How I Read More Than Just Thinkpieces

A rundown of what I do to find good pieces to read on the world wide web (okay, including a bunch of thinkpieces).

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Feb 24, 2016

Before we begin: don’t have time to read this just now? How about you save this blog post in your Pocket using this button: ? ;)

Recently someone asked me:

How do you find so many cool things to post to Facebook?

The most immediate answer I have is sort of obvious: read what other people are reading. Okay, great, thanks – but how do you go about doing that? Well, I have a few things in mind, so here’s a break down of how I keep finding interesting things to read.

Pocket

First, because I can’t think of an elegant segway into this, here’s an analogy. If you want to read a lot of great books, you find and buy every great book you can – even with a significant backlog you can put them on a bookshelf and try and whittle down the proverbial “unread stack” over the years (or, in my case, just pile them into the corner and look over every once in a while at your sad pile of neglected literary worlds). But, with digital content you don’t have an obvious bookshelf, except maybe your bookmark bar, but that quickly gets unruly, and becomes a confusing mixed metaphor: are you bookmarking things for quick and consistent access or just things to come back later; if you’re using a bookmarks bar for both purposes, how do you distinguish those? There a bunch of solutions out there besides your bookmarks bar (Instapaper for example), but my personal favorite is Pocket. You can use the Pocket browser extension to save interesting content that you come across randomly on your computer, or the official Pocket apps to save things you find on your phone, and even (as I’ll come back to later) integrate it with various other apps to save content right from inside other things (note: this, is what I consider the “secret”, or rather my method, for finding and posting good content.)

All The Newsletters

I don’t even know how many newsletters I’m currently signed up for, but it’s definitely a lot. I don’t actually read most of the newsletters except Jean Hannah’s beautiful Thread and the morning briefing from the New York Times. With the rest, I skim them and then look at the link text, opening up the ones with interesting, fun, and/or engaging content. Here are the newsletters I can remember I’m signed up to right now:

After a while, with this and other newsletters, you start to amass a neat backlog of interesting things to read.

“Recommended” Reading

Before we move on to the other things I do that require slight effort to find cool content, let’s talk about the easiest way to find interesting things to read: find something you really enjoyed reading (a human interest story, news article, digital art peice, whatever). If it’s a content focused website, chances are they have a “recommended”, “similar”, or “related” articles/stories/pieces section. Click on one or two of these, just click the most interesting one. If that one doesn’t seem as interesting as you thought, click its recommended reading. You don’t have to overdo it – if you can’t find something realted and interesting to you after 3 or 4 clicks, the website probably just isn’t generating good content or might not be the best at filtering and grouping content together well. It’s a small thing, but I’ve found a cool article or two this way for sure.

OPS (an acronym I just made up for Other People’s Shares)

This one’s pretty simple too, but involves selling your soul to social media. If you spend enough time scrolling through Twitter (I barely use Twitter as a public presence platform like I do Facebook: I kill time by using it to find interesting articles posted by the incredible people I follow who do use Twitter well), your Facebook News Feed, or Reddit (I don’t actually use Reddit, at all, but it’s a good option to keep in mind), you’ll end up with a news and article aggregate that you get to hand-pick. This method allows you to intersect the things your friends and acquaintances like with your personal interests, the best of both worlds maybe?

Apppppppps

I spend a lot of time on my phone, so in addition to the official Pocket app, I’ve taken the time to figure out what works with what, so here’s a run down of app options that integrate with Pocket so you can seemlessly save that danke web content:

  • CloudMagic
    • This email app offers integration with Pocket so you can save newsletter links and other fun stuff right to Pocket.
  • Twitter
    • Twitter has the ability to add a “Save to Pocket” button that comes in handy, I find a lot of awesome links whenever I’m just killing time scrolling through Twitter, so this has been a gold mine for my reading content.
  • Email
    • Pocket gives you the ability to email links to a special email. If you don’t have access to the app, the extension, or your phone, this is a great alternative in a pinch!
  • IFTTT
    • Using “If This Then That”, IFTTT for short, you can connect even more, like Todoist or Evernote.

Okay, I’ll Stop Rambling Now …

As I finish this post up, I’m realizing this was basically just me endorsing Pocket as a personal news aggregator. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Here’s some actual, if still vague advice: build a system (see this Scott Adams blog post on why systems, not goals, are important) to save content, read, and post content and figure out your own personal news feeds: you News Feed (Facebook), Twitter, the daily newspaper, a friend’s random link-filled emails, etc. Whatever it is, identify where you get your links from, put them somewhere, and take some time, on occiasion, to work through your backlog. I’ve been doing this for maybe a year and a half and I’m actually still figuring out how to make time to go through my backlog (for reference, I have 1,720 things in my Pocket … so, there’s that). Maybe I’ll make another blog post once I get my life together and can actually figure out a reading scheduling.


— Andres Cuervo

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