The Best Tools to Build Your Huge Read Later List
The Read Later list is an important productivity tool. Submitting articles to a separate app for later reading will help you stay focused on your work and give you something productive on your phone while you are idle. But it’s easier to save an article than to read it, which is why stories in read-later lists (for example, in the Instapaper and Pocket apps) tend to accumulate. Here are three different reading list traversal strategies and tools to accomplish them.
Reading queue
If you have to rummage through your reading list app for items you really want to read, then there is too much clutter on your list. It’s time to either read those articles that you miss every time, or let them go.
If you have decent self-control, you can browse your Reading List as if you were browsing an abandoned mailbox and archive anything that isn’t interesting to you. Go through ruthlessly – if you regret archiving an article, you can always dig it up later. (Chances are, you will forget about it forever and you will be fine .)
If you don’t have that kind of self-control, you need an application like Reading Queue that will only show you one item at a time. You can skip an item only three times before the application deletes it. This way you will spend more time reading and less time looking for something to read.
Postman
If the problem is that you never open the Reading List app, try sending articles to your inbox instead. V
If the problem is that you never open the Reading List app, try sending articles to your inbox instead. The Mailist extension for Chrome and Firefox works like Instapaper or Pocket, but instead of saving articles to the app, it compiles them into an email newsletter just for you.
If you’re having the opposite problem – a littered inbox of newsletters you’ve long wanted to read – use these instructions to submit those newsletters to Instapaper.
Tricks like this may not work forever, as your brain starts to ignore reading list emails just as it ignored a reading list app. But if they last for a few weeks, they can help you shorten your list. (I believe in “the tool that works right now”.)
Accelerator
Instapaper can make you read your articles faster with the Speed tool. While viewing an article, click the Share button at the right end of the bottom menu. In the row with gray stock options, click the speedometer icon.
There is no speed reader in the pocket. But it is supported by a third-party accelerated reading app for iOS, Accelerator .
There are more bizarre ways to view your reading list. Pocket and Instapaper have read-aloud features, so you can listen to articles with automatic, Siri-style reading, such as a robotic podcast. You can even pick up some of the tricks from our How To Read More Books posts and read the articles out loud with a friend or partner. We personally won’t go that far, but for some it works.
It’s nice to go into “super efficient” mode and view, archive, and delete unwanted articles. But one session is usually not enough to clear the Reading List permanently. Pick a part of your day that regularly lends itself to running briskly on the phone – toilets, on the train, in lines – and direct yourself to that free space each time. (Set a daily reminder if needed.) The rest of the time you can sit back and read the full article. But for these few minutes you are in terminator mode: seek and destroy.