How do you stay on top of all the content that can help you in your job search? Industry and company research. Industry trends and market information. How-to articles about steps in the job search process. It’s a never-ending flood of content coming at you daily, and you don’t want to miss the good stuff.
My new favorite tool to stay on top of the “river of content” is a cloud-based service called Pocket. It’s simple to use and, even better, it’s free.
The basics:
If you are like me, you are power browsing your news feed, blogs, and other web resources while you are doing something else. During commercials watching television. At a break in your kid’s game. Waiting in line for an event. The list goes on.
As you browse, you find great content, but, at the moment, you don’t have time to read what you have just found. You tell yourself you will come back to it, but you forget, or you can’t find it again.
Think of Pocket, my new best friend, like a digital filing cabinet that allows you to quickly store an article, a video or any piece of web content for a later time when you can dig in and digest the information.
The beauty of Pocket is the simplicity with which you use the service to capture content. Pocket has a Chrome browser extension that allows you to capture content directly from your browser page.
It also has Android and iOS apps that allow you to capture content directly from your mobile device using the Share function.
It has a Share function that allows you to post the content to a wide variety of social media platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Great for building your brand and demonstrating thought leadership.
And Pocket allows you to easily add tags to the content that you save to improve the organization of all the information that you have captured.
As I shared above, Pocket is free. You just need to sign up. The tool is based on a Freemium business model. The free version is ad-supported. The upgrade to the paid version is a $44.95 per year (or $4.99/month) subscription and removes the ads and includes a couple of extra features such as permanent storage and full-text search. I love Pocket and want them to succeed. But honestly, the ads are not intrusive, and the saving and tagging features are all I need. Free is enough for me.
How I use Pocket:
Daily, I use at least 1 hour each day of my free time to browse for content. Whether at my desktop or on my phone or tablet, I navigate my feeds and social media for content that I value. For me, it is information about the job search process, careers, and the world of work.
When I find a relevant piece of content, I just quickly save to Pocket and add a tag. I don’t stop and read at that time. I keep it for later when I have time to focus and extract the real meaning and value from the content.
Here is the most critical step for me. I carve out 30 minutes every day to go to my Pocket collection and read my saved content and articles. If I like the content, I save to my permanent repository (I use Evernote). If I see no long-term value in the content, I delete it from my Pocket collection.
If you see an article that I have shared on LinkedIn, you can bet that it came from my Pocket collection. I don’t wake up and go hunting every morning at 7 am for the content I need to share that day before 8 am. It is ready and waiting for me in my Pocket collection.
Granted, Pocket is just one of many tools out there that you can use to capture and organize content. Evernote does the same thing (I am a Premium user), but I find the free version of Evernote a little more cumbersome than Pocket and not as flexible. Same story for Microsoft OneNote. For me, Pocket is the best front end for stage one of your content aggregation process. If you have other options, suggestions, or opinions, give me a shout with your ideas.
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Dan Troup is the Managing Director of the AdvantEdge Careers coaching service. If you are interested in learning more about how a job search expert and certified career coach can assist you, please contact AdvantEdge Careers for a free initial consultation.
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