Collecting too many links

I’ve talked about this before, but the concept of read-later apps is not really working for me.

A lot of apps have been tested over the years: Pocket (from back when it was still called Read It Later), Instapaper, Safari’s Reading List, Matter, Omnivore, Cubox, Readwise Reader, GoodLinks, etc.

I’ve also tried other apps to help me organise links that are not “read later material,” such as the eternal Pinboard, Drafts, or more recently the very interesting Bridges.

A few times, I also tried to get rid of this kind of apps altogether, and I tried to read articles when I encountered them, either in the moment or kept open in a browser tab for a few days, but it didn’t work out either. Soon, a strong FOMO sensation regained control of my web habits: the web is just too good to watch it go by without savouring all that I can. I had to save some of these links to go back to them later.

Today, I’m using a combination of GoodLinks and Things. GoodLinks for articles I really want to read later (saving them offline) and Things for the rest. Thanks to this Apple Shortcut from MacStories that I modified, I can save quotes from articles saved in GoodLinks to a specific “area” in Things: it creates a new task with the article’s title, and a note with the selection already formatted as a quote in Markdown. This shortcut is very smart as it makes up for the only thing I miss in GoodLinks: highlighting.

For other casual links encountered in Safari, I use Things to take notes thanks to the handy and super fast Quick Entry feature and add the tag “blend” for links destined to be featured in my monthly compilation of links.¹

So far, it works. Actually, I’ve never been so well organised when it comes to saving links, and it makes me proud of myself. It works so well in fact that I am now submerged in cool links and articles to read.

The pile keeps growing, and instead of giving me more choices on what to read and write about, the ever-growing pile of links overwhelms me and creates indecisiveness about where to start. This induced “stress” is counterproductive and goes against the initial purpose of these tools.

I know there are apps like Quiche Reader or the Random article widget from GoodLinks that can help me read things instead of procrastinating, but these don’t work either. They just make me look the other way faster than the regular list of links.

At this point, I’m saving links as if I were about to write a thousand posts. This is overkill, but I don’t want to blame the tools: it’s my fault.

Maybe I follow too many blogs, maybe I read too many websites, maybe I subscribe to too many RSS feeds. This avalanche of daily new stuff to discover is incredibly satisfying, entertaining, and I am eager to wake up every morning with the idea of having new things to discover and enjoy on the web. I almost dislike Sundays for this reason, as it’s by far the quietest day of the week.

You’d think that I would take advantage of the quieter weekend days to catch up on my reading list and saved links, but this rarely happens. The list stays untouched, and sediments across my beloved apps.

The days pass, and I read nothing; the weeks pass, and I write nothing. “Tomorrow,” I say. “Next week,” I say. The blog remains frozen in time, despite all these great links available and the seamless mechanics of my new Swiss-watch-like workflow happening behind the scenes.

In the end, the tools I use don’t matter. I can have the best tools in the world to save, read, highlight, tag, take notes, and organise all the links I want; they won’t do much if I don’t have the right frame of mind, the time, and the motivation to even read the first word. It’s about discipline, energy, and intellectual availability.

So what can I do? I’ve been thinking a lot about this the last couple of days, and perhaps I need to stop bothering saving articles I know I won’t read because they won’t help me write more. The kind of articles that I instantly consider important but don’t really have a chance of being shared on the blog.

Or maybe I should prioritise reading these articles because they’re the important ones and arguably the main reason why read-later apps exist in the first place.

Maybe I should only save some articles for the blog. Maybe I should narrow down the topics I cover here since “things I care about” seems a bit too vague and broad, judging by the wide variety of links I save at a frantic pace.

Maybe I should delete articles that are too old and focus only on the top of the pile, the most recently saved. Maybe I should automate their deletion after a certain number of days? Sometimes, when I manage to read an article, too much time has passed since its publication, and either the news coverage has evolved too much, or the topic feels too cold to inspire anything.

This is probably what will happen with the 40th anniversary of the Mac. Dozens of articles saved, very few of them already read and enjoyed, but I’m pretty confident that nothing about this topic will transpire on the blog but this sentence. It’s just too much work, or at least the overcrowded lists in GoodLinks and Things make it appear like a lot of work.²

Maybe I should just stop thinking about it and embrace the mess. After all, this pile of hundreds of unread articles isn’t hurting anyone; it even led me to write something new, so I guess my workflow works?