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💡 The Big Idea: Reinventing Read-It-Later to Overcome Information Overload

Over 400 million terabytes (or 4 billion gigabytes) of data are created every day.

That number is increasing exponentially, making it increasingly hard to keep up with even the things that you actually want to see.

In this newsletter, I share a different approach that eliminates the anxiety associated with queues that never seem to empty.

The Evolution of Read-It-Later

I remember when I first started using Twitter.

There were no algorithms, just people that you’d chosen to follow sharing things you wanted to see.

Back in the day, I was a “Twitter completionist.” I had a small number of people I followed, and I could make it through my timeline easily. My app of choice (R.I.P. Tweetbot) showed how many unread items were left, and I had no trouble getting through it all.

I also got into Read-It-Later and started sending articles and newsletters to a separate inbox that showed me only the things I wanted to read.

Sounds like a solid system, right?

The truth is I still had trouble getting through it all. And I felt guilty about it.

Here’s the problem: there’s too much information to keep up with it all. Even the good stuff you want to see or read is more than you can possibly handle. And it creates a backlog that produces more stress with each unread item.

To keep from drowning in the Information Age, we need a new approach.

There are two specific things we can do to beat information overwhelm:

1. Cut everything but the really good stuff
2. Change the way we think about our inboxes and to-read piles

(I’m using the terms to-read and Read-It-Later fairly loosely here. The concept also applies to your YouTube queue, podcasts, and any other collection of things you want to consume later.)

Curate Your Sources

The first thing we need to do is eliminate the noise and focus on the signal.

We need to embrace our own limits and get rid of anything that isn’t valuable or sparks joy.

There are lots of great blogs, YouTube channels, newsletters, and podcasts out there. Even if I’m interested in what they have to say, I can’t put pressure on myself to consume everything that my favorite creators make.

So, to help the really good stuff rise to the top, you need to curate the things that aren’t as valuable as maybe you thought they would be.

Every so often, I audit every information source I’m subscribed to. I ask three simple questions I picked up from the late Jim Rohn:

1. Who am I allowing to speak into my life?
2. What effect is that having on me?
3. Is that ok?

There are a lot of things I subscribed to a long time ago that I just never bothered to unsubscribe to. And every once in a while, I get annoyed and ask myself, “Why am I still consuming this?”

Our tastes change over time. So, if something is no longer useful, feel free to cut it loose.

If you don’t get consistent value of the things you can consume, consider unsubscribing.

That even applies to my newsletter!

By the way, this is easy with email: just search for the word “Unsubscribe” in your email app, and you’ll get a list of the things to which you’re subscribed. All reputable email service providers are required to have an unsubscribe link in every email they send.

So, do future you a favor. Find one thing to unsubscribe to right now.

It may not seem like much, but every little bit helps.

Change How You Think About Read-It-Later

The second thing we can do is to change how we look at the things we want to consume.

In his book Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman uses the metaphor of a river to apply to your to-read pile:

Treat it like a river, not a bucket.

I think this is both brilliant and necessary.

When Read-It-Later apps first arrived, having a separate high-priority inbox for the things we really wanted to look at was a decent strategy. But now, there is so much quality content out there about things you actually care about that it’s impossible to keep up with it all.

So you need to be ok with letting things pass by you.

If something is really interesting or resonates, feel free to pick it up. But otherwise, feel no guilt as the river carries it away.

It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about your Reat-It-Later inbox (though I could make the same argument for your email as well.)

Here’s how I’m attempting to embrace this new philosophy.

My Current Read-It-Later Workflow

I’ve completely moved away from RSS and Read-It-Later at this point. I’m not logging in to Readwise Reader, Feedbin, or anything else.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped reading things online.

Instead, I’ve switched to Safari as my main browser, and I’ve embraced its Reading List feature. If I see something that’s interesting, I’ll manually send it to the reading list. And every day, I try to spend about 30 minutes going through things on my reading list. I don’t treat it as an inbox, and there’s no pressure to “complete” everything.

Sending things to the reading list is easy, thanks to the Share Sheet extension on both macOS and iOS. So if I come across an interesting article from another source, such as an email or social media, I’ll send it to Safari using the Share Sheet.

Here’s the key, though: there are no subscriptions in the Reading List.

Things get triaged there, but only the things I actually see. In other words, the list isn’t growing while I’m not looking.

The last piece of this is that I’m using the Obsidian Web Clipper to highlight things during my reading session that I want to save, and I send them to Obsidian. The Web Clipper is really well done and can send either the whole article or just the highlights to your vault as a new note with pre-configured Properties for the article title, article source, and author.

😎 Something Cool: The Obsidian Web Clipper

I’ve been dragging my feet on embracing the Obsidian Web Clipper because it requires 1.7.2 or higher. This was a dealbreaker for me because I rely on the Query Control plugin, but as I mentioned a few weeks ago, there’s now a fix that finally lets me update Obsidian to the latest version 🎉

Let me say that I expected the Obsidian Web Clipper to be good. I didn’t expect it to be this good.

First, I love how you can clip things, and it pre-populates the Properties with things like the article title, publish date, and author name. You can even configure templates for different types of content that have different properties and settings or save locations (you can create a new note or add it to the top/bottom of a specific note, including the daily note).

But what I really love is the Highlighter Mode.

With Highlighter Mode, you can select the text or elements of the webpage you want to keep. Once you’re done, click the Clip Highlights button, which copies only the highlighted section into Obsidian. It’s perfect for my new Read-It-Later workflow and is available for just about any browser on the planet.

If you ever have a need to clip things into Obsidian, give the Obsidian Web Clipper a look.

📚 Book Notes: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

​Meditations by Oliver Burkeman isn’t quite what I expected. But it is still very, very good.

It’s basically a 4-week daily reader with a different short reading every day. We cranked through it when I picked it for Bookworm, but I’d actually recommend you slow down a bit if you pick this one up for yourself.

The content, though, is classic Oliver Burkeman. I really enjoy his style, and as I mentioned above, this whole newsletter topic was inspired by his metaphor of your to-read list being a river, not a bucket.

If you want my mind map notes for this book, click here.

— Mike

P.S. I've got something new cooking for Black Friday 😉 I mentioned it last week, but click here if you missed it and are curious to know what's coming.