My system for keeping track of everything I wanted to read was to keep everything open on my phone. I would send links from my desktop to my phone to do that. My Firefox Mobile had so many open tabs, it showed ♾️ rather than the actual number. I read things halfway and then abandoned them (but didn’t close them), and Random browsing tabs intermingled with the things I wanted to read making it impossible to find anything.
I wanted to fix these problems. So I ‘scratched my own itch’ and created an opinionated read-later app. This is what it looks like:
There are some key ideas behind the tool that help me to be more intentional about my reading:
- Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket (hat tip to Oliver Burkeman for this idea which inspired the tool) – Burkeman says that you should see your to-read list like a stream of items flowing past you, not as a bucket that you should empty. That is why unread links eventually will disappear if you don’t read them.
- Reading means reading – If I click on a link to read it, I commit myself to actually reading it: it will disappear from my read later list (and will appear on my read list).
- Read your oldest items first – There is only one sort order: news links appear at the bottom of the page. It stimulates me to deal with the older links first (either read them or skip reading through expiring them). This idea also helps with the next point.
- Put some time between wanting to read it, and deciding to read it – Slow things down. I might think it is important to read something now, but I’ll be a much better judge of that in a few weeks. (I copied this from the 50-day rule that I use for my personal finances: if you want something that costs more than a hundred euros, wait for 50 days and then see if you still want it).
- Don’t gamify your reading – The tool has none of the gamification mechanisms that infest the web today. No badges, no cute texts urging you on, no graphs and counters. It won’t even tell me how many links are still unread.
- Keep it simple – The interface is extremely simple, just showing you a list of links, including the domain they come from. Nothing else.
You can self-host this too
For once, I have put in the work to actually release the code. Hopefully someone else will find it useful too, or will at least copy some of the ideas.
You can find the code on Github: opinionated-read-later, but please check all the info in the README file before you get started.