#CollectedHack: If you still bookmark links, you're doing it wrong.
Bookmarks come in many shapes and sizes, but most bookmarks fall into one of two buckets - Quick Links or Useful Articles.
The first bucket is straightforward and convenient. These are shortcuts to your bank account, your cable subscription, or your email. Most importantly, these are largely bookmarks that you use frequently and effectively. I probably use this type of bookmark at least a dozen times a day.
The Problem
But those supposedly Useful Articles are a different story. We all have read great reference articles with useful commentary on a particular subject or interesting stats that we want to reference in our next presentation or paper. But how often do we actually remember to use them? Almost never. Most of us stash that link in our bookmarks bar or in a folder that we never open. If I had a more effective way to archive articles, I would probably save three times as many for future reference!
The Solution
Putting these articles in a cloud account linked to Collected can help you to recall all them when and where you need to. Also, by saving them in a cloud account, you'll still have a copy of the content even if the original page is removed or goes down. So how do we get these articles into a cloud account?
Say hello to Save to Google Drive. It's a simple Chrome Extension that lets you save webpages back to your Drive.
One quick caveat - the formatting in the Google Doc can vary a bit from one blog to the next and occasionally you have to clean up the Google Doc. But for this tip, the format is not what we came for. We're interested in the rich contextual snippets that Collected will now find and suggest back to us.
How to set up this #CollectedHack:
Step 1: Make sure you're using Google Chrome and have a Google Drive account.
Step 2: Install the Save to Google Drive extension from the Chrome Webstore.
Step 3: Configure the options for the 'Save to Google Drive' extension by navigating to the Chrome Menu > Settings > Extensions > Save to Google Drive > Options. Choose the destination folder you want to save articles in and make sure to select the 'Google Document' option under 'Save page as'.
Step 4: Link Collected to your Drive account and make sure to select the folder that you are saving your articles in.
Step 5: When you see an article you want to save, click the 'Save to Google Drive; icon in the top right of your Chrome menu. Open the new Google Doc and do any necessary clean up.
Step 6: Download your Collected plugin of choice (Word, PowerPoint, Chrome or Google Docs). When you start working, Collected will suggest back to you the most related snippets from your saved articles!
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What is a #CollectedHack?
#CollectedHacks is a series of tips geared toward helping you get more from your cloud-stored content. With Collected linked to your cloud accounts, you can easily rediscover and reuse all your content while you work. Find all our previous hacks in our blog archive using the tag or search Twitter for the hashtag.
