Using Pocket

I’ve been using Pocket for more than 10 years, and I find it indispensable. It’s simple and fits easily into the way I handle links.

Bookmarking and baggage

Putting bookmarks into a browser bookmarking hierarchy is the digital equivalent of hoarding. I never go back to the bookmarks, so they just become a mental burden. Every few years, I move to a different browser and either lose all the bookmarks, or copy them over, never to be looked at again. When I started my Pocket system, I imported 1600 links into pocket, many of which were not active anymore, and most of which I could not even remember having added.

So what about other online bookmarking services? While they are more portable, they suffer from the same basic problem: I never go back, they are cumbersome to organise and they require me to categorise.

Enter Pocket

Pocket has a few advantages compared to other systems:

• It’s designed around a single stream of information, organised by the date you place the link into Pocket.
• It has browser plugins and Android actions.
• It has offline readers for Android and iOS.
• It has an API, so I can get access to my queue from scripts.

Getting stuff in

I have 2 ways to get info into pocket: Sharing from my phone and saving from the browser.

On my phone I usually save items directly from my twitter feed. Pocket places a sharing option on the Android context menu, so I can save tweets with links directly from my timeline. The only problem I have with this is the case where a tweet has 2 links. Pocket then only saves the first one.

In my browsers on my computer I have the Pocket addons, so I just hit the button to save a page for later viewing.

The thing to note here is that I don’t do any filtering or categorising when putting content into the list. If I might want to look at something later, it goes into the list. Takes a few seconds.

Getting stuff out

If I only used Pocket as a general reading list, it would have been OK, but I would sit with the same problem: Too many links, neglected and forgotten.

Instead, I have a system that automatically recycles the links, courtesy of some scripts I set up:

Some time after 5pm most days, I run a script that opens between 10 and 20 links from my Pocket queue. These are the oldest links in the queue. I then have some choices:

If I don’t want to spend time on these links, I just close the tabs. This keeps the links and they will re-open the next day.

If I have time, I delete them from the pocket list and work through them.

If I want to keep the link around for a while, I just push it back into Pocket. This puts it back into the queue as a new link, so I’ll only see it when it comes round again.

The end result

Using this system, I cycle through the full queue roughly every few months. It blocks out time for reading them, and is not distracting at any other time. I can confidently just push things into Pocket and forget about them, knowing that I’ll get around to them soon.

Since the Pocket list is searchable, I can refer back to items on it if I recall something that piqued my interest recently.

An interesting side effect is the serendipity of random connections: Every so often I see a link that triggers some insight, just at the right time. It’s a bit like putting your music on shuffle and listening to a song that randomly captures the exact mood.