Trimming The Verge
Reading to close out the year
600 articles. That’s roughly how many unread articles I have in my Pocket. Mind you, this is after declaring “Pocket Zero” about a year ago, realizing I was unlikely to ever get to the articles I had accumulated over the years (a couple thousand at that point, if memory serves). So I hit reset and started from scratch.
Seeing as we’re past Thanksgiving now and coming down the home stretch of 2016 (good riddance), I thought it was a good time to start the pruning process again. But rather than simply archiving everything, I’ve decided to actually go through those 600 articles and hand curate things I actually want to keep to read (via the ‘Favorite’ functionality in Pocket), and to archive those that simply don’t matter (many were “news” bits that are no longer timely and/or relevant).
Working on this today, I’m already down to 400 or so articles in my main list. I hope to get this well below 200 before the end of the year, and I hope to actually read all of those (a lofty goal, perhaps). Even going through the ones I have today, I’m reminded how much good writing there is every day on the internet that many of us overlook because there’s simply way too much for any one person to get through. I’m also reminded how predicated we are around “new” versus “good”.
Of the 200 or so articles I’ve gone through so far, I really wish I would have read about 50 of them (and I plan to!), but they simply took a backseat to “new” articles. And many of those “new” articles eventually also yielded to even newer articles, etc, etc. This remains both an obvious and yet weird thing about the web. “New” matters more than “good”, to the point where if you share something good, but old, people often wonder what you’re doing. “Did you not realize that article was from six months ago, you moron?!”
Six whole months! It may as well have been carved into cave walls!
And yet, there was great stuff from earlier this year. Stuff worth sharing, even now! Funny that.
Anyway, just an update on my reading/information gathering process as we close out the year. After I trim my Pocket to something more manageable, I intend to save some of the longer stuff to Instapaper (yes, I still use both) to be able to send those to my Kindle. Then it’s time to read, read, read. With the goal to start 2017 anew.
