instapaper - The Road to Silicon Valley

Jim Rohn said “All Leaders Are Readers”. There is definately something in that famous quote which rings a bell with those who are frequent readers. Reading stimulates the cortex and also brings a sense of pleasure of attaining more knowledge. Well to me anyways. If you have read my personal blog on experiments in Personal Development, Productivity & Inner Peace then you will know where I am coming from.

The problem

I read alot. Books and online – daily! Plenty of tech news, blogs, science & psychology sites and other places which bring value to me. So this leaves my Firefox browser looking like this:

A total mess with dozen of tabs open. Since there is no way I will get through all the articles within the same gap of time that these are open in, I will need to either close the browser (saving the tabs) or leave it running letting Firefox chew up my computer’s memory. Not to mention this method is “Anti” David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) time management for productivity success and increased focus. Yes, I’m a GTD fan. So, what to do. As per the GTD teachings, offload the stuff that I cannot read in the near future for later processing (reading). But with what?

The solution

Instapaper – A simple tool to save web pages for reading later

How it works

Instapaper gives you a Read Later bookmark (see Firefox screenshot above).
1. When you find something you want to read, but you don’t have time, click Read Later.
2. Then when you have time use any of the following devices Computer, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Kindle and ePub readers to read those articles nicely formatted and filtered for pure content.

As shown above, the iPhone (and iPad) Instapaper application downloads all the articles onto your device so that you can read those articles where internet is not available.

Simple and my reading habits now follow the GTD teachings. Cool hey.

Examples of how I use it

Sometimes at night in bed I read through 1 or 2 articles before falling asleep. The alternative to reading a book in bed before bedtime. Tools: Kindle / iPad.
Walking to work. My walk is 15 minutes and I can squizz in 2-3 articles and catchup on the latest tech trends. Also gives me some topics to discuss at work over that water-cooler or share tech info with my engineering team. Tool: iPhone.
Fill in time – anything from when I’m taking a break from coding to waiting for someone. Why burn time on unproductive thoughts when you can learn something new. Tools: Computer / iPhone.