For the longest time, I was an article hoarder and jumped from one read-later app to another. But most of the time, it stopped at the hoarding part and never got to the reading part.
Until I found out from Marcel that there is a superior way to manage articles you want to read. I’m even a bit ashamed to admit that it took me reading a post from another person to come up with this system. Because it’s so stupidly simple, you can summarize it in one sentence. In Marcel’s words:
Here it goes: I put links to articles I want to read into my to-do list and then I read them.
Yeah, that’s precisely what I do now. Here’s my Today view in Things 3 as of writing this:
Three side-effects of this system that are a feature, not a bug:
- If I save many articles on a day, they clog up my todo list. This makes me more conscious of what I want to save in the first place.
- If I don’t manage to read an article on any given day, I have to move it to the next day. This creates friction. If I do this a couple of days in a row, it starts to annoy me. A good sign that I can delete the article from my list altogether.
- If I really do want to read an article, I make time for it because it’s now on my todo list. With the same priority as, let’s say, doing laundry. Not something to do “sometime”.
But what about saving articles for later so I can revisit them?
I don't think there is a point in doing that anymore. If an article truly resonates with me, I should probably take the time and write a post about it. Like I did yesterday. This makes me reflect on the article and I won’t forget it so easily.
For other articles that I find shareable, I post them over on Bluesky and they get backfilled onto my personal website, so I have my little archive there.
You see, you don’t need much for a good read-later system. Not even a new app.