In a recent podcast episode, Mike Vardy at Productivityist talked about How to Read More (and Read Better). As I’ve been reviewing my goals for the year and specifically how my goals fared in January, I finally admitted that I’m a digital packrat.

I faced the fact, a long time ago, that I’m a packrat in the physical world. If you need any tech from the 1980’s, I’m your guy. Seriously. I have lots of cutting edge products from that era that have been supplanted by newer cutting edge products. In many cases, due to the number of computers and people in our family, I have duplicates of lots of things. Eventually I’ll get rid of all of it, but for now, most of it is safely stored.

What I hadn’t really thought about was how much of a digital packrat I am. It’s especially bad with things that I want to read. If you’ve read my blog at all, you know that I load up on Kindle books. Free if possible, paid when I must. I have enough that I’m constantly shuffling them between my iPad and Kindle cloud account. It’s the one reason that I’m looking to upgrade my iPad…for more memory to store more books. Not so much with apps (I’m bad, but not a total packrat), but with books I’m certifiable.

When the internet started in full force, and browsers became capable…I discovered bookmarks. You could mark a page so you could return there with little effort. No longer did you have to search for things, you could just jump right there. For the longest time, like most folks my age, I bookmarked pages that I wanted to return to at a later date. I would have bookmarks on multiple devices, in multiple browsers, and the lists seldom overlapped. I would remember something I wanted to read and spend countless hours searching through my bookmarks. I eventually created a structure for the bookmarks that loosely resembled my digital filing system. The digital filing system loosely resembled my paper filing system. So everything was kinda, sorta related. Just not quite related enough that I could regularly find things. But in this new and improved organization, I would still get stuck. I would find myself searching through my bookmarks for something that I’d seen and wanted to relate to somebody else. I’d have to think about which computer, phone, or tablet I’d actually bookmarked it on. When Google unified their bookmarks in Chrome I did a happy dance…for days. It reduced the number of places I had to search down to a handful. But a handful was still, well, a handful. That meant that I was constantly trying to remember if I’d bookmarked something while searching in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. So the nuttiness continued.

I eventually stumbled upon XMarks. It’s a tool that allows you to share your bookmarks across browsers. For me, this was a godsend. I could now be certain that my bookmarks in Safari matched those in Chrome. Whether I marked something on a Windows computer, my Mac notebook, my iPad, or my iPhone…everything was in one place.

And I still struggled to find things.

All I had to work with was the name of the sites or some short descriptor that was saved with the bookmark. The actual content wasn’t there, so many grand ideas were left in the cloud, never to be found by me again.

Oh, the frustration!

Without really thinking about it, I created a workflow for what I wanted to read and wanted to save. I’m a systems guy, but I never really considered that what I was using was a system. Partly it’s because the system itself was so convoluted that it would take pages to explain it. In the simplest terms that will serve my purpose, I would bookmark things I wanted to read and save them in a folder called Stuff to Read. My creativity was at an all-time high when I named that folder. Eventually it got special characters added to the beginning to force the folder to the top of my lists for easier finding when it was time to bookmark a link.

The theory was that I would regularly go back to this folder and read through the bookmarks. Then I would file the information in an appropriate folder for later retrieval.

Regularly…As if!

Seriously, it was a great plan…but remember the whole digital packrat thing? I would find myself with some time confetti where I would be somewhere with just enough time to browse through my Twitter feed. I would see something of interest and bookmark it for later reading. In ten minutes waiting to pick up my daughter at school I could bookmark 20, 30, even 40 items. Boom! Stuff to read later that might prove interesting. A couple hours later I’d be waiting in the parking lot to pick my son up after wrestling. 10 minutes, 40 bookmarked items. Boom!

Except…I didn’t follow through. You already knew that, but it’s my confession, so I can take this wherever I want.

I would gather 40-200 items daily that I wanted to read. Things I really thought could make a difference. And the few times that I did drag myself to the @@__Stuff to Read folder, I would find a bucketload of interesting material. I would discover actionable items. I would find something to share with one or more friends. I would find that killer answer to one of my kids’ problems. I would find enough diamonds that I would keep pack-ratting things to read. Sure, there was chaff, but there were enough real finds that I would continue to be motivated to bookmark more and more.

I know, you’re thinking to yourself, “Seriously dude, how bad could this be. A couple hundred items to read. Maybe a thousand?” Oh ye of little faith. I just did a rough count. Think 50,000. FIFTY-FREAKING-THOUSAND items that I’ve tagged for reading later. And not just a mishmash. I evolved the system where I even categorized the things I wanted to read into sub-folders. Things like:

So many areas of interest…and not enough time to read everything. Let alone actually make use of them.

Simultaneously, I was trying to keep up on a slew of podcasts and blogs. So much great content out there. So little time. So little organization. Such an overload.

My FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) was partly to blame for my bookmarking. I knew that if I didn’t tag things to be read later, they would slip through my fingers and I would have trouble finding them again. I also knew that more new things would be generated, and the shiny new stuff would grab my attention. I would miss that one timeless piece of information. It would be like walking through the Amazon Rainforest and not seeing the plant that will cure all cancer. It would be a tragedy.

So I continued to bookmark in an organized way. But I couldn’t ever catch up with the reading I wanted to do. Not ever.

The I discovered OneNote. Here was a way to save the information that I read and wanted to keep. It was organized. It was somewhat searchable. And it held the promise of being cross-platform, and available across the web. I started to use it just for recipes that I wanted to share with the kids. That was about the time three of the girls were moving out of the house, and I honestly was tired of getting a frantic call asking me to e-mail a recipe. It was especially traumatic when I realized that lots of our family recipes weren’t in digital format.

So I took action and started a family cookbook online using OneNote.

For several reasons, OneNote fell out of favor. They reasons aren’t important. What does matter is that I discovered Evernote. It solved several of the problems that I had with OneNote, the biggest being the ability to use multiple tags. Now I could have my killer Slow-Cooker Buffalo Ranch Chicken recipe tagged in all the ways that I needed. I could search for chicken or poultry. I could search for slow-cooker or the trademarked CrockPot. Or crock-pot or crock pot. I could search for buffalo or Franks (the brand of Buffalo sauce we use in the recipe). More importantly, the kids could do those searches too. I still got calls about recipes, but now I didn’t have to figure out how to send a recipe when I wasn’t home. I could just point them to the right search terms in Evernote.

Voilá! Problem solved. Well, sort of.

I had created a repository for things to save, but I still had my exponentially growing backlog of things to read. I had a way to get recipes into an accessible storage system, but no real way to manage them. Same with all sorts of other information.

Then I listened to the Productivityist podcast episode and I had an Aha! moment. I started to intentionally create a workflow related to all the material that I wanted to read. I created an information- and source-agnostic system that would allow me to continue packrat bookmarking but had the potential to allow me to use my time confetti more appropriately.

I haven’t been at this very long, so it’s still very much a work-in-progress. But it’s got enough potential that I wanted to share what I’ve done.

I start off with all the sources of things I want to consume. Twitter links. Facebook links. Blog posts coming to me through Bloglovin and Feedly. Links sent to me via e-mail. References in books I’m reading in my Kindle app. The source doesn’t matter. If it’s electronic, I can grab it.

If the tool I’m working in has a direct link to Instapaper, then I send the link directly there. If you don’t know about Instapaper, check it out. It’s one of my favorite tools, and I’m using Instapaper much more effectively than I used to. For now let it suffice that it’s an amazing tool that lets you collect things to read. If you’re using Pocket, you’ve got a similar solution. I’m using Instapaper, but my buddy Jeff D. Stephens talks about Pocket in a recent podcast, you should check it out.

Anyway, if the app doesn’t have a direct link to Instapaper, I can still send it via the email address that you get when you sign up. It’s fairly easy, and sufficiently convenient that I find myself sending things over to Instapaper. A lot of things.

Then, when I have time confetti I try to balance collecting new material with reading existing things I’ve captured. I’m using my iPad for the reading. For instance, I’m sitting in the elementary school parking lot and I’ve got 10 minutes. I fire up Instapaper and click on an article snippet. I scan the article and decide if I’m going to read it. If not, I trash it right then and go on to the next. I’ll get three or four articles read during that time confetti. When I’m done with the article I’ve got a couple of choices:

• Trash it
• Save it as an actionable item
• Save it as a reference item

With Instapaper, I can make the determination and perform the action right in the reading pane. Trashing it is pretty easy, although I’d like to be able to disable the confirmation question. It’s not a big hassle, but it’s another touch. If I’m going to save it as actionable, it goes into Todoist (my current task manager) via the Todoist e-mail address. If I’m going to save it as a reference article, it goes to Evernote. For recipes I add @Recipes to the subject line. This sends them directly to a notebook in Evernote that contains recipes that I haven’t categorized nor tagged. That’s a content curation step that will be done later.

Once I’m done with that article in Instapaper, I’m on to the next.

That’s it. It’s not rocket science, but it’s a system. The really big breakthrough for me was realizing that I didn’t have to have separate collection and review systems for all the different media types. Heck, I can save links to YouTube videos and send them to Instapaper. So now everything that I collect that has a link ends up in Instapaper. It’s my first line of defense against information overload, to paraphrase Mike Vardy. I have one place where I’ve collected links, so I get to review everything there…rather than in a half-dozen or more places.

That step alone has saved me time. The added benefit is that Instapaper allows me to be offline when I’m doing the reading. There are some things that require an internet connection (YouTube videos are stored as a link, so they’re an example), but for the most part I’m able to read and decide on what I’m going to do with the content no matter where I am.

I’ve set a goal of reading from my Instapaper at least 30 minutes a day. I’ve been trying to sneak that time in throughout the day, but it’s proven a bit difficult. Today I decided to do the reading while I was eating breakfast. I got in 30 minutes of reading before my day started. It was vastly more satisfying that trying to wedge this task in amongst the other things going on today. And I really felt accomplished. I knocked out about 20 articles. A couple were trash, but the rest were either interesting enough to keep or will require some action. Both those sets went to the proper repositories.

I still have some honing to do with the system. Right now, everything I send to Todoist goes into the inbox, so I have to touch it again when I process that inbox. I’d rather just send the action to whatever project it belongs to and simultaneously set the priority, date, etc. But that will be something for the future. I’m also struggling a bit with my Evernote folder structure, but I’ve successfully sent archival items to the correct folders where I want the filed. That means I don’t have to process as much in the Evernote inbox. Win-win there!

So that’s it. That’s how I’m consuming content now.

What do you think?