“So many blogs, so little time.” Would Frank Zappa ever say it? You’ll never know it, but for sure, the number of inspiring blogs around is staggering: there are more than 500 million blogs out of 1.7 billion websites. How can you manage to catch up news and articles every day?
Have you ever felt like there are so many blogs to follow so little time? Have you ever wished to read all the articles from a single author? And how about actuality: do you ever manage to stay 100% caught up with the news? Do you ever feel like the world is falling apart and you are not aware of it?
Why you get lost
I believe there are many reasons why you are not able to stay on track with our favourite blogs:
- When caught up in an exciting blog, you tend to jump to the next thrilling article linked to the first one. And maybe you find out a compelling video on YouTube. And then, hey, Youtube is suggesting a similar video. That is to say: often, the online environment is busy and distracting, and you have no “breath” to read intentionally.
- Do you have a carefully organised list of blogs to follow? Do you meticulously track which ones you’ve read and which ones are up to read? I bet no. You can have a bookshelf for novels and magazines, but articles are outside your control, and you often “happen” to visit them.
- You probably won’t finish this article. I may have already lost you to another tab in your browser, or a ping from a coworker, or an email from your boss. Or any number of other digital distractions that have come to define modern life. The so-called context switching harms your possibilities of reading a good amount of articles within a reasonable amount of time, and the chances that you finally manage to finish your reading list keep decreasing.
- Many news websites offer very noisy experiences: you hardly focus on the focus because it’s full of advertising, or images, or links to (un)correlated articles. Would it be nice a book-like experience?
Collect in the stream and pick the best
What to do about it? The solution I propose is to have a stream of selected sources integrated with a pleasing reading experience.
What you should do is create a repository of blogs (sources), in which you will be able to see the list of all the new blog posts from your favourite websites. You can send the article to a second service that will work as a “read it later” portal whenever you find something worth reading.
The first service is Feedly, a news aggregator application for various web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android. You can use it to view updates on any topic you’re interested in, whether they come from the news, blogs, social media posts, RSS feeds, or other sources. Moreover, you are able also to create categories for your references.
The second piece of the puzzle is a Pocket that saves all your contents so you can return to it later on any device, at any time. Pocket has many ways to collect your content in your to-read list: browser extension, mobile apps, email forward and computer apps.
A workflow example
So, how will you manage to increase the number of blog posts and news read drastically?
- Use 10 minutes a day to scroll your Feedly feed and understand what articles you may want to read. Send to Pocket every report you consider worthy.
- Plan a moment every week to get through your Pocket. Try not to have any other app opened on your computer/phone/browser and enjoy some peaceful reading time.