Instapaper: Manage your time smarter on the Web

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Reading to go: Instapaper on the Kindle.

Create a productive workflow that lets you save important articles to read later

First of two parts. See part 2: Readability: Making the Web more read-friendly

Guest post by Scott Hanselman
ComputerZen.com

Here’s how most folks use the Web. You get a link in email, Twitter, Facebook, IM, whatever and you open it in a new tab.

Instapaper

Then, at some point in your copious free time, and possibly while reading other more pressing things, you’ll read these 43 tabs, right? Even better, some of the articles are 8 pages long so you’ll load up pages 1-4 and 6 and you don’t even know why.

Then, maybe your browser crashes or your system reboots or something locks up or you get confused as to why you wanted to read that in the first place.

This is not cool and I refuse to use the web in this way anymore. Here’s what I do.

Consider this new workflow. You’ll either Read It Now (which we’ll describe in part 2) or Read It Later (see below).

Instapaper lets you read important stuff later

Whenever you find something long that you know you want to read but you just don’t have time now, don’t open a tab. Save it to Instapaper, a free service. I’ve got a bookmarklet for Instapaper in my bookmark bar on all my computers in all my browsers. This is important, hence the bold.

read later

If it’s not set up on all your machines in any browser where you might find content, you’ll fall back to old habits and not use it. Take the 10 minutes and do it. The bookmarklet even works from within Google Reader. Anywhere you find stuff you want to read later. You can even have your Instapaper queue sent over to your Kindle if it makes you happy.

Compare this sample workflow to yours

Let’s say I see this article by Phil Haack tweeted. I visit the page and while it looks interesting, he’s so loquacious and I’m busy now. I’ll read it later.

Haacked

I’ll click “Read Later” in my bookmarks bar, and I see this notification.
Haacked Saved

Fast forward some hours. I’ve got time and I’ve collected a few interesting bits that I’m looking forward to reading. I visit Instapaper and see this:

Instapaper queue

There are the articles I’ve saved lately, with new ones first. It knows what I’ve read, what I’ve starred and what’s been archived.

Here’s an interesting bit: While I can click the link for Phil and visit his site, I don’t. I’ll click “Text” for Phil’s article using a filter. The Instapaper filter is a lot like Readability (more on that in part 2) in that it removes the non-content parts of the article. It also adds a little bar at the top where I can select between readable fonts, change the width, font size and line spacing. Everything here is focused on text and making the content I’m consuming more accessible.

We’re Not Paid To Write Code

I can, of course, also read from my phone (I’m working on a Windows Phone 7 version) or whatever device makes me happy. It’s the same queue.

read later - mobile

What do you think? Sound like a productivity tool you would use?

Scott Hanselman is a principal program manager for Microsoft. This article originally appeared on ComputerZen and is republished under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike license.