In my last post, I shared Part 1 of my latest time-saving experiment, using the Text2Go tool to help reduce the amount of time I spend reading blogs (without reducing how many blogs I read). In that experiment, I was able to successfully transfer much of the time I spend reading blogs at my desk to the time I sit in traffic commuting to my day-job. The Text2Go tool made it really easy for me to create MP3s straight from Google’s Feed Reader, and I am in love with this product.

But that was part 1, and in all honesty, not all of my time reading online was eliminated. I still spend *some* of my time reading blogs and other articles related to small business and technology, right from my desk. So this post is about another feature built into Text2Go, the ability to speak the text of a web page directly from the browser.

When I started this part of my experiment, it was pretty simple. I just found an article that I would normally read from beginning to end, tell Text2Go to start reading the text me, and then I would go about doing some other work. Since I already had great success with the Text2Go tool, I knew before I started that the tweaking was going to be more on the side of what was read to me and what I was trying to accomplish while it was read to me, rather than how the Text2Go software performed. The Text2Go software is already top-notch in my book.

My first test involved me finding an article that I find inspiring and/or motivational for a MicroISV. I started with this excellent article on Ian Landsman’s blog over at UserScape.  I surfed on over to his site, highlighted the text, right clicked and selected Speak. The sound was immediately oozing out of my computer’s speakers. (Too easy!) Then I went about trying to tackle my list of to-dos for my iKollect application.

At first I found the voice a little distracting, but mostly because there was a new person talking to me, and I was actively listening to the voice to see if I liked it. But since I had been listening to Samantha in my car, I found that I got used to it rather swiftly.

(In my previous post, I had already determined that I found the default voice to be pretty annoying, and I had downloaded and switched to the female Samantha voice, which I think is not bad at all)

I went through my list of to-do’s pretty quickly, without being distracted much by the voice. I created my daily objective list on my whiteboard, listing out the high priority items in order of importance. The computer generated voice did not do much to distract me and I was able to perform this little ritual of mine without any problems. And I got to listen to a great article that has some great advice for newbie-entrepreneurs (of which I still consider myself).

At the top of my objective list for the day was to squash some bugs in the next release of iKollect I am currently working on (two weeks behind schedule…so sad). So I pulled up an article in my browser from Pam of Escape From Cubicle Nation (which I thoroughly enjoyed reading recently and had noted to myself to go back to when I had a moment). Then I dug in to the bugs. I cannot say I had as much luck with the “listening-while-I-work” method this time. I found myself constantly stopping my work to listen to the article.Â

So I tried switching things a bit. I tweaked the voice a little to slow it down and I reduced the volume a bit. That seemed better. So back to bug squashing!

But no luck. I was still distracted.Â

So I again tried tweaking things a little. I put on some quiet classical music at the same time as the text (I love classical as much as I love Tool, and waltz’s in particular seem to help me get into a groove). But that still didn’t work. I still found that having Samantha read to me while I tried to work to be detrimental to my task. It had to be Pam’s fault. Maybe the problem was that she wrote an article that was too damn good! Grrrr…in frustration, I picked something else off of my objective list for the day - answering emails. And click! I was back into productive mode again.  (Turns out Pam wasn’t to blame after all!)

Over the next several days, I tried many different variations of this and I consistently found that when I was doing anything with my source code, I just couldn’t listen to a spoken article and still get things done on my application. Everything else, sure, no problem. But whenever I tried to get my head around a piece of code, I ran into trouble.

So in the end, I stopped using Text2Go’s tool to read me blog entries and articles while I worked. I am disappointed that this didn’t work out for me, but I am definitely not disappointed in the Text2Go tool. It’s still a top-notch program that gives me back 45 minutes of everyday. You should check it out!

Tags: iKollect, productivity, Text2Go