Vlad's Roam Garden

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Reading Inbox

When I encounter something that I think would be worth my attention - I save it to Readwise Reader

This also serves as a trigger to create an SRS item in Roam


The first problem of reading things on the internet is that there are too many things out there one is tempted to read.

Even if you have a good curation process there is always too much content and too little time.

My first approach to managing the reading inbox was to keep things I want to read in endless browser tabs and breathe a sigh of relief when my browser crashed and all the open tabs disappeared

When I noticed that this process didn't actually achieve the goal of helping me to read things I wanted to read - I started pushing myself to add things to Pocket/Instapaper to have a clear backlog of things to read

Which put me in a situation when I had hundreds of articles in Instapaper instead of as persistently open tabs (somehow that only marginally impacted number of open tabs I had 😅)

The result wasn't amazing - I went from not reading things and having them eating into my attention to not reading them and forgetting about them.

Arguably it was an improvement, as attention is an important and scarce resource, but as the point of this workflow is to help me actually read things instead of collecting the things I wish I have read - it was a failure.

A better way to direct my limited attention was called for! And I found it in Spaced Repetition