Nearly a year ago I published a post called Knowledge Worker Productivity (read it if you haven’t, yet). Over the last year a lot of friends told me how they especially liked this one post and looking back at what I wrote last year I decided to post an update as to what has changed in my routine since then.

First, note that I’m still kind of an information addict and read a lot for work and also in my “free time”. The information I consume might  be a bit too much for many of you. However, this doesn’t mean the tools and methods I use won’t be helpful for your purposes.

So again, like in my last post, I’ll go into a bit more detail on the tools and methods I use and how I usually use them. However, to keep this post shorter, I will omit some things I wrote about last time. So if you haven’t read the last post, go read it now.

Disclaimer: All of these are my personal preferences. It is just a selection that works very good for me (for now and until I find something better). As I work with three Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro) the selection is biased towards tools that work on these, but most of them should be available on Android, Windows, or at least (mobile) Web, too. Enjoy!

This post was inspired by some mails and discussions I had with colleagues and friends about how I cope with all the information I work with. Especially one colleague is always pushing me to make a presentation and/or blogpost about it. So first, here the blogpost and the presentation and respective slides will follow.

More and more of us are deeply dependent on information for our jobs or just out of interest. Even if we don’t call ourselves information workers or knowledge workers, some might say most of us already are. Even if not really dependent on it we get addicted to information consumption. This goes so far that people treat this addiction like obesity and recommend “information diets” or even “information fasting“. To be clear I’m a total information addict so far that my former advisor and good friend would say “Puja has two brains, one for normal life and one for all the information he consumes”. I have to say I was deeply addicted and most of it was because of RSS and that big bad number next to “unread” (similar to “Notification Badge Anxiety Disorder”). Still, I don’t (want to) believe RSS is dead (just yet). And based on the lack of good discovery and aggregation tools I didn’t want to give up all my feeds. With time, new services, and especially with the purchase of my iPad (with retina display “for better reading”) this has completely changed. Now I use a pletora of apps and tools that make my information consumption a lot lighter and more efficient. It might still be a bit too much for many of you, but then I’m an information freak. This doesn’t mean the tools and methods I use won’t be helpful for your purposes.

In the remainder of this post I’ll go into a bit more detail on the tools and methods I use (and their alternatives) and how I usually use them.

Disclaimer: All of these are my personal preferences and even if I mention alternatives (all of which I tried) the list of tools won’t be exhaustive. It is just a selection that works very good for me (for now and until I find something better). As I work with three Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro) the selection is biased towards tools that work on these, but most of them should be available on Android, Windows, or at least (mobile) Web, too. Enjoy!

_Yes, I know “the idea that one product will ‘kill’ another is plain wrong”, but bear with me here. _

Today I woke up with a message from my co-blogger from gongfubrother telling me about the new game console that’s been blowing up on kickstarter having raised $2 million on its first day (they had a goal of $950,000). OUYA is going to be an open game console based on Android 4.0 with a price-point of just $99 including a nice controller that even sports a touchpad.

As PandoDaily wrote earlier OUYA is going to compete against established players like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, all of which have support from the big game players in the market. However, I don’t think this comparison is fair, the competition to the established consoles is just in an indirect way. Independently developed games and ported mobile games, which will be the start of OUYA, don’t compete directly with the likes of Call of Duty, MW3 or Tekken. Rather, they compete on an indirect basis for the general attention and free time of people. They even plan to include a touchpad on the controller to ease the porting of games of smartphone games. This combined with the killer price of $99 and the geeky fact that everything is open (even rooting is allowed without voiding the warranty) are the perfect settings for killing it on kickstarter, where these kind of hardware (e.g. the Pebble watch) tend to go viral very fast.

However, my first thought was that finally someone made the Google TV device everyone is waiting for. Looking at the comments on kickstarter you can see a lot of people asking for XBMC or another kind of media center integrated. From a non- or casual-gamer perspective this would be a $99 HTPC with some free and cool additional gaming functionality. The price is very competitive comparing it to the $99 Apple TV, but even more looking at the Google TV devices out there (e.g. the $200 Sony NSZ-GS7) or that crazily overpriced Nexus Q – $300 for a device that is supposed to be a glorified “social AirPlay” device without any Google TV functionality, really Google!?

Also, with its open platform the OUYA enables anyone willing to extend it with soft- and hardware as they please. Even for hardcore Apple fans (like me) who are confined in their AirPlay world it would be a perfect companion to their (even jailbroken) AppleTV. Heck, it just needs to have a simple media center integrated to connect to your NAS and be able to run some Android apps like Twitter and Facebook and you have everything you always wished your Apple TV could do. Connect it to your Smartphone or Bluetooth Keyboard and you don’t even need the controller for inputting text, for everything else the touchpad on the controller does it, too. Maybe I could even connect it to my Pebble watch and control it from there. Integration with other projects (like RunKeeper) is nothing new for the Pebble team and even without direct collaboration there’s always the Pebble Android SDK. Now think one step further and have OnLive or some other cloud gaming service on it – suddenly killing traditional game consoles could be one step closer.

Just dreaming…but this could really get awesome! What do you think?