Read later apps and article retention

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. Iā€˜ve recently changed a couple of things to make this more effective

  1. Iā€™ve 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
  2. I will not save a bogus article on the first of every month titled with the Month and Year so I can see whatā€™s been in there for 6 months. If Iā€™ve not read it by then itā€™s getting deleted

How do you manage read later apps?

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I have similar workflow like yours but I donā€™t 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.

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I use RSS to exclusively read articles.

I am using Inoreader to use the ā€œRead 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.

Itā€™s a tricky problem to be sure. Weā€™re living in the information age and information overload is truly a real thing. I suffer through it constantly!

+1

I donā€™t know how I kept up with everything before I retired. I guess I didnā€™t. :slightly_smiling_face:

I use a filter to delete old ones I havenā€™t started and didnā€™t 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 couldnā€™t quite dial it in, but still like the idea.

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I use GoodLinks and export the articles that I want to keep, from my Mac, as PDFs.

GL allows me to export as plain text, markdown, or PDF from Mac, iOS, or iPadOS. But the links remain clickable only when exported from macOS.

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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 ā€œHmmm. 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:

  1. A lot of what Iā€™d been hoarding was of fleeting importance and, if it wasnā€™t worth reading at that very moment, it really wasnā€™t worth saving.

  2. If it was worth saving it would probably be retrievable in the future if I didnā€™t save it myself, but rather made a quick note of what it was and why it might be worth a second look.

  3. Itā€™s nonetheless OK to store something youā€™ve come across if you have a plan to work with it later.

So, Iā€™m 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 Iā€™m 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 articleā€”you 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 Iā€™m 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 itā€™s 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 whatā€™s good to me is usually what I want to read immediately, or Iā€™m determined to read it when I get the chance and the app is just a convenience.

Iā€™ve found that the more articles I read as soon as possible, the more up-to-date my ā€œinternal news cycleā€ is with my immediate interests, and itā€™s a lot easier to just discard what doesnā€™t catch to the thread.