Why I’m ditching read it later apps
I’ve been an avid user of Read It Later, and then Pocket, for years.
In the case of Pocket, I’ve frequently been on their annual top 5% of users (based on number of words read).
I’ve been a big fan of these apps, and have really appreciated their usefulness: they let me, well, save things to read later, from wherever I am, as long as I have a mobile phone. This is really useful for me because, during the day I tend to be focused on my work at Whitesmith, and don’t even have the patience to read them at the moment.
My ritual has always been to save the articles and later read them during the weekend. This often resulted in me spending a good amount of my Saturday and/or Sunday swiping through my reading list. Not to mention the fact that I always had more articles than I was capable off reading, which I refused to delete (also known as FOMO) — a pretty common symptom from users of these apps.
In January I decided to experiment ditching Pocket and Read it Later. Now, every potentially interesting article I found is opened and stays in a tab in my browser, until I read it or realize it isn’t that valuable. When I start having too many tabs open, I’m forced to close some. If my whole browser needs to be closed for some reason, they are all gone, and that’s fine. Because if it’s something very important I’ll probably remember to search my history to open it again.
This has resulted pretty well for me — my articles usually get read at the end of the day, one or two days after, or forgotten forever. And naturally, I’ve been having more time on the weekends to spend on other things, and without the annoying monkey in the back telling me that I have so many things to ready.
