface but it hasn’t done so yet on mobile. To fill this void, you can simply set up an IFTTT formula to do this for you: in this case, a formula that sends links to my Pocket when I have favorited a tweet. Once set up, this recipe takes just one click to trigger. Easy.

B. I set up an IFTTT formula to send all Gmail attachments to Google Drive or Dropbox. I don’t have to worry about finding attachments in my Gmail inbox anymore. And there are countless other recipes you may find helpful to you: just play around with IFTTT’s app.

If all of this Pocketing/IFTTT’ing sounds too difficult for you, there’s another option: Sight. Sight lets you take a screenshot of an article you have on your screen and it will be stored for later (including offline) reading. It is limited, however, to screenshots of one single article in English. In other words, it cannot handle landing pages, Facebook’s timeline, Twitter feeds, or subscription/login-based accounts.

Adopting technology, like these apps, to eliminate some of the more mundane hassles of your practice (in this case, information overload) can free up bandwidth for you to focus on business development and lawyering. Hope these tips help.

Please follow the author on Twitter at @robertjordan33.

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