I have engaged with too many services that allow me to squirrel away digital media for consumption (and no doubt a lot of productive, insightful and deep reflection) at some notional future date. Here are some strategies that I have derived for managing a large inflow of content.
The days when I had a physical in-box full of photocopied articles and white papers nagging me to read them is long past. Now I have to deal with an effectively infinite in-box of material to read instead.
My iPhone is optimally efficient at filling my interstitial time with short reading bursts. The incessant rain of emails, blog posts, status updates and other quick-hits means that, in practice my longer-scale reading activities are too often getting pushed down my to-read list.
It is pretty trivial at this point to observe that Instapaper is the optimal solution for consuming and managing all of the long-form articles I want to read. But given that it is so easy to scan through multiple sources online, and even filtering those sources so that I only push less than 20% of posts into Instapaper, I still end up with an unrealistic queue of archived material awaiting my attention.
Before I started using Instapaper I had a folder in Evernote called “Articles To Read” and another equivalent folder in Gmail. I was using both in parallel, along with a tagged list of bookmarks on Pinboard. I also had a related “Videos To View” folder in Gmail. The majority of the contents of these folders being neither read nor reviewed.
To take control of this I have reorganised and rationalised my approach to managing all classes of media inputs. I think this process might be useful for anyone with a similar mindset, so I am sharing it here.