I treat read later apps as somewhere to read articles. If I want to retain them I copy and paste to Obsidian (ugly but effective). Read Later Apps (for me) should be another Inbox, and not a perm store.
For years I used Pocket as my read later app of choice, but switched to GoodLinks when they implemented focus filters.
The problem I have is that I tend to keep too many articles in goodreads for too long and then not always clear house, so I can end up with more than 100 articles waiting to be read. Iāve recently changed a couple of things to make this more effective
Iāve switched off Quick Save. This means that when I save something to Goodlinks via the share sheet, it pops up a dialog and I make myself tag the article to categorise it. This small amount of extra friction makes me really thing about whether I save the article or not
I will not save a bogus article on the first of every month titled with the Month and Year so I can see whatās been in there for 6 months. If Iāve not read it by then itās getting deleted
I have similar workflow like yours but I donāt store articles. If I need the infomration permanently, I make my own notes based on the webpage and store them in Apple Notes.
I love quick save on Goodlinks and use that exclusively. I also bought Anybox to use as a Link saving and deal later app but I hardly use that app.
I am using Inoreader to use the āRead Laterā. Then whenever I go to inoreader, my link takes me directly to the read later page to show me the unread articles I have.
Itās a tricky problem to be sure. Weāre living in the information age and information overload is truly a real thing. I suffer through it constantly!
I use a filter to delete old ones I havenāt started and didnāt save for any particular reason.
I played with adding to reading lists via a shortcut that would first check how many words I had left in unread. No room, no add. I couldnāt quite dial it in, but still like the idea.
Time-honored professional organizing advice is to immediately get rid of something you find in the back of a closet if you hear yourself say āHmmm. I might need this again someday.ā
I spent my first decade of content overabundance hoarding every shiny thing I stumbled across, only to find myself declaring read-it-later bankruptcy and deleting the entire collection six months later. I finally figured out that:
A lot of what Iād been hoarding was of fleeting importance and, if it wasnāt worth reading at that very moment, it really wasnāt worth saving.
If it was worth saving it would probably be retrievable in the future if I didnāt save it myself, but rather made a quick note of what it was and why it might be worth a second look.
Itās nonetheless OK to store something youāve come across if you have a plan to work with it later.
So, Iām trying to break the habit of just dumping stuff into an app to someday maybe read and instead save what I commit to read with intention.
Like @geoffaire I now make it a point to tag everything I save. At the moment Iām using two tools: GoodLinks and the very excellent Obsidian Web Clipper. The very best thing about the Obsidian Web Clipper is being able to create customized templates that allow you to do more than just add tags when saving an articleāyou can pretty much add any property you want.
Although I could in theory eliminate GoodLinks and just use Obsidian, GoodLinks provides a much better mobile reading experience than Obsidian, so I still put things there to read when Iām not at my desk. Obsidian is for content that needs to be a part of my note repository.
I use Goodlinks as a temporary storage for articles I want/need to read.
Then what deserves to be permanently saved ends up in Devonthink, the rest gets deleted.
My normal workflow for RSS is New Explorer ā Goodlinks ā Devonthink.
So:
NE: download/find/sort info
GL: store what needs to be further examinated
DT: permanently store info
When I export an article from GL I save it in a specific folder (in Downloads) and then Hazel automatically moves it to DT Inbox. I have smart rules to move PDFs to the proper group within DT based on naming but for just a few, all the rest ends in Inbox for later sorting. I prefer to use several databases to host different info:
medical reference articles go to my Health DB, technology related articles go to Tech DB and other articles end up in my Hobby DB where they are then sorted in groups, according to their function.
I could directly use DT instead of GL but I tend to keep DT as clean as possibile because itās my repository for all sorts of precious content (bills, medical docsā¦).
Goodlinks is great and the highlights feature, though in its infancy, is nice.
Good writing is hard to come by these days, and whatās good to me is usually what I want to read immediately, or Iām determined to read it when I get the chance and the app is just a convenience.
Iāve found that the more articles I read as soon as possible, the more up-to-date my āinternal news cycleā is with my immediate interests, and itās a lot easier to just discard what doesnāt catch to the thread.