How not to clutter up Pocket and have time to read articles

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Copywriter Sergey Kaplichny - on how to effectively use the Pocket deferred reading service.

Lazy read services are a handy thing. Well, you know how it happens: you come across an article, there is absolutely no time to read, but the article is interesting. In order not to produce a swarm of open tabs, I just save the link to the list, and then in my free time I return to it and read it carefully.

Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Safari Reading List - I've used all of them, but settled on Pocket. I would like to share my approach to using this service.

The two minute rule

In general, everything that interests me and that I cannot read now gets into my Pocket. Videos, regular articles, links to books, collections, and so on. This is such a hub of stored material, in which it will be pleasant for me to delve into later.

The exception is that I do not throw into Pocket something that can be processed here and now. If I need no more than two minutes to work with an article, then I set aside time and immediately study the material. The same goes for articles / notes that relate to some existing project or call for action. I immediately attach them to the task in the to-do-list and schedule the execution. Otherwise, the swamp begins with the postponement of affairs.

Pocket helps you avoid cluttering your browser with dozens of open tabs. Everything that needs to be read right now is reading. I save everything that requires immersion.

Reminder and processing

There are several repetitive information processing tasks on my to-do list. They look like this: "Parse Pocket", "Parse pending messages in TG" and "Read emails". That is, a couple of times a week I deliberately set aside time to process the stored information, study it and understand what to do with it: just enjoy it or use it for some projects.

Sometimes it happens that I have kept something for my mood, but it turned out to be not so interesting. Or I wanted to dive into some topic and threw materials similar to each other. There is nothing wrong with that, because that is what information is filtered for in order to extract the most useful from it.

Further use

If I plan to use articles for projects, then I select the most important from them and transfer them to Bear. If I want to adopt personal experience from the article, then I rewrite useful information in my own words in order to better remember them. It turns out.

Articles that motivate action turn into tasks on my to-do list.

In addition, I mark all interesting articles with an asterisk before archiving. Then once or twice a month I look into the Favorites folder, choose the best ones and publish them in the "Links" section.

All this helps to process articles on time, not to produce a bunch of windows with open tabs and more or less keep the incoming information under control.