Productivity

How I Manage Web Reading

I do a moderate amount of web reading, and I thought I would share my system.

Software

Feedly. I like the interface on this RSS reader, and the ability to mark things to read later.

Pinterest. Pinterest also gives me articles

IFTTTThis automation tool takes articles I mark as Feedly and sends them to Instapaper. (I use the applet by mayel2b that does this and it doesn’t count against my applets)

Instapaper. A service that allows me to read saved articles without the distractions of the websites.

A browser. Both Chrome and Firefox have extensions to save things to Instapaper.

Schedule

Every day I allow myself 5 minutes to browse articles in Pinterest. I save anything I want to look into more to a private board in Pinterest.

On Fridays, I go to Feedly and read the articles from the blogs I follow. Anything that looks interesting I mark as Read Later. IFTTT sends it over to Instapaper automatically.

On Mondays I go through the private board in Pinterest, and everything gets saved to OneNote (if it is reference material) or sent to Instapaper using the browser extension

Reading

I have Instapaper both on my phone and iPad, and I read whenever I have a few minutes. This could be during breakfast, while I’m waiting for a meeting to start, or while waiting for dinner to cook.

I can usually get through the articles I have saved for a week’s worth of reading within a week.


This system has taken me a few years to work out, but I find it easy to have all my web reading in one place.

One Comment

  • Cynthia

    simply because many feeds have only summaries of articles (a pet peeve of mine, and a serious limitation I consider when subscribing)

    I agree! that is also a pet peeve of mine. I believe it’s also a time waster. Instead of being able to scan it in the reader you have to go somewhere else to read the entry. Thanks for giving me the idea of limiting my feeds based on this “feature”.