Productivity Tips: 5 Tips for Avoiding a Reading Backlog

Many people let their reading material build up into a backlog. You may collect piles of mail and other papers or folders full of website bookmarks. Over time, it feels like your reading backlog is a black hole that things never come out of.

Here are 5 tips to help you avoid a reading backlog or take control of one you already have, whether online or offline:

Productivity Tips: 5 Tips for Reading Concentration

As we rush through our piles and folders of reading, we can be left wondering what we just read. Maybe you're reading while distracted or just have so much on your mind that the content slips away soon after reading. Reading with purpose can help us understand and retain what we read.

Here are 5 tips for concentrating on your reading for better comprehension and retention:

Using Personal Knowbase for Citations

A previous post talked about using Personal Knowbase for Bibliographies. In addition to using the software for listing and annotating bibliographies, you can link your working notes with source articles to create citations.

The general idea is to include information about your sources in the same PK data file as your "working articles" which contain the notes and writing work for your current project. You would have a single PK article for each source and assign it keywords for the topics relevant to that source. Please see the previous post for more ideas on using PK as reference management software.

Using Personal Knowbase for Bibliographies

Many researchers, writers, and academics use Personal Knowbase to keep track of sources and references. The software is great for notes management, and you can link your working notes with citations. While PK does not have a built-in facility for creating bibliographies, you can use its keywords feature to associate topics with notes and sources.

Here are some ideas for using Personal Knowbase to manage bibliographies. These ideas assume a basic understanding of the PK terminology and interface, but even without experience with the software, they should provide you with a notion of what's possible.

Creating an Idea Dump with Personal Knowbase

Whether you're an entrepreneur, a writer, an artist, an inventor, a programmer, or anyone doing creative work, your ideas are your first step toward developing your projects. Your ideas are a valuable resource and critical to your productivity. Treat them as they deserve — with loving care.

Using Personal Knowbase notes management software as a central repository for your ideas keeps them together, makes it easy to find related ideas, and provides a structure for browsing your undeveloped ideas. Collect and organize all of your inspirations into PK articles and index them with keywords so that you can retrieve related ideas later.

Productivity Tips: 5 Tips for Building Your Writing Skills

Previously, we posted with 5 Writing Tips for Everyone. Here are 5 more tips for building your writing skills. Exercise your writing muscles.

Using Personal Knowbase as Index Card Software

Since the 1980's, we've been using personal computers to replace tasks that we used to do with pen and paper. We used paper index cards for many purposes from research to recipes. Now we put that information on our computer.

Although we now enter most information directly into our computers, the structure of the data often still resembles how index card systems used to work. We have digitized our index card projects.

Personal Knowbase Helps Educators Stay Organized

It's Back-to-School time again! Personal Knowbase is a great software tool for organizing notes and records. Following are six ways that PK can help educators get organized.

Personal Knowbase is a note management program for Windows. It stores information in free-format notes which it refers to as "articles." Assigning keywords to your articles indexes them for easy access based on your customized criteria.

Using Personal Knowbase to Organize Quotations

I've been collecting quotations for decades. It's something of an obsession. I sprinkle them in websites and blog posts, tweet them to my followers, and sometimes just collect for the sake of collecting. When I read, part of my mind is always on the lookout for good quotes. Not surprisingly, I store my quote collection in Personal Knowbase.

Back to school? Personal Knowbase Can Help

With school starting, students have so many details to keep track of. Personal Knowbase can help you take control of your note-keeping, research, and records.

Personal Knowbase is note management software for Windows which stores information in free-format notes or cards, which it calls "articles." Assign keywords to your articles to index them for easy access. Build a personal knowledge base of your information.