Ben Cohen — Briefly

I am stupid.

But that’s a good thing. Being stupid means being selective.

I encounter more information every day than I could possibly remember or process if I tried to deal with it all serially, so I don’t try. Some things I think about as I encounter them, and the rest get filed for later consideration.

I used to use del.icio.us for my filing, but bookmarking is heavy — it requires thought to tag an article, and clutters my long-term memory. So I switched to using Instapaper when it came out. Instapaper is great, and Marco has done a fantastic job with text extraction, offline caching, and cross-platform development. However, it was (and still is, mostly) a pain to transition things from my “things to look at later” list to my “worth remembering in the future list.” Enter pinboard.in.

Pinboard helps me by offering both a light-weight “read later” list and a long-term bookmarks section, with easy transitioning between the two.

But like I said, I’m stupid. When I add things to my read later list, I forget about them. I add anywhere from 3 to 10 links a day to my read later list, and I never read them later.

Adding things to a list is half the equation for remembering them. The other half is checking the list. For that half, I wrote a little script to check my recently added new links and send me a daily email with the list. A small step, but one I hope makes my stupidity a little more productive.

Here’s the script. Please fork, hack, and comment.

http://gist.github.com/183288 (gist linked because Tumblr doesn’t allow <script> embed in the style gist provides)