Ask HN: How do you deal with your web articles reading list?

3 points·ciaoben··2 comments

My pocket account has 2000+ items, most will be outdated now, most will never be read, most I don't even remember why are here..... I am struggling to managing (in the more material sense of it (tools/methods) and in the more idealogical sense of it(self discipline)) the ton information that I found every day...

How do you deal with it?

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Enforce some rules:

1. It's on the list for more than a month? Archive it without remorse, you'll never read it anyway.

2. Be more strict/selective with what it goes on the list. I usually spend few seconds skimming through the article I'm about to add. If nothing interesting shows up, the article stay out of my Pocket.

3. Keep your add to list/mark as read ratio at 2:1 (i.e. if you add two articles in a day, be sure you read at least one)

Long story short: I didn't had more than 15-20 items on my list for the past 2-3 years :)

I rarely add stuff to my reading list because I have learned that I mostly ignore what I add. That includes the rare things I add these days.

The reason I mostly ignore what's on my reading list is because things usually go there because I don't have time to read them. My normal habits won't give me more time in the future...I'll still look at more than I can read. The only way I can catch up would be to block out time.

However...

I've recently been thinking about just storing all the text of the pages I visit with the idea of running search over them so that finding what I've seen is easier. Tooling might be one of those enterprise type systems that run on the JVM and the hardware something like Raspberry Pi's and thumb-drives.

Just haven't got around to it yet...it's on my TODO list.

Good luck.

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