Experience Curating Tools and Resources

Hopefully you're viewing this page because you own a copy of Experience Curating. But there's no secret handshake or password, so I'd appreciate you not sharing the direct link to this page with anyone else. 🙂

Are you looking for the context and links for the footnotes in the print version? If so, click here. If not, let's continue.

This page contains the supplemental tools and resources to maximize your Experience Curating. But you should know two things before you get to the good stuff:

  1. You may not have access to Microsoft Excel or care for it as much as me. So you can also view this page's downloadable Excel .xlsx format spreadsheets in Google Drive (instructions here), with a program like Kingsoft Office (my preference for Android and iOS), or other alternatives like LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice.
  2. I'm constantly updating this page and its linked files. If this looks different or has more/less content than the last time you were here, well … that's intentional.

Enjoy these tools and resources, and come back often!

The Spreadsheets of Experience Curating

This section contains a brief description of each spreadsheet and a reference to where it was linked in Experience Curating.

The Curated Links

There are a number of Experience Curating related resources linked throughout the book, especially in the “Appendix A – Resources” section. But you can't slice-and-dice or get much context from those links. Besides, there are other valuable resources that weren't included in the book that you might like.

That's why I created the spreadsheet below. View the separate Instruction Manual tab for a road map, and then watch the hours fly by as you dig in!

Sample Archive Instruction Manual

I suggested creating an instruction manual for each experience archive in the “Labels” heading of chapter 7. The one below is for my most important archive where I keep my best online-based experiences.

All-Purpose Versus Specialized Tool Decision Matrix

I recommended that you complete a brief exercise to determine your curating tools in the “All-Purpose Versus Specialized Tools” heading of chapter 12. The steps were to:

  1. Create a grid to help you visualize your all-purpose versus specialized tool options.
  2. List the topics you'll curate in rows and the mediums for various topics in columns.
  3. Enter the desired or potential tools you may use for each topic and medium combination to see how many there could be (or that you want).

There's a simplified and granular example in the spreadsheet below of what my grid could look like if I chose to diversify out of Excel. Glance at the examples and then use either of the two blank worksheets (a.k.a. tabs) for your decision matrix.

Curating Platform Best Practices Comparison

I ranked the most popular spreadsheet programs from an Experience Curating perspective in the “All-Purpose Tool #1: Spreadsheets” heading of chapter 13. The spreadsheet below contains the details of those rankings, plus some additional curating tools like Evernote and LibraryThing.

How does each platform compare with the others in the best practices battle? Find out now.

Do You Dig? How about More …

I talk a lot of Experience Curating shop in my popular Smart and Simple Matters podcast. So check out the archives or subscribe to the show right here.

Want to make me one of your biggest fans? The success of this book depends on people like you sharing your thoughts or the results you get. Please consider leaving a review on Amazon – even just a sentence or two, and even if you got it outside of Amazon's ecosystem – about what you found noteworthy or useful. It's a tremendous help and I'd be grateful.

P.S. If you share your thoughts on Experience Curating somewhere else, like on your blog or podcast, send me the link. I'd love to hear how this brand of curating has impacted you.

P.P.S. Here's the link again to the context from the print version footnotes.