A Better Way to Handle Online Reading?

Posted on May 24, 2007 by LJ Earnest
Categories: Productivity,Techniques

Originally published on 16 Mar 2006

About a year ago, I made a specific effort to limit my physical reading material. I canceled magazine subscriptions, keeping only those I routinely read and enjoyed. I made a promise to myself that I would only read one book at a time; this later became modified to one non-fiction and one fiction book at a time, after discovering that when committed to a non-fiction book alone reading never got done; but if I prime the pump with fiction, I am much more likely to read the non-. Anyway, I digress.

Given that I am in a technological field, and I take full use of the Internet, I am finding myself with a growing list of articles to read. I use an RSS aggregator, putting my feeds on probation just as I would physical material. I use Firefox to open each article I wish to read in a separate tab, then in theory I process that like an in box – but that’s in theory. What I end up with is a pile of articles that I want to give more time and energy to than I have at the moment (more than the 2 minute rule), so they go on a next action list under a project called “Read on line articles”…

Currently that list resides in Bonsai, like the rest of my lists. But the problem with this is that the link shows up on my PDA. This doesn’t do me much good if the PDA is not hooked up to the computer I am using – I would have to retype the URL. So the list grows, and I never take advantage of the context to read some of these articles.

Today I read an article that advocated using del.icio.us as a way to “archive” blog/news items for future reference. I already maintain a list of bookmarks and reference material on my PDA, which then (through several steps) generates itself into an HTML page for my personal website. But with del.icio.us, I can automatically generate an entry without the “magic” of PDA to computer. I started playing around with it for today’s links.

About a half hour ago I began to wonder if I could also use del.icio.us to hold my on-line reading list. I think I will try this. I will classify the articles as @Read, thereby distinguishing them from other links in the list; and if I choose to keep them for reference material, I can remove the @Read and put in appropriate tags for later finding. It would certainly ease the linking – I wouldn’t be doing this reading without the Internet, and therefore would have access to the list at del.icio.us. And the live links would make it much quicker for me to navigate to the articles.

Next action on this project: move my reading list to del.icio.us.

Next action after that: report on this in one month (4/16/2006)