I’m dyslexic and have ADHD while studying and working in mental health. I’ll do self directive research at work to better myself when I have a little ‘ah ha!’ moment, it’s still scattered but naturally I’m interested. While the stuff for study gets sidelined into a doom pile of saved articles and overwhelm. My “to-read” list would just keep growing, and the articles I saved in “read-it-later” apps would often end up being “never-read”.
So I am curious to ask, do you guys use any read-it-later apps? Ever run into any issues while using them?
For me, I use pocket but I quickly fall behind - way more in than out. That’s primarily down to me and my efforts but the application itself does nothing to assist me.
If you’ve had the same struggle, how did you tackle it? Or could you recommend some tools that might help?
Interested in everyone’s thoughts.
In the past I used Instapaper. Not sure if it still exists. It sent you a daily or weekly “Newspaper” as an ebook of all the blogs/articles you saved. Could also be sent to your ebook reader so you can read (external) distraction free.
But it’s not self hosted.
The read-it-never phenomenon is due to 1) lack of priority, and 2) loss of interest. I tackle this by setting aside 30-60 minutes a day to listen to or read something of interest. Everything is in a bookmarks folder and each session starts by adjusting the order of the bookmarks into priority including removing items that I’ve lost interest in. Then I spend the rest of the time reading from the top of the list down.
It’s daunting if you have 2,000 itmes in your doom pile, but in a list that big 90% of it should be trashed. To make it more manageable, go through 10% of it each day. It’s sub-optimal, but a completely acceptable way to address it and more optimal than never reading any of it.
You’re gonna be spending the time reading up on that and configuring it to suit your needs. That’s time not spent reading.
Taskwarrior is great for that
So this is more a process flow question than a tooling question imo. I’ve had similar thoughts and what I ended up on kind of worked.
Kanban board for tasking out -> nextcloud deck Obsidian for any notes needed Wallabag to replace pocket
My main improvements were to stop saving everything to pocket and only save either what’s my current project/research interest and to start using Kanban to save ideas for future projects instead of dumping everything into pocket immediately.
Getting things done, Kanban, or bullet journal all have worked in some way in the past to better facilitate this. Although some of my friends find heavier processes get in the way of doing things I’m the opposite, heavy structure helps me move through the process.
Hope some of this helps.
Indeed a process issue. My OneNote share can attest to this (I’ve saved gobs of articles to “Quick Notes”.
I recently restructured OneNote using the PARA idea: Projects, Areas of Responsibility, Resources, Archive.
Now when I save an article, I must file it properly at save time. It’s really helped.
I know that Omnivore is a read later app and support self-host solution. Maybe you could give a look or even a try.
I’ve started using Omnivore and like it for organizing, but it doesn’t have some sort of magic feature that’s going to make OP suddenly begin to read things. Linkwarden is another good read it later app for those looking at options.
With that said, one of my selfhosted projects was an ephemeral RSS feed I call infoscope. There’s a limited number of displayed articles pulling from a custom feed list and when they’re gone, they’re gone. Every day you’ve got a number of interesting things to choose from, but no guilt of piling up unread pieces when you find yourself busy with other things.
Only works for me on a PC well but I really like Outliners for this.
Look at Notion, Roam Research or Logseq (using the latter as I like foss)
Daily Notes, and when I have something worth reading, it gets an #to/read tag. whenever I have a downtime I just grap one and add a couple of other tags when I liked it.(yea, I also send myself messages to matrix, but sadly they never make the cut into logseq :/, thats my doom pile )
When I was in college, I explored learning tools more than I explored knowledge itself. I use Pomodoro, To-Do List, Pocket, etc. every day, but I screw up my course grades. Later, I realized that knowledge and information should stay in my brain instead of the computer. So I gave up on those tools and instead tried to remember what I saw on the spot. Of course, this is actually hard to do, so I still rely on browser bookmarks and reading lists (Chrome and Edge are both good). But unlike before, I no longer feel the least bit guilty about the pile of unread stuff on my reading list. Human energy is limited. If you chase two rabbits at the same time, you will not be able to catch either. So, when I was researching game development, I read a lot of great Internet articles and added them to my bookmarks or reading list when I was done. As I work on front-end development, I read other great articles and add valuable ones to my bookmarks or reading list. Until one day when I become interested in game development again, I will browse related articles again, and they are there quietly waiting for me. This is good.
In short, don’t feel guilty about your ever-growing reading list. If you can’t be bothered to read it, you don’t need it just yet. Even if you forget that you have saved it and re-google the content you are interested in, what does it matter?
Sorry for going off topic, I don’t mean to criticize anything. Also, I’m not a native English speaker and Google Translate helped me write this.
!RemindMe 3 days
I use Wallabag for storing things to read later. Unfortunately, once the database grows past a certain point it’s not really feasible to use the mobile app anymore.
Don’t look at software to save you from this problem.
Make yourself scan through the doom pile!
Just scan it. If an article no longer holds your interest, delete itNext, instead of reading reddit responses, turn them off and just read your darn to-do articles.