Read on the iPad, Read on the iPhone
An update on my reading workflow…
Last week, I wrote about my writing workflow. But there’s a layer just beneath this surface which is at least as important to the writing side of the equation for me: reading. A very large percentage of what I write stems directly from what I read. And so I thought I’d share that workflow as well — I think it actually evolves more often than my writing workflow does.
As people may know, I try to capture nearly everything I want to read in Pocket. I rarely read anything in real time, and even when I do, I often still save it to Pocket, just so I have a record of it. But it’s not that simple. Given just how much I read, I’ve found I need a few different tangential services to capture everything and to create an ideal workflow for my reading.
To that end, I actually also use Instapaper. I know this sounds silly or superfluous given that it’s the same type of “read it later” service. But I use it for a different purpose: I send things there that I feel like I must read.
I do this for a couple reasons. First and foremost, I like sequestering “must read” from my “catch all” as described above for Pocket. Now, I’ve tried various ways to use Pocket for such granular functionality over the years — both with tags and with utilizing the “favorite” (star) button. But I’ve found using a different service for this to be just as, if not more, useful. In particular because I also use a Kindle quite a bit, and Instapaper offers a great send-to-Kindle functionality.
So after I’ve saved something to Pocket that I know is a “must read”, I will then “favorite” it there and use IFTTT to automatically send my favorites on Pocket to Instapaper. Yes, this is a little convoluted. But once you set it up, it works quite well in the background (there is a minor lag between the favoriting and the sending-to-Instapaper).
I also then archive the posts I’ve favorited for this purpose on Pocket, so they’re out of my “inbox” there. This leaves my Pocket list to focus on mainly more “newsy” items I have to (or feel like I have to) get to throughout a day.¹ I also use Pocket’s (more) social functionality to recommend articles to others.
One more thing I like about Instapaper: the ability to randomly sort saved articles. You can sort of do this on Pocket too, but only on iPhone, and only if you find the “Random” feature buried in 3D Touch. In Instapaper, this is a fully baked feature. And while it also sounds a little silly, I love it because I’ve found myself trending far too much towards what I’ve saved most recently, versus what I actually want to get to. Random removes such bias…
Unfortunately, both Pocket and Instapaper have issues with reading content behind paywalls. And yes, this includes if you happen to pay for content behind said paywalls. A great example is The Wall Street Journal. Even though I’m a subscriber, and I’ve tried to let Pocket know as much, I still have to go to the web each time I want to read a full article. This is fine, though it adds a few seconds to the reading experience and if you have hundreds of articles from WSJ saved — as I do — this adds up over time.
Speaking of, for those articles I have to read on the web, I set Safari (on iPhone, iPad, and Mac) to automatically load the “Reader” version of the page, stripping out all the crap that loads with a typical website these days. This leaves just the words, and is also helpful if you happen to use my little screen reader trick…
A couple other non-standard reading experiences in my workflow include The Economist and Medium. The former is because I use the bookmarking functionality inside their app to save the articles I want to read each week and often listen to them (The Economist has an audio version of each article baked in). The latter is because I like to use the highlighting (and clap) functionality for Medium, which you can only do in the app. Not to mention that increasingly, there’s content behind Medium’s paywall which also doesn’t translate to Pocket…
Two other apps predominantly for reading that I keep on my homescreen: The New York Times and Apple News. The former here should be obvious: I subscribe to and read a lot of NYT content (and this content, thankfully, does tend to translate well to Pocket and Instapaper). The latter I find myself increasingly using for the push notifications about interesting content outside of my normal Twitter bubble. This content only translates well to Pocket if you load the Safari version and then save it from there…
No matter where I’m reading, I’m constantly saving excerpts of things I enjoy or find interesting to Bear, the notes app. This is how I note down things to write about later, either for full posts, or for my newsletter.
While it’s not exactly reading, Audible also has a place on my homescreen, and I’ll often read along with such content on my Kindle. It’s still insane to me that on the latest Kindle Oasis you can only either listen to Audible content or read Kindle content on the device — you can’t do both at the same time!
Speaking of listening, while Instapaper has a (paid) Playlist feature for articles to be read aloud to you, I found their built-in reader to be too slow (even at 2x speed) for my taste. So if I’m going to listen to something, I tend to use the aforementioned built-in iOS screen reader functionality. Similarly, while Pocket’s in-app reader is faster, that functionality is far too buggy.² So I use the iOS version instead. And I also keep around the Voice Dream app to create playlists of content to listen to — in particular because you can listen to it at much faster speeds, in a nice British voice (amongst others), no less.
In terms of where I read — meaning, on which device — I would say I do most reading on the iPad, with the iPhone close behind (simply because it’s always in my pocket, and available when on-the-go). The Kindle is a distant third. And I almost never read anything on a Mac (or any OG “computer”) these days. Again, even if I’m working there, I’ll just save it all to read later.
So I think that’s largely my reading workflow these days. Again, I know how convoluted it must sound to many of you. But after many trials and many errors, I found this mainly works for me. At least for now. As noted, I’m constantly evolving in this regard.
¹ This leads to a couple product ideas for Pocket. First, arrange by date saved (and date of the post, for that matter). I think this could be a useful way to filter/view content. Second, create the notion of two (or more) “inboxes”. I recognize you can sort of do this via tags, but they’re too cumbersome to use at a high volume (believe me, I’ve tried). I’d instead make a simple filtering mechanism either at the time of save or after the fact to say ‘this goes here’ and ‘this goes there’. Again, I know this is largely a power user request.
² It causes the whole app to crash after listening to just a few articles, without fail — actually, with fail.
