My Reading Workflow
Information access in this era is best described as ‘overwhelming’. With so many options of news portals, magazines, newsletters and blogs on the Internet, one will easily get lost in the scrolling and bookmarking of material to read. To try and make this process easier for myself, I recently tried to simplify and make my reading workflow more efficient. I mostly use my digital devices for working, so it makes sense to utilise them as well for reading.
The Process
The idea was to get higher quality, personalised content into my reading list, collate them into a single location to read and quickly jot down notes if I have to. I put these 3 steps into a simple illustration below. Curate, which is to get your content. Collate and consume, which is to gather all the content and be able to read them easily.
The first step was the most tedious and involved quite a bit of trial and error. Previously, I would visit my regular websites; news, magazines or blogs to look for interesting articles. I also would scroll through my Twitter timeline to see (I still do this). But this took too much time and by the time I was done scrolling and bookmarking, I was too tired to start reading.
Therefore I decided to use newsletters instead. I subscribed to a bunch from everywhere. News websites, magazines, personal newsletters, you name it. I couldn’t know which ones I would like, so I figured I will curate along the way. After around 3 weeks, I unsubscribed to some which I don’t find particularly interesting. I would now receive around 6–7 newsletters a day. These usually go into a folder in my mailbox, to be filtered again later. At the end of the day (or whenever I could squeeze in the time, during commute or lunch for example), I will go through them, delete some and click on those I plan to read later.
Previously, my ‘read later app’ was just bookmarking articles on a browser. There is nothing wrong with this, but I find myself sometimes without an Internet connection, especially on my iPad, so a proper read-it-later app would serve me better.
I chose Goodlinks for several reasons. First, it is the ease of use. It does not need an account to register or log in, it just works (Sorry, couldn’t help it). It automatically recognises your iCloud account and syncs to all of your devices, including a Mac. Saving articles on Goodlinks is a breeze. It has a Safari extension and a ‘quick save’ feature which just saves it without having to input other information like editing title, tags, etc (though you still can, if you want). Lastly, it’s just a beautiful app to read on, with customisable fonts and backgrounds. It costs a few dollars, but well worth the price to get. Goodlinks also has a bunch of customisation and support to Siri Shortcuts as well, if you are into that.
So now I have a bunch of articles sitting in Goodlinks, ready to be read anytime without needing an Internet connection and in all of my devices (provided you have it synced earlier).
Lastly, I needed a quick way to jot down notes related to the article. The sharing function on Goodlinks is excellent for this. All I needed to do is click on the Share button, choose Notes and it will automatically import the link to the article and I can start typing whatever I want. The Notes menu also allows you to choose which folder or subfolder you want to create your new note in.
More reading, less scrolling
So my regular reading routine at night now is just to fire up Goodlinks and start reading. There is still some effort needed to go through the newsletters but it has reduced a tonne of scrolling time which really tires me out (not to mention very distracting!)
This new workflow has completely changed my reading experience. Reading now is more enjoyable and less of a chore. I hope you found this article useful and I highly recommended creating your own workflow which suits your style to have a better reading experience. Have a good day!
