Tag: Read It Later

Information Overload – Trying to Reorganize A Workflow

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In January of 2011, I wrote a story on the subject of Organizing Your Workflow with Instapaper and Pinboard. This was in response to the announcement of the impending closure of Xmarks(which later did not close), and the announcement that Delicious was shutting down. This had brought me to Pinboard.

Pinboard-Home

Pinboard is currently available at a rate of just over $10 for a lifetime subscription, plus $25/yr for an Archival Account.

At the time, I used Instapaper, a Read It Later service, as a holding pen for stories, which I later archived in Pinboard. In April of 2011, I announced the move to Read It Later(now Pocket). There were many good reasons for this, however, the refresh from Read It Later to Pocket made service lean more toward the visual.

Which brings me to May of 2012, where I once again pondered the subject, right after I read Clay Johnson’s book, the Information Diet. At the time, I vowed to get my information overload under control.

Here we are, March of 2013, and…it is worse. I finally declared bankruptcy on Pocket(Formerly Read it Later). I exported everything I was most definitely NOT Reading Later, and sent it to Pinboard. There is some duplication there that has to be cleaned up, but now I have 25,000 bookmarks to go through and prune. The archive of which takes up 25GB.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t working, but I’m changing plans once again. I need a plan that allows me to reference old material I have in the archive, while keeping track of more relevant material. For now, I’ll be living in Pinboard, without benefit of a secondary service. But I am open to suggestions.

Will update you as this develops.

 

 

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Mixing up the Workflow and Avoiding Overload

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This is not the first time we’ve talked about our workflow. It has evolved over the years. Our workflow currently consists of a Read It Laterservice and a

If This Then That. com

long-term bookmark archiving service.

When we started, the Read it Later service was Instapaper. We adopted Pinboard as the long-term archiving service. It is nice to know all the reference material we might use is stored for later use.

We later moved to Read It Later, which has recently rebranded as Pocket. The problem is we have 11,000+ bookmarks in Pinboard, and near 3000 in Pocket. Just reading all the stuff we need to learn to keep informed is a challenge.

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Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet discusses this problem, and makes a large amount of suggestions on the subject. He refers to the idea as infoveganism. This is not to say we totally agree with Mr. Johnson, but we see the point that information overload is a problem.

Last year, Ars Technical posted an opinion piece titled, “Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity.” Perhaps RSS is but so is the alternative, social media. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc are all sources of often repeating information. Who can keep up with all that?

The secret to a good workflow is to wisely choose your information flows, keep your inbox empty, and try to schedule spring cleaning for your accounts the same as anything else.

As part of that, we’re trying out ifttt.com, which allows you to tie together parts of the Internet. Using If This Then That logic, you can tie things together. For example, since Pocket support in Pinboard doesn’t allow bookmarks to be added when read, ifttt.com can add this functionality. There are dozens of suggested tieups between sites that otherwise would not be possible.

It is time to liquidate the Pocket account, get up to date, prune the Reader accounts again, prune the Twitter followers…

What is your workflow?

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Switching from Instapaper to ReadItLater

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The concept of a Read It Later service is not new to our workflow. Back in October of 2010, we discussed moving our workflow to Instapaper. Then, our storage expanded to Pinboard, and we discussed integrating Pinboard and Instapaper into a writing and reading workflow.

However, the developer of Instapaper is very iOS-centric. He released an official iPad and iPhone app, and many of his updates are paired with an app update. We do like the product, but we decided to consider the competition when ReadItLater released an official Android app(Market Link), which is available currently at 99 cents. We had initially looked at ReadItLater and moved on, but things have changed.

The Android app offers an exclusive feature not available for any other platform app. Instant Push Sync, which ensures new items instantly download and are available on the phone, even if the phone is offline. Also on the Android side of things, there is a ReadItLater plugin for Dolphin Browser.

Read It Later also has a Firefox extension with a feature we were hunting for(unfortunately not also available for Chrome), which is Save All Tabs for Later. It also offers offline reading, Google Reader integration, etc.You can mark items as read directly from the browser.  Overall, it is much more tightly integrated into the browser experience.

Pinboard also supports the same import from ReadItLater it does from Instapaper, which means that end of my workflow(the archive) is unchanged.

Read It Later also has a beta paid feature called Digest. This turns your Read It Later stories into an online magazine format, and automatically sorts them into topics. The magazine format is very popular right now.

It does lack the auto-send to Kindle function that Instapaper offered, but this can still be reproduced using Calibre. It lacks folders, but supports tagging(which can accomplish the same thing)

If your priorities are clean formatting of long-form text content and integrated portability to an eReader, you may lean toward Instapaper. If you do your reading with your browser or mobile device and want to keep up with content-rich pages with lots of images or videos, Read It Later may be more suited.

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