The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps By Tiago Forte
The article delves into the power of “Read It Later” apps, highlighting how they help manage information overload and improve reading habits. These apps, like Pocket, assist in organizing and consuming long-form content effectively, addressing barriers such as app performance, matching content with context, and asynchronous reading. By providing a method to save and filter content for later consumption, these apps support individuals in making informed decisions about what to read, enhancing focus and productivity in an era of constant digital distractions.
Highlights
The fact is, the ability to read is becoming a source of competitive advantage in the world.
The ability to synthesize knowledge (intelligence in other words) is the real competitive advantage.
What has become exceedingly scarce (and therefore, valuable) is the physical, emotional, attentional, and mental capability to sit quietly and direct focused attention for sustained periods of time.
ADHD people who can hyperfocus shall rule the world in the Intelligence Revolution.
The problem is that our entire digital world is geared toward snackable chunks of low-grade information — photos, tweets, statuses, snaps, feeds, cards, etc. To fight the tide you have to redesign your environment — you have to create affordances.
uncompleted tasks take up room in the mind, which then limits clarity and focus
no matter how stringent I was in the original collecting, no matter how certain I was that this thing was worthwhile, I regularly eliminate 1/3 of my list before reading
Time-separating intake from consumption of content yields a strong filtering effect allowing you to save time and only focus on the things you actually care about.
The amount of information in the world is a progress trap. Too much stuff to read is just as limiting as too little.
As the pace of change in the world accelerates, we double down on all the methods that created the problems in the first place — more planning, more forecasting, more control and risk management. We’re left with massive institutions that nobody trusts, that are simultaneously brittle and too-big-to-fail, creating precarity at every level of the socioeconomic pyramid.
You develop an opposable mind — the ability to juggle and play around with different perspectives on any issue, instead of seeing it through one lens.
Increasingly, the only metric that will matter in your journey of personal growth will be ROL: Rate-of-Learning.
There’s another way to learn faster: assimilate and build on the ideas of others. Sure, you won’t understand every tacit lesson their experience gave them, but you can incorporate many of them, and in a fraction of the time it would take you to make every mistake yourself.
Ideas are high leverage agents. They become more so when arranged in highly cross-referenced networks. The only tool we have available that is capable of both creating and accessing these networks on demand is the human brain.
People who cling to paradigms (which means just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything they think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is no power, no control, no understanding, not even a reason for being, much less acting, in the notion or experience that there is no certainty in any worldview. But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose. It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.
The world is horribly broken. There are better ways to do everything and nobody ever tries to make things better. It’s time. It’s time to actually try.