Monday, 10 May 2010

How to manage your reading list

I stumble across a million Interesting Things to read every single day. This terrific, but it's also problematic, because they do tend to get tangled up. Here are the problems my Interesting Things used to cause:

1. I would wind up with so many open tabs that I couldn't actually see what they are any more, creating a navigation problem.
2. I would get to the end of the day, close the browser, and poof! All that good and useful stuff would disappear, never to be found again.
3. It interrupted my workflow - I would take time to read an article about UX that could have been spent actually working on UX, just so I wouldn't lose it.


I've now worked out a process that has fixed these three problems. It uses two tools:

Instapaper is 'a simple tool to save webpages for reading later'.

Evernote is a souped-up bookmarking service, which lets you store pretty much anything you need to remember.


Here's the process:

1. Find an Interesting Thing to read
2. Add it to my instapaper account
3. When I have time to get some reading done, choose an Interesting Thing from my instapaper
4. Once I've read the Interesting thing, save it to my evernote account.


So - I always know what Interesting Things I have/haven't read, I can keep a tagged & searchable record of all the Interesting Things I've read, and I don't lose time trying to keep up with my Interesting Things when I have other things to do.

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Posted by Zoe at 05:04

3 comments:

  1. Nicky10 May 2010 at 05:32

    Thanks for this post Zoe - this is exactly a problem I have, and loose sleep over!

    I've recently figured out a similar system for twitter, where I see a constant steam of useful links that I never have time to follow up. This is what works for me: I use tweetdeck, which easily allows me to save interesting tweets in my favourites column.

    Then when I have time I go through my twitter favourites, and bookmark anything I really find useful to my delicious account. It has the same results as your evernote strategy, in that tagging allows me to search out the bookmarks again, but also I can share these bookmarks with others.

    Actually I find this whole information overload aspect of social networking and belonging to a large PLN interesting.I've been thinking about putting together a blog post and a workshop on it, it seems to be an increasing problem for many people I know, including myself! So thanks for a timely and helpful post.

    Nicky Hockly

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  2. ChrisM10 May 2010 at 05:44

    Incidentally, another tool which does essentially the same thing is instapaper (as far as I can tell), but puts a different lick of paint on it, is ReadItLater:

    http://readitlaterlist.com/

    I suspect there's not much to differentiate them beyond Look&Feel.

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  3. Zoe10 May 2010 at 09:12

    Thanks Nicky - I don't let myself use 'favourites' in twitter, because I know all too well I never check them! I'm glad that works for you, though.

    Chris - Readitlater looks pretty good. I also like Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/), which strips all the noise off a webpage and leaves you with the plain text in a nice font.

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