Admit It — You Really Aren’t Reading Anything Later.
You know them like you know your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Their plugins reside in your Chrome extensions bar. When referring to one of the premiere Read-It-Later services, you say it like you would say you’re Googling something; you Pocket it.
Pocket, Instapaper, Pinboard, you've heard of these and some lesser known services like Raindrop.io. You have 100 tabs open on your browser with these uber interesting articles you don’t have time to read. You click your Instapaper extension. There it is, in your browser and synced to your iPhone and iPad. You say you’re going to get to all these articles tonight, all 100 of them. You think you are doing your computer a favor by limiting the tabs open in your browser and stashing away 100 articles you’re probably never going to read. Why? Because you do it everyday.
And let’s not even talk about IFTTT. I have a gazillion IFTTT recipes: Save links I’ve favorited in Twitter to Instapaper. Save links I’ve shared to my Timeline on Facebook to Instapaper. Save Watch Later YouTube videos to Instapaper. When I go to the Twitter web client there is even a little Instapaper button under a tweet.
I go around looking at what seem to be interesting links in tweets or Facebook posts and automatically favorite or share them knowing they’ll end up in Instapaper for me to look at later. But do you know how many articles I have saved, between Instapaper, Pinboard, and Raindrop? 10,000, maybe more.
It’s a disease. We are all suffering from it — “I’m too busy/lazy/curious/undiscerning to figure out what is worth keeping and what is not.”
Have you ever saved an article that was literally a 2 minute read? I have. Do we not have 2 minutes to just peruse the articles we think we may want to read/archive and see if they are even worth the effort? Saving an article from Cult of Mac, which I consider fluff, light, fun stuff — do I really need to do that? Am I learning anything with the things I am saving? Are they provoking thought, providing insight, teaching? These are things we need to ask ourselves. Take 2 minutes to scan the article you want to save/archive/read later. Ask yourself if the cost/benefit of adding the article to your 10,000 article archive is actually worth it, beneficial. If not, skip it. And turn off those IFTTT recipes.
