How I’m Managing the River of News

Keeping up with the flood of information these days almost seems like a monumental task. Between blogs and Twitter, I found myself constantly having about 30-70 tabs open in Safari just to keep track of the stuff that I wanted to read but hadn’t gotten around to yet.

I originally started trying to manage all of this information using Delicious but I found that it took too much cognitive load for rapid fire archival and retrieval especially when on my iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, I use Delicious for long term storage and reference but it’s not so good for stashing away, say, a tweet with a link.

Recently, I’ve been incorporating Instapaper into my workflow to stash away these links; a kind of GTD “Someday” bucket as it were.

The best thing about using Instapaper, is that people are starting to incorporate it into their apps. For example, my feed reader and my Twitter client on the iPhone (NetNewsWire and Tweetie 2 respectively) both support saving links off to Instapaper. Above and beyond that, you can also use the Read Later bookmarklet to automatically save links from your browser (mobile or otherwise).

Now if I come across an interesting link that I don’t have time to read that very second, I just save it off to Instapaper. When I have time, I’ll go through the links and read them. Some are one offs that I don’t care to save and the others get archived quite nicely into Delicious.

Using this method, I’m actually reading more instead of skimming and my Safari tabs have been tamed and now come in at around 5-10.