Read it Later vs Saved Links

I’m wondering how/if people distinguish saving links that are important to have/save versus links to articles you’d like to read later.

I currently use Raindrop.io and it’s become a well organized black box I remember to save links to, but never remember to refer to when I’m looking for a link.

Raindrop looks nice. But if you don’t remember to use it…

I regularly use Pocket for articles (and try to read or save to PDF as soon as possible), Pinterest for images (rarely), and Safari webarchives to save entire webpages. I rarely bookmark URLs these days because I rarely have new sites I need to remember, and I have a nice collection of browser bookmarks accumulated over the years that suffices. When I’m working on a project I’ll often create a Finder subfolder just containing those URLs, or I’ll toss them in an EagleFiler (DevonThink competitor) file in a project.

I am currently playing with Memex. Since I can work with a web page right away, I remember to come back :slight_smile: The organizational features are sufficient, and browsing history search is nice. But I miss an iPad app.

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Web articles? For me, I default to pushing those into my read later pile (in Reeder). I try to separate my browse/gather phase from my deeper reading phase, so I’ll skim my feeds, capture a bunch, then later settle in to read with a different mindset. I try to be speedy but somewhat discerning during the gathering— I don’t want to be gathering for long periods, but I do want to capture a diverse set of materials related to my interests that include some surprise while yielding a reasonably high percentage of meaningful reads.

I’ve used Delicious, Diigo, Pinboard and Raindrop. I’ve considered myself a loyal Pinboard user, though I’ve come to appreciate Raindrop’s UI, and the fact that you can organise links in folders as well as with tags. However, the honest truth is whichever bookmarking service I dump links in, I rarely if ever return to them to there. I’ll most likely continue using Raindrop as a publicly accessible database of reference items I think are worth collecting and sharing.

Personally, this distinction (read later vs. bookmarks) is very straightforward for me and I use Raindrop as well.

If it’s something to read, it goes into Pocket (or Instapaper—I switch back and forth once in a while). I use highlights to preserve useful details or insights from the articles. If it’s a service or tool or reference that I might find useful later, it goes into Raindrop.

That’s pretty much it. Those are the only two categories of thing I save in this way, so there’s no real confusion for my (admittedly simple) use case.

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Open tabs. I’ll admit it.

When I do save articles, I usually either clip them into OF if I want to read them regularly, or send to Read it Later.

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I tend to have one of 3 types of links:

  1. Technical videos/articles like this which I occasionally have reason to share with coworkers/friends
  2. Things I want to buy (some realistic, some not :slight_smile: )
  3. Actual articles for reading later that I couldn’t get to when I came across it.

But, I wonder now if it’s a symptom of not really having a knowledge base. Perhaps these articles, tools, and videos should be synthesized in a note with the link in a footnote as the source.

I think removing the 1st type of link would make my use of a read it later service a lot clearer.

I quite like GoodLinks as read-later service. It does a better job of saving my place in long articles, compared with Instapaper or Pocket. For articles I want to save, I use DevonThink.

However, Memex looks intriguing!

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Read later service: Pocket or instapaper ( i really move every couple months, cannot pick one, so frustrating).
Read it later is anything I would like to read or watch (pocket allows youtube videos)

Bookmarking: Raindrop
any website, reddit post etc will go to raindrop.

Automation

  • anything saved to Pocket/Instapaper gets automatically saved to a Raindrop collection using IFTTT.

  • starring anything on Feedbin also gets automatically saved to Raindrop

    There are lots more automation but you get the point

Its simple, i do not have to think about it and automating most of it makes it easier because as humans we will forget to save things. From my experience, its always the things you forget is the one you will look for in the future. That is when your future self will thank the automation for saving stuff/things.

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On Mac it’s Reading List (I just had to watch my hands to remember what the shortcut was, it’s completely ingrained to the point of automaticity: Shift+CMD+D), and then later I will read them on my iPad. Everything gets cleaned out once a week at least, articles that I really want to keep get sent to Evernote or (gasp!) I’ll print it out to make a hard copy.

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I’ve gone back to saving links to the safari reading list, and once a week going through them during my weekly review to save them to PDF or webarchive for permanent storage.

The review activity gives me the added advantage of “thinking time”, and I’ve found I delete about half the links I store during the review.

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@dustinknopoff: also see working smarter with pkm — transcripts, particularly the field guide linked in the first paragraph.

You’ll already be familiar with some of the thinking, since you’ve obviously considered how you manage this stuff, and the guide is somewhat more conceptual than practical, but it might help steer you towards a clearer sense of what, why and ultimately where/how to store your reading/links/knowledge.

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I’m like this as well, and occasionally intrigued with how short of a time span things go from “interesting” to “why did I save this?” for some of the items.

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same for me, I think I delete even far more than half of the items I saved.
Guess it weeds out the clickbait :slight_smile:

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I’ve never considered my own thoughts on a link or knowledge source I’m sharing to have more value than the links themselves.

The link you shared is the first I’ve seen which emphasizes/verbalizes that!

Thanks for sharing.

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I used Pocket for many years but had the common problem of not remembering to look at it. Then I added and IFTTT rule to put something on my to do list in Todoist whenever I added something to Pocket. That worked better, but not perfect.

Now, I just clip the URL to DEVONThink. Since I look at DT all day long, I see them everyday. The ones that I clip for projects I move to the project folders and the ones that I clip just to read I leave in the Inbox. I scan the Inbox regularly and if I have time, I will read one. I usually try to read several on Sunday morning to keep my Inbox at a reasonable size.

So, far this has been working better for me than previous solutions. I like Pocket and believe that it is well done, but it is just not part of my regular work flow so it is out of sight, and hence, out of mind.

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I simply keep open the Mac Pocket app, and I periodically zip through articles (or print to pdf in Reader view) throughout the day. Still, I usually have a couple of dozen articles in the queue.

The Mac app (originally Read It Later, and purchased by Pocket in 2013 and renamed) used to only be available to Mac users if you were a subscriber but someone told me that’s no longer the case.

The ReadKit RSS reader integrates Pocket articles, by the way. And I read that Reeder (which I downloaded a few days ago but haven’t delved into yet) does too.

I’ve never been a big keyboard shortcuts person but I’ve slowed down the last few months with the intention of using them more. This keyboard shortcut has been a game changer for me. I went back to Reading List and I’m using Pocket and Instapaper even less.

THIS. I’ve been reading lots more of what I save for later since I started using Reeder as both my read later app AND my RSS feed reader. I think my infovoristic utopian ideal requires the smallest number of apps that can cover the functionality I need in the best way possible. That sometimes means foregoing the new-shiny that’s really good for a very specific functionality subset because the overhead of adding one more app to the pile cancels out the value it brings…

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This setup is working nicely for me as well. I used to dump all the articles into Pocket and it was a hot mess that did absolutely nothing for me except making me feel uneasy, stressed-out and a bit guilty that my “read later” list was expanding at a rate 10 times that of my reading progress.

Recently I outright deleted my Pocket account and started saving articles of interest into DEVONthink as PDFs. From my experiments, the most visually-pleasing PDFs are produced by Safari, either by sharing as a Reader PDF or simply printing to PDF.

I also created a Workspace optimized for reading these articles so that I can transform DEVONthink into my read-later service with a keyboard shortcut. With the added benefit of DT’s built-in AI indexing and analyzing the content of these articles, I believe this setup will stick with me for years to come.

I should also mention that I got my initial inspiration from this article:

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