Reading time: Just over 1 minute
Do you try to read articles or blog posts as soon as you see them? With an app called Pocket you can safely put them aside until a time that’s more convenient for you.
Nothing thrills me more than being able to use some sort of technology. What do I like about it? I like the way technology can do boring repetitive tasks — such as filing or sorting — that my mind tends to resist. I like the way it frees up my time and therefore allows me to accomplish more. I like the way it makes me feel more efficient and effective.
This week, I was reading the blogs I follow regularly (using the great tool called Feedly) and I stumbled across a reminder of another app I had completely forgotten about: Pocket.
Here’s what’s great about Pocket:
- It’s free.
- It allows you to capture webpages you want to read or refer to later. Just sign into the app, click on the link and give it a tag. Those webpages will be stored until you delete them.
- It allows you to install a Safari extension so that a little icon sits in your toolbar making it really easy to use.
I remembered Pocket, but hadn’t used it in more than a year. Thankfully, I had entered its password in my 1password lockbox (never count on your memory for passwords) and was able to login quickly.
There I discovered all sorts of interesting and fascinating articles I’d saved last year. Some of them even contained information that will be useful for the book I’m working on right now. How had I forgotten about this?!
I’m going to resume using it daily.
If you want to try Pocket, I have one suggestion for you. Think hard about the tags you want to use. I think I hadn’t spent enough strategizing mine and, as a result, my files of articles were a bit of a hodgepodge. As with a physical filing system, you don’t want to many Manila files. Nor do you want to few. Like Goldilocks, you want just the right number. Because Pocket is such a powerful tool, it’s worth spending at least half an hour figuring out these tags in advance.