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The links you save today might be a mystery tomorrow. Time to change that.
Thirty seconds can mean the difference between one more link being lost to the black hole of ambiguity, and having useful resources at your fingertips.
The award winning Australian MacQuarie banking app is easily the best finance-related app on my phone. It’s the only one with dark mode (a big plus), but what I especially appreciate is the “I want to…” drop down list that is front and centre after you click on an account.
Each item on the list begins with a verb, eg.
I want to…
Each time I open the app I relax, knowing I don’t have to remember which action is hiding behind which menu. All I have to do is to think, “I want to…” and the app provides the rest. The same information exists in my other banking apps as a list under a menu, but somehow it’s not as welcoming, not as accessible. Those verbs are powerful!
This is a good lesson in UX design, and it’s one you can apply to the links you save for future reading. You want to feel this same level of relaxation and confidence when “later” finally comes.
If you can’t immediately tell why you saved an article or a link, your saved links and Read-It-Later system is a list of distractions rather than a useful resource. The why behind today’s links is still clear, but next month it might not be quite so apparent.
You need a way to communicate with the you of tomorrow that won’t overly tax the you of today.
The first step: know why you’re saving that link!
Then either spend up to 30 seconds writing why your future self will be interested in that material, or assign it up to two tags.
Everything you feel compelled to save for your future self to reference will fall under one of a repeating list of categories. Identify the ten (not 100) broadest of these and use them as tags.
Example categories:
Temporary tags may be needed if you are gathering material for a specific project.
The app you use really doesn’t matter. I like Raindrop, but I’m just as happy saving links to a plain text file and visiting the original source when I’m ready to start reading. It’s easy to add a Why sentence to Raindrop, but sometimes I share links to Journelly instead. It’s a good option when all you want is a link for reference purposes.
The Obsidian Web Clipper browser extension is a good way to save web pages into Markdown format for reading offline. Add a why property to your template, and/or use tags.
Now that Pocket has shut down, I’m seeing a lot of people moving to Wallabag. It’s open source and is reasonably priced when you don’t want to self-host.
See also this post on bookmarking services, from the creator of my favourite Mac utility of all time, Hookmark.
So. It’s now “later”, and you are settling down to read. You can still start at the top and scroll through, or you can zoom in with laser focus to the categories that interest you in that moment.
Filter out the work-related articles and enjoy those set aside for when you have time to relax, or vice versa.
We need more clarity, less distraction; more accessible resources, less clutter.
Attaching your Why to every link you save will help you build a body of reference material that will be easy to access, and even easier to delete without fear of losing something important.
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